Feature film
Prisoner 1040
Procesado 1040
Rubén W. Cavallotti · 1958
Synopsis
José Rossini, an old man, is sent to prison for having cut his neighbour's climbing plant. Mixed in with the common-law prisoners, he suffers bullying and ill-treatment, and the man he was fades behind his case number; a petty thief, the Zorrito, takes him under his protection. The film shows prison life, its rules, its guards and its regulars, and the justice that locked him up for so little.
Context
The film adapts a play by the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Patrón, on a screenplay by Wilfredo Jiménez and the author; produced by Enrique Faustín, it was released in Argentina on 4 September 1958. The lead goes to Narciso Ibáñez Menta, who had already acted in the director's first film. Two film historians, Raúl Manrupe and María Alejandra Portela, see in it a criticism of the penitentiary and judicial systems of great formal rigour, whose conclusion strikes them as insincere.
Who it is for
An Argentine feature film in Spanish, eighty-three minutes long, about the life of a man in prison.
Prizes and reception
Praised for its rigour, it revealed Walter Vidarte, whom critics regard as the discovery of the film.
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