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About This Film
Macario is a desperately poor woodcutter whose hunger has become a private obsession: he wants to eat an entire turkey by himself just once. On the eve of Día de los Muertos, his wife secretly gives him that impossible luxury. In the forest he is visited by three figures—God, the Devil, and Death—and shares the meal only with Death, who rewards him with healing water. Roberto Gavaldón and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa turn B. Traven’s story into a fable where hunger, faith, colonial hierarchy, and Mexico’s cultural intimacy with death occupy the same frame. Día de los Muertos is not simply atmospheric shorthand. The holiday’s coexistence of grief, remembrance, food, humor, and mortality gives the story its emotional grammar. Macario’s gift seems to offer escape from scarcity, but every cure also reveals how closely survival is tied to power, belief, and the inevitability represented by his new companion.
Vibe
Día de los Muertos —
Watch For
- Watch Gabriel Figueroa’s high-contrast black-and-white photography, especially the candlelit imagery associated with death and ritual.
- Notice how food operates as class measurement: the turkey is a fantasy of abundance before it becomes the basis of Macario’s supernatural bargain.
- Track Death’s behavior compared with God and the Devil; Macario trusts the figure who speaks most directly to his material condition.
- Pay attention to colonial institutions—church, medicine, and authority—and how Macario’s healing power becomes threatening once it crosses class boundaries.
Production Notes
Cannes lists Macario as a 1960 Mexican feature directed by Roberto Gavaldón, with screenplay credit to B. Traven and cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. Mexico’s Secretaría de Cultura explicitly connects the film to Día de los Muertos, describing Macario’s encounter with Death and the Devil on the eve of the November observance and identifying the film as a classic of Mexican cinema. The adaptation combines Traven’s story with a distinctly Mexican visual and cultural framework. Figueroa’s photography is especially important to that transformation: the film’s candle-filled and nocturnal imagery makes mortality tactile rather than abstract. Ignacio López Tarso’s performance keeps the fable grounded in hunger and fatigue, ensuring that Macario’s supernatural encounter grows from material deprivation rather than detached metaphysics.
Trivia
- Macario competed at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
- Gabriel Figueroa served as cinematographer.
- Mexico’s Secretaría de Cultura explicitly associates the film with Día de los Muertos and Mexican cultural attitudes toward death.
- Ignacio López Tarso plays Macario opposite Pina Pellicer, with Enrique Lucero memorably embodying Death.
- The story’s supernatural bargain begins only after Macario finally receives the whole turkey he has dreamed of eating alone.
Legacy
Macario became one of the most internationally recognized works of mid-century Mexican cinema and a durable cultural reference for cinematic representations of death. Its imagery is regularly revived in Día de los Muertos programming by Mexican cultural institutions, evidence that the film remains attached to the holiday beyond simple period nostalgia. The movie’s importance also rests on how thoroughly it avoids making Death merely frightening. Death is inevitable, observant, sometimes humorous, and more comprehensible to Macario than the social institutions governing his life. That relationship places the film within a broader Mexican artistic tradition in which death can be intimate, satirical, devotional, and visually beautiful at once. Figueroa’s photography and López Tarso’s performance ensure that the film works as both folk allegory and social drama. For international audiences, it remains a key gateway into the Golden Age’s later achievements.