La Vaquilla

La Vaquilla (Spanish for "The Heifer") is a 1985 Spanish comedy film directed by Luis García Berlanga, set on the Aragon front of the Spanish Civil War in 1938, in which a group of Republican soldiers crosses into Nationalist territory to steal a heifer that the enemy plans to use in a bull run during a town festival.¹ It was one of the biggest box-office successes of Spanish cinema in the 1980s and is regarded as the first Spanish comedy to take the Civil War itself as its subject.¹

Production history

The project had an unusually long gestation. Berlanga had the idea as early as 1949, and from 1956 he and Azcona wrote two versions under different titles, Tierra de nadie and Los aficionados, which were published but never filmed.^{6 • 7} Berlanga himself dated an early script to 1956 and said it had been rejected by the censors of the Franco regime.¹ Changing administrative, social, and economic conditions kept the film from being made until well into the democratic period; state censorship had been abolished in 1977, and Berlanga again enlisted Azcona, his frequent collaborator on La escopeta nacional, Patrimonio nacional, and Nacional III.^{1 • 8}

Scholarly comparison of the successive scripts shows a marked shift in tone. The first version, Tierra de nadie, displayed a deep blackness and an atmosphere of degradation in the grotesque mode of the esperpento (Spanish grotesque, deforming satirical dramatic style), while the final film favors the lighter, less deforming sainete style; the authors read this conversion as the record of Berlanga and Azcona's definitive stance on the war, moving from anguished awareness of human absurdity to a moral vision of the conflict.⁸

Reception and meaning

The film treats the Civil War with what one exhibit on memory in Spanish cinema calls equidistant comedy, presenting soldiers on both sides who largely ignore the reasons they are fighting and could even change sides for personal reasons.^{6 • 9} The Glasgow thesis on Spanish Civil War cinema describes it as suggesting that the war was dividing Spain down the middle and pointing to the absurdity of a nation carved in two, an absurdity underlined by an early scene in which the two sides exchange supplies because the Republicans have tobacco but no cigarette paper.¹

Berlanga described the film as a call for reconciliation between those who took part in the conflict, though not a pompous one: he imagined two spits that join and mix in the same wasteland, an image he said he suffered much thinking he might never achieve.²

Commercially, the film sold 1,907,561 tickets in Spain for a gross of 3,171,609.48 euros, making it one of the country's best-selling films of its decade, although it failed to gain a general release outside Spain.^{3 • 1} Later Spanish comedies about the war have been read in its lineage; El País credits Berlanga with opening the door to Civil War comedy in Spanish cinema, and critics place later black comedies of the postwar period alongside it.^{10 • 11} The village of Sos del Rey Católico in Aragón, where the film was shot, honored Berlanga and Azcona with sculptures on the 25th anniversary of the shoot.⁵

Other uses of the name

The title has been used elsewhere. Yo, el vaquilla (1985), directed by José Antonio de la Loma, is a biopic about the Barcelona delinquent Juan José Moreno Cuenca, known as "El Vaquilla", based on his book of the same name.¹² Restaurants named La Vaquilla or Asador La Vaquilla operate or operated in Teruel and Colmenar Viejo, the Teruel establishment being a steakhouse on Calle Judería.^{13 • 14} In August 2026 a young cow that escaped during the bull-running festivities of Minglanilla, in the province of Cuenca, became widely known in Spanish media as "La Vaquilla de Minglanilla" while it remained at large, with a Colombian animal sanctuary offering an alternative to its being put down.^{15 • 16}

References

1. Archibald, S. Spanish Civil War cinema thesis, University of Glasgow, section on La Vaquilla
2. La Vaquilla, Institut Valencià de Cultura, film record
3. VAQUILLA, LA, ICAA Film Database, file 828651
4. La vaquilla (1985), Cultura Berlanga, Berlanga Film Museum
5. La vaquilla (1985), SensaCine
6. La vaquilla, Virtual Spanish Civil War exhibit
7. Berlanga: perversiones de un soñador, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
8. Montiel Mues, J.A. and Moral Martín, F.J. (2021). Transformaciones de un paisaje: La vaquilla (1985), RiuNet UPV
9. The cinema of Berlanga and historical memory in Spain, Arte, Individuo y Sociedad
10. Reírse de Franco, el último tabú del cine español, El País (2025)
11. La posguerra civil española también puede ser cosa de risa (negra), El País (2024)
12. YO, EL VAQUILLA, ICAA Film Database, file 857051
13. Asador La Vaquilla, Teruel, contact page
14. La Vaquilla, Colmenar Viejo, RestaurantGuru
15. La vaquilla que se fugó de un encierro en Minglanilla, Telemadrid (2026)
16. La vaquilla escapada de Minglanilla, sin localizar de nuevo, Voces de Cuenca (2026)

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1963 to 1998

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

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