ABSTRACT
The examination of middlebrow cinema in this period nuances the account of a dictatorship lurching from the liberalization of the 1960s to the repression of the 1970s, and a film industry lurching from charismatic exceptions to genre cinema. Liberal nineteenth-century authors like Galdos were marginal figures in Franco’s Spain until the late 1960s. Many factors influenced audience response to films in this period, but the overlap between the historical evidence of a new middle class and the insistence on ‘quality’ in the press is suggestive. The overlap also needs to be placed in the context of gradual change in exhibition. In the particular circumstances of late-dictatorship Spain, when, on the one hand, a new middle class had come into existence to become a new audience sector, and, on the other, the film industry was in a process of renewal following the failure of the New Spanish Cinema, the formal characteristics of the middlebrow film cluster around quality and craftsmanship.
