Trivia / Welcome Mr. Marshall!

• Cast the Expert: Excluding the main characters, the villagers were played by actual villagers from Guadalix de la Sierra, a village in the mountains north of Madrid which was a very poor region at the time. The children were paid 25 pesetas for day of shooting. If the movie had not shot there, they would have been picking potatos for 18.
• The Danza: Manolo Morán as Manolo.
• Deleted Scene:
  • Miss Eloísa's dream, where she dreams of her alumni morphing into American Football players and tackling her.
  • The shot of the American flag in a puddle was censored at the request of an American jury member in the 1953 Cannes festival and not reinserted until 1980.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Little from the executives themselves, actually. Their only three conditions were that the movie should be a musical, set in Andalusia and starring Lolita Sevilla. It ended being a political comedy with brief musical numbers, set in a Castilian village pretending to be Andalusian, and with Lolita Sevilla as an Advertised Extra.
  • The Francoist censorship was also unusually kind, simply cutting the teacher's semi-sexual dream and any implication that the priest was anything but morally virtuous.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Averted. It is often assumed that the film was somehow censored or "damned" during the dictatorship. It was actually shown freely.
• Lying Creator: Berlanga, in spades.
  • The above story of the film being in any way limited or persecuted.
  • In the early 70s, Berlanga also claimed that he was arrested on the leadup to the Cannes festival over suspicions of counterfeiting, due to the film's promotional material including fake dollar bills with the image of Lolita Sevilla and Pepe Isbert. There is no evidence that any of this happened.
  • Berlanga went as far as to suggest that Miguel Mihura's name was imposed by the executives and that he had no influence on the script other than putting his name and getting a check for it. In reality, he made a major rewrite of the script and was responsible for inserting many of the more surrealist jokes.
• No Budget: Another common myth is that the film was done on a string budget. It was actually expensive for the standards of the time and its main actors were among the best paid in the industry. On the other hand, this didn't mean that much in the still semi-blockaded Spain of the post-war. There is at least a claim that the teacher's dream was not filmed at all, rather than neutered, because of budget concerns. Others say that it was because it was near impossible to find actors that looked like tall, muscular American Football players in early 1950s Madrid (all actors of the right age would have been born, or grown during the civil war and the subsequent "years of hunger").
• Reality Subtext: Yeah, the film's better understood if you know what the Marshall Plan was and why Spain didn't benefit from it.
• Star-Making Role:
  • For Berlanga. It was his second (long) film ever.
  • Zig-zagged with Lolita Sevilla. She was an up and coming Copla singer who expected this film to be a typical Andalusian musical comedy and do for her what others had done earlier for Rosa Montiel and Marujita Díaz in the 1940s and early 50s. As such, she was very angry with Berlanga for "stealing her film" and ruining her career, in her opinion. Ironically, the Andalusian musical comedy died shortly after and the entire genre became blacklisted as many Spaniards saw it as backwards and a staple of the harshest part of the Francoist regime. In the end, this film became the only reason why Lolita Sevilla is known at all, so it was her real star-making role because it was not tailor-made for her.
• Troubled Production: Yet another myth. The authorities didn't actually interfer with the shooting.
• What Could Have Been: Besides the already mentioned original plan of the producers and the cut dream sequence, there is the likelihood, pointed by Spanish film critics, that the film would have been severely censored if it had just come out a few months later, after the Pact of Madrid. The Franco Regime would have been then very hostile to the idea of offending the newly found American friend.
• Writer Revolt: Everything Berlanga and co. did.