Violación inconfesable (1981)

Co-written and directed by Miguel Iglesias Bonns

Tagline: "He threw his wife into the hands of a friend, he gambled her away in a card game. Never had a man's degeneracy reached such limits"

Following his period making Tarzan and Paul Naschy movies for Profilmes, Miguel Iglesias Bonns went on to make TV documentaries and softcore films, the typical refuge for Spanish genre cinema filmmakers in the late seventies. The project of Violación inconfesable (Unspeakable rape), known in Portugal as A destruiçao de Marta Heiman, the second of the two softcores he made, was apparently initiated by its star Gil Vidal, an Andorran actor who had had some success in French cinema in the fifties. The result was a co-production made by the Balcázars and the Portuguese company Quinecor which, despite its high sleaze quotient, failed to get the "S" classification, although the film's advertising falsely stated otherwise.

Vidal plays Eric Heiman, an unsuccessful artist who marries Marta (Berta Cabré), the daughter of a well-known businessman whose money he wants to come into when he dies. The marriage turns out badly, for Eric either sexually abuses Marta or simply shows no interest in her, spending much of his time and his in-law's family on drinking and gambling, or spending his time with other women. Things get worse when the father dies and it turns out he was penniless due to some bad business moves: all of his property is seized and his daughter only inherits a ramshackle house on a fishing island off the Portuguese coast and an insurance whereby the death of either spouse will immediately bestow a fortune on the other. With the pair living a life of borderline-destitution, Marta goes out of her way to keep the house in good order while Eric, who is no longer able to paint, starts to live off the loans given him by friends and acquaintances. His presence has become a nightmare for the amazingly patient Marta, and he spends much of their time together loudly wishing her dead so that he may collect the insurance money.

The story, told non-chronologically and slightly confusingly via flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks, does not develop much other than the move from the mainland to the island; or rather, instead of development, we simply get more. In other words, the cartoonishly peevish Eric becomes more and more obnoxious: not a single scene in which he appears does not have him verbally abuse Marta either in front of friends or in private, make some drunkenly angry remark about how rotten his life is, or nastily slight others in conversation, not least a fisherman (Carlos Villafranca) who is intent on being helpful ("Look at him. He walks like a monkey!") And Eric certainly does not get any better: you know things are going pretty much downhill when he snatches the plate of food Marta is eating away from her and feeds it to a visitor's dog.

And of course, the degradations visited on Marta get worse and worse. A new character arrives on the scene in the shape of Jaime (Bernard Seray), an old friend of Eric's from his days as a bohemian in Paris, who takes up residence in the couple's house and later tries, in one scene, to seduce Marta. Days later, she catches the two men, both drunk, having sex with each other; Eric reacts by pinning her down so that Jaime can rape her, but the worse her yet to come. There's more to come: in Marta's presence, Eric and Jaime start talking about how convenient, insurance-wise, her death would be and then start "jokingly" threatening her with knives. On another occasion, Eric strikes a friendship with three sailors and the four are soon playing poker. When he has lost all of his gambling money to the sailors, he plays another round, offering Marta up if he loses. And of course, he does lose, and the trio burst into her bedroom for an hour of grubby fun.

So, as we can see, not much in the way of plot, just accumulation, but something startling (as in different) does happen, approximately just before the final reel and there is a creepy twist at the end. Prior to that, it's basically Eric getting nastier and nastier, and Marta going through increasing debasements. One almost pictures audiences thinking to themselves "What's will it be next time?" and the twist ending makes it all feel like a 75-minute black joke. The film itself is rather poorly written, with dialogue lapsing easily into cliché, and Iglesias's direction feels rushed even if the Portuguese backgrounds are attractive. Likewise attractive are the flat-chested, daintily-featured Cabré, and the lofty Vicky Palma (billed as "Vicky Palmer"), who was the hippie girl in Iquino's La caliente niña Julietta, and has a bit part here (dubbed by the genre-ubiquitous Asunción Vitoria) as Vidal's fleeting mistress.

As a curiosity, the film's making coincided with the failed 23-F coup d'état brought about by Francoist Civil Guards. Iglesias and Balcázar were in Portugal at the time, making the film, and got worried about the situation until it was over the day after. Certainly, a hypothetic success of the coup would not have permitted erotic films such as that they were engaged in making!