Paulino Masip

Paulino Masip Roca
Born	(1899-05-11)11 May 1899 La Granadella
Died	Cholula, Puebla
Occupation	Director

Paulino Masip Roca (11 May 1899 – 21 September 1963) was a Spanish playwright, screenwriter and novelist of the Generation of '27. Driven into exile in Mexico in 1939 by the events of the Spanish Civil War, he became involved with the nascent Golden age of Mexican cinema and was the author of over 50 screenplays

Biography

Paulino Masip was born at La Granadella, Lleida. He settled in Logroño in 1905 with his parents and four siblings, where he learned Spanish, the language in which he would write from then on. He also studied and earned his teaching degree in 1919.

Shortly after his twentieth birthday, he moved to Paris, where he lived and worked until 1921. On his return to Spain, he came into contact with the powerful Espasa-Calpe publishing house in Madrid, for which he translated some books. In Logroño he helped found the Ateneo Riojano and was its member in letters and secretary. There he founded, with the help of his father, a liberal intellectual, and directed between 1924 and 1925 the newspaper El Heraldo de La Rioja, and also founded and directed between 1926 and 1928 El Heraldo Riojano. But his opposition to the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera earned him countless government fines that stifled the company financially until its closure.

He then traveled to Madrid with the idea of dedicating himself to journalism. In 1930, he began his relationship with writers of his generation, such as Manuel Andújar and Alejandro Casona, among others. He worked in the magazine Estampa, became editor-in-chief of the newspaper Ahora and in 1933, after being its theater critic, he was appointed director of La Voz de Madrid, the youngest newspaper in Spain. Later he will be the editor of El Sol, all of them republican and liberal. He frequented the tertulias of José Ortega y Gasset at the Café Granja El Henar and the Café Regina, chaired by Manuel Azaña.

Before the Civil War he premiered Dúo and his later works, the comedies La frontera (1934) and El báculo y el paraguas (1936) were performed at the Teatro Cervantes and the Teatro de la Zarzuela. During the war he left Madrid, settling in Valencia at first and, finally, in Barcelona, where he directed La Vanguardia between 1937 and 1938. That same year he is appointed press attaché in Paris by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Mexican government paid for his and his family's trip to exile in May 1939, together with eleven other intellectuals such as José Bergamín. During the voyage he wrote Cartas de un español emigrado (Letters from a Spanish emigrant). Upon his arrival in Mexico, in 1939 he joined the S.E.R.E., an organization to help Spanish political refugees. He directed the Boletín del Comité Técnico de Ayuda a los Republicanos Españoles (Bulletin of the Technical Committee for Aid to Spanish Republicans). He collaborated in the magazine Mañana; published his Cartas a un español emigrado (1939) and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1941.

In Mexico he alternated theater, novels and short stories with writing film scripts, adapting and translating texts. He also wrote poetry. He was also a regular contributor to Mexican exile magazines (Romance, España Peregrina, Litoral, Las Españas). However, at this stage literature took second place; it was not in vain that Max Aub stated that he had been swallowed up by the cinema because, a prestigious playwright and journalist, a promising novelist, he devoted himself almost exclusively to being a screenwriter and film dialoguist, which he alternated with his reviews in Cinema Reporter.

He died in Mexico on September 21, 1963.

Writings

According to Román Gubern, Masip wrote more than fifty screenplays for Mexican cinema, starting in 1941, when he wrote El barbero prodigioso, a film directed by Fernando Soler. Among them are El verdugo de Sevilla (1942), also by Soler, an adaptation of a play by Pedro Muñoz Seca; Lo que va de ayer a hoy (1945), No basta con ser charros (1945) and Los maderos de San Juan (1946), by Juan Bustillo Oro; Jalisco canta en Sevilla (1948), a Spanish-Mexican co-production directed by Fernando de Fuentes and starring Jorge Negrete; Yo soy charro de levita (1949), by Gilberto Martínez Solares; Crimen y castigo (1950), by Fernando de Fuentes, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel; La devoradora (Dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1946) Ahí viene Martín Corona (Dir. Miguel Zacarías, 1951) and Escuela de vagabundos (Dir. Rogelio A. González, 1954), three films starring Pedro Infante. He also wrote the screenplay for La barraca (1944), a film based on the text by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and directed by Roberto Gavaldón with a technical team made up almost exclusively of Spaniards, and Canción de cuna, a play by María Martínez Sierra. He adapted Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's El escándalo for the stage.

He mainly cultivated theater, screenwriting and narrative with an intellectual and humorous slant. As a translator he translated works by Charles Nodier. Paulino Masip's most famous work is the novel The Diary of Hamlet García (1944), reprinted in 1987 in Spain with great success. This work is considered one of the best about the civil war.

His second novel, La aventura de Marta Abril (1953), is a lighthearted biography of a light-hearted beauty, in the best tradition of the picaresque, at the antipodes of the shy and hesitant Hamlet García of his major work.

El báculo y el paraguas is a play premiered in 1936 that responds to the molds of Jacinto Benavente's theater: the bourgeois comedy and the well-done play. Its interest lies in its feminist concern. The woman, in this case, the protagonist, decides, like Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, her own destiny against the impositions of her social and family environment.

El emplazado is a farce about a businessman who has been given up by his doctors. He abandons business and, after several love affairs, one day discovers true love and, with it, the truth about himself; humor serves as a counterpoint to the conventional plot.

Works

Novels

• El diario de Hamlet García (1944; 1987)
• La aventura de Marta Abril (1953; 2010)
• Un ladrón (1953)

Short stories and novellas

• Historias de amor (1943)
• De quince llevo una (1949; 2009)
• La trampa (1953)
• El gafe, o la necesidad de un responsable, y otras historias (1992)
• La trampa y otros relatos (2002; edited by María Teresa González de Garay)

Plays

• El báculo y el paraguas (1930)
• La frontera (1933)
• El hombre que hizo un milagro (1944)
• El emplazado (1949)​
• El escándalo (1952)

Poetry

• Remansos líricos (1917)

Selected filmography

• Rough But Respectable (1949)
• The Three Elenas (1954)
• Look What Happened to Samson (1955)

External links

• Paulino Masip at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by Paulino Masip at Biblioteca Nacional de España
• Works by Paulino Masip at Open Library