General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Ensayo de un Crimen

Ensayo de un crimen (Spanish for "Rehearsal for a Crime") is a 1944 novel by the Mexican writer Rodolfo Usigli and a 1955 film adaptation directed by Luis Buñuel, released under the title La vida criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz). Both works center on a wealthy man who believes himself fated to commit the perfect murder, and both are set in post-revolutionary Mexico City. The novel is regarded as a founding work of Mexican crime fiction, and the film as one of Buñuel's most personal Mexican pictures, marked by dark humor and his recurring theme of the impossible desire.

Key fact	Detail
Novel	Ensayo de un crimen, by Rodolfo Usigli (1905–1979), first published by Editorial América, Mexico, 1944¹^•²
Film	Directed by Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), Mexico, 1955, 89 minutes, Spanish language, produced by Alianza Cinematográfica³
Screenplay	Luis Buñuel and Eduardo Ugarte, credited as "inspired by" Usigli's novel rather than as a direct transcription³^•⁴
Main cast	Ernesto Alonso (Archibaldo de la Cruz), Miroslava (Lavinia), Rita Macedo (Patricia Terrazas), Ariadna Welter (Carlota), Andrea Palma (señora Cervantes)⁵
Literary standing	Considered the germ of the Mexican crime novel; Ilan Stavans called it "the best police novel written in Mexico"¹^•⁶
Film recognition	Ranked #35 in Cahiers du Cinéma's Annual Top 10 Lists and #82 in François Truffaut's The Films in My Life⁷
Restoration	Restored by Cineteca Nacional México and screened in the Venice Classics section of the 2019 Venice Film Festival³

Spoilers

Plot of the film

Archibaldo de la Cruz, a wealthy bachelor, has been obsessed with death since childhood. As a boy during the Mexican Revolution, his parents gave him a musical box that his governess said could kill any enemy who heard its melody; when the curious child opened it, a stray bullet killed the young woman, and he took himself for her murderer³. As an adult, the violent deaths of several women close to him, women whose deaths he had desired, convince him that he is a killer, and he tells his life story to a judge, mixing reality and imagination⁵. His only argument is that he wished for all these deaths¹¹. In fact chance always frustrates his attempts, and he never kills anyone⁵.

Buñuel described the film as "a joke, a divertimento", a dark comedy about visual and auditory obsessions, childhood memories, death linked to eroticism and guilt³. In interviews collected by José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, he said of his antihero: "Archibaldo wants to kill... He seeks to kill a woman and fails. Tries to kill another and fails again. One could say he wanted to fail, so as to try once more"³.

The novel

Usigli, a dramatist, narrator, and essayist best known for the play El gesticulador (published the same year, 1944), wrote Ensayo de un crimen as his only novel¹^•⁴. Its protagonist is Roberto de la Cruz, a single man of comfortable means devoted to gambling and governed by aesthetic preoccupations that drive his desire to commit the perfect murder; the Mexico City of the 1940s supplies his stage¹.

The book departed from the themes that had prevailed in Mexican narrative up to that point, showing the decomposition of sectors of the capital's bourgeoisie and marking the start of a vision of post-revolutionary Mexico. After an initially adverse critical reception, it came to be considered one of the most important Mexican novels of the twentieth century¹.

Genre position. The novel inherits a tradition running from Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas de Quincey, J. K. Huysmans, and Bernardo Couto Castillo, and shares material with contemporary hard-boiled fiction such as Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), and Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake (1943)¹. Critics place it at the origin of Mexican crime fiction: José Luis de la Fuente calls it the first Mexican crime novel and possibly one of the earliest in Latin America, and the scholar Ilan Stavans, in his doctoral thesis, called it "the best police novel written in Mexico"⁶. A later thesis notes that it may have been preceded by Antonio Helú's "La obligación de asesinar", though that work is arguably a short story rather than a novel⁸.

A formal innovation noted by critics is the shift of narrative viewpoint from the detective to the criminal, against the convention of the classical detective story, in which the reader was denied access to the criminal's thoughts and motives⁸.

The film adaptation

Origins of the project. Around 1951 Buñuel and Usigli spent several weeks working together on the screenplay, one of three projects on which they collaborated that year, alongside Susana and Una mujer sin amor⁴. The initiative came from the actor Ernesto Alonso, a former student of Usigli, who bought the rights to the novel intending to star opposite his friend Miroslava Stern under Buñuel's direction. Buñuel recalled that what interested him in the book was "the obsession, the frustrated vocation of the murderer"⁴.

The break with Usigli. The collaboration of two intransigent creators did not last. Buñuel said he abandoned the joint adaptation after about fifteen days "because Usigli did not permit the slightest variation of his text"⁴. Buñuel continued on his own with the Spanish writer Eduardo Ugarte and released the film without Usigli's consent. Usigli complained before the film writers' union, arguing that his rights had been trampled and that he had been promised approval over changes; the two men insulted each other publicly at a union assembly⁴^•⁹. Buñuel was absolved because his credits read "inspired by...", signaling not a transcription of the book but a different work developing certain elements in his own way⁴. In France the film circulated as La vie criminelle d'Archibald de la Cruz¹⁰.

Buñuel explained that the novel's roman à clef side, its portrait of a specific Mexican milieu, did not interest him, since he did not know that world and doubted the spectator would care; his film kept the character's obsession instead⁴. With time the rift healed: in a 1972 conference in Brussels on Imagen y prisma de México, Usigli named Buñuel, alongside Emilio "El Indio" Fernández, as a director of great quality above the other filmmakers of Mexican cinema¹^•⁴.

Style and themes

The film sits between film noir and black comedy, with a psychoanalytic plot and melodrama beneath, and it deconstructs the conventions of the Mexican commercial cinema it appears to follow¹⁰. Critics read Archibaldo's compulsion through Oedipal frustration and hostility displaced onto the women he pursues, whom he tries and fails to kill; the film keeps Buñuel's characteristic comic tone throughout¹⁰. The musical box functions as the emblem of an unresolved childhood desire, in this case the desire to murder¹². The theme of the impossible desire, one of Buñuel's favorites, runs through the picture, which examines the structures and values framing the femicidal desire of its presumed criminal⁵.

Some critics have called it Buñuel's most surrealist film since L'Âge d'Or, with the surrealism residing in the spirit rather than the form¹³. A study of the adaptation notes that Buñuel's film omits concrete references to pre-revolutionary Mexican history, geography, and culture on its surface, yet it does not place him wholly outside Mexican cultural contexts¹⁴.

Reception and legacy

The film is considered one of the most original and atypical of Mexican cinema for its marked black humor¹, and one of Buñuel's best Mexican films¹¹. It appears in several canonical lists: #35 in Cahiers du Cinéma's annual top-ten lists, #56 in Sector Cine's Best Mexican Films of All Time, #79 in Cien años sin soledad: Greatest Latin American Films, #82 in Truffaut's The Films in My Life, and #932 in the TSPDT 1,000 Greatest Films⁷. On iCheckMovies it holds a user rating of 7.9 from 3,816 votes⁷.

The critic José de la Colina wrote in 1971 that the film, though a minor work in Buñuel's output, was more alive than the book⁹. Scholarship on adaptation argues conversely that Buñuel's film contributed to the artistic prestige of the literary source¹⁵. Its afterlife in cinema includes Pedro Almodóvar's Carne trémula (1997), described as the most notable film homage to Ensayo de un crimen to date¹⁴. A restoration by Cineteca Nacional México was presented in the Venice Classics section of the 2019 Venice International Film Festival³.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026