A late example of the españolada: Carlos Serrano de Osma’s La rosa roja (The Red Rose, 1960)

Carlos Serrano de Osma is one of the more unclassifiable Spanish film-makers from the Francoist era. His troubles with censorship, critics and post-Civil War Spanish audiences forced him into retirement in 1960 when he had only directed eight films. In the following decades, his work hardly stirred the interest of film historians. In recent years, however, academic interest has grown. This article analyses the last of his films from a historic and textual perspective. Even if La rosa roja/The Red Rose (1960) is apparently a fairly conventional film, its numerous interesting features render it one of the more attractive and singular films in its genre: the españolada.