Word: madrid
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Smugglers' Den. The weapons are economic blockade and psychological pressure. At issue is Spain's rankling sense of being the only European nation with a foreign colony on its soil. This anachronism must end, says Madrid, and Gibraltar must be returned to Spain, to which it belonged in 1704, when a sudden British-Dutch attack captured the fortress in three days...
Part of Franco's blockade consists of withholding labor from the Rock. Even before the dispute, Madrid stopped giving new work permits to Spaniards for Gibraltar jobs, and in ten years their number has fallen from 14,500 to 9,000. Some 800 Gibraltarians living on the mainland were recently ordered to leave Spain and to return to the colony. Traffic across the border is now slowed to a crawl by Spanish customs guards, who take a full hour to examine each car; scarcely 14 a day are cleared...
...stage. The Outlaw of the Red River, with George Montgomery, is now shooting on the banks of the Tagus River. Yacht to Jamaica never left Barcelona. Nor did Horst Buchholz as The Man from Istanbul. Orson Welles's epic of Falstaff, Chimes at Midnight, is packing up in Madrid, but Henry Fonda is just digging in around Segovia for The Battle of the Bulge. And in suburban Madrid, it looks as if Franco lost the Civil War after all: there, in a set ankle-deep in marble-dust snow, 1,500 Red revolutionaries have just taken over...
Bailing Out Bronston. The sinking feeling was shared by the Spanish government, which has long cultivated the movie trade. Though it fatuously forbade Lean to play the Internationals during Zhivago's revolutionary skirmishes, Madrid laboriously rounded up turn-of-the-century rail equipment (still in use) and Russian weapons captured during the Civil War. It also promised a squadron of mounted police to play Moscow dragoons. When they didn't show, Lean fell back on some gypsy cavalry, who have already been Moors in El Cid, Boxers in 55 Days in Peking, Macedonians in Alexander the Great...
...case of Spain's most lucrative foreign producer, Samuel Bronston, the government has gone even farther. Once so overextended that he couldn't pay his tab at Madrid's Castellana Hilton, Bronston has been bailed out with an official two-year moratorium on his debts, plus a fat crude-oil import license. Of course, Bronston has of late been cranking out some patriotic Spanish shorts as a sort...