Plácido (1961) review

It's the Christmas Holiday in España, and Plácido Alonso (Cassen) drives around a motorcar for a living but he can't afford to make payments on it and is worried the vehicle could be impounded - elsewhere, there's a "charity event" taking place in which the wealthy are bringing in impoverished individuals to their homes and feeding them to show their "benevolence," except they actually find poor people to be repulsive.  This was made at the time of Franco's dictatorship - which seems to have been a gutsy move - and Berlanga deserves credit in that regard, but the movie isn't really that funny, Plácido is a one-dimensional lead figure (count how often he says the word "notary") and it is underwhelming as satire: it's quite clear that many "elite" members of society - then and now - hold the working class and the destitute in total contempt.  My biggest gripe, though, is the endless (and infuriating) chattering: if someone applied duct tape to the characters' mouths, they might explode.