Books: The Technicolor Treatment

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OR I'LL DRESS YOU IN MOURNING by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. 349 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

After reading this scenario-style book, you've practically already seen the movie. The familiar saga about the slum kid who fights his way to fame and wealth in the prize ring is here re-enacted in real-life Spain, where the classic path out of poverty into glory is the bull ring. The hero is El Cordobés (real name: Manuel Benítez), at 32 the most celebrated bullfighter in the world, if not always the most admired (TIME, June 21).

The frame through which El Cordobés' life is seen is his Big Fight — the 1964 Madrid corrida in which he was elevated to the status of matador de toros and in which he survived a near-fatal goring. Every tense moment in this corrida is the cue for a flashback: the future El Cordobés growing up in an earth-floored hovel where he sometimes has only grass to eat; serving a grueling apprenticeship at village fiestas where the only available medical care is a slosh of alcohol in an open wound; rising under the tutelage of a crafty promoter named El Pipo, compiling a fortune of $8,000,000 and becoming the idol and symbol of a new, liberalized and more commercially aggressive Spain.

Authors Collins and Lapierre, whose first collaboration was the bestselling Is Paris Burning?, make prime melodrama out of El Cordobés' story, and they are frequently informative about the brutal, corrupt realities beneath bullfighting's cloak of romanticism. But the problem with their cinematic technique is that while it requires only a grainy black-and-white script, they give it a glossy, Technicolor treatment. Every irony is underlined, every climax hammered home, every scene overstuffed with authentic touches from their well-stocked notebooks. The result, paradoxically, is that their finished product is rarely as vivid and compelling as their raw material must have been.