YMMV / The Cuenca Crime

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Although El Cepa is evidently stupid and illiterate, it is ambiguous if he didn't know about his "murder" before the civil guards came to take him to La Osa, or he did, but kept his mouth shut because he feared retribution.
• It Was His Sled: Grimaldos was alive the whole time.
• Playing Against Type: If you are used to watching Hector Alterio playing Argentinian avuncular characters, you will never recognize him as the antagonist Hanging Judge Isasa, who has no trace of an Argentinian accent.
• Retroactive Recognition: Pre-fame Guillermo Montesinos as El Cepa and Assumpta Serna as his (stunning) wife. A one shot, non-speaking role in the latter case.
• Screwed by the Network: Released in August, at the time (1981) believed the worst month to release a movie. Still sold 3 million tickets.
• Signature Scene: Two very vicious ones. Everyone remembers this as the movie where a man has his testicles tied to a roof beam. It is also the movie where a terribly thirsty man sucks milk from his terrified, lactating wife while in jail.
• Sleeper Hit: Despite (or because) its Troubled Production, it was a box office record in Spain.
• Streisand Effect: Critics who don't like the film (or don't consider it a masterpiece) blame the attempted censorship for its massive success. Miró herself was disappointed with the fame that the scandal brought to the movie, and would have preferred that it had been less successful so long as it was on its own merits, not as a reaction to persecution.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: By focusing almost entirely on Gregorio and León's relationship and torture, the movie misses on a more choral approach showing the motives and interpretations of other characters and how they reacted to the confirmation that the accussed were innocent. The suicides of Don Rufo and Isasa are told in the epilogue but not shown, even though both would make powerful images (Isasa died in his own home and his death was passed as a heart attack; Don Rufo drowned himself in wine). Finally, the movie ends in 1926 but the legal proceedings continued until 1935, when all the surviving torturers were found innocent. Taboada lived through the whole process and at one point met the exhonerated Gregorio and León in Madrid and got in a fight with them. He met injustice soon after when he was executed during the Spanish Civil War.