Macario

• It was the first Mexican film ever nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, competing at the 33rd Academy Awards before losing to Bergman's The Virgin Spring; it also ran in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the year La Dolce Vita took the top prize.
• The source is a novella by B. Traven, the phantom author behind The Treasure of the Sierra Madre whose real identity remains one of literature's great unsolved cases, generally pinned on German anarchist Ret Marut, possibly born Otto Feige. Traven in turn reworked the Brothers Grimm tale 'Godfather Death.'
• The candle-filled underworld where Death keeps every human life burning was shot inside the Grutas de Cacahuamilpa caves in Guerrero, the endless flames standing in for every soul alive on Earth.
• Principal photography ran September 7 to October 9, 1959, splitting between Estudios Churubusco in Mexico City and the silver town of Taxco de Alarcon, including the zocalo, Casa Borda, and the interior of the Santa Prisca church.
• Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, the most decorated camera artist of Mexican film's golden age, shot the entire picture in stark black and white.
• Lead actress Pina Pellicer played opposite Marlon Brando the next year in his self-directed One-Eyed Jacks; she died by suicide on December 6, 1964 at age 30.

The whole turkey episode reads as a parable about hunger that money can't fill. Macario gets his wish, then wealth, then power over death itself, and none of it touches the original gnawing emptiness. The miracle water just swaps starvation for dread. Read this way the film argues that the poor are never actually given enough to stop being afraid, only enough to lose sleep over keeping it.

Death choosing Macario over God and the Devil frames Death as the only honest broker in a rigged world. God promises heaven later, the Devil promises everything now, but Death alone deals straight and keeps the contract to the letter. The horror isn't that Death is cruel, it's that Death is the single figure who never lies to a poor man.

The cave of candles invites the read that Macario never left the forest at all. The ambiguous ending, with his body found beside the half-eaten turkey, suggests the entire arc of fame and the healing bargain is a dying brain's last feast, hunger dreaming itself a god before the wick burns out.

A starving woodcutter in colonial Mexico swears he won't eat again until he can devour a whole turkey by himself, no scraps for anyone. On the Day of the Dead his wife steals one and cooks it for him, and three figures come begging a bite: the Devil, then God, then Death. Macario turns away the first two and shares half his turkey with Death, who repays him with water that cures any sickness. Fame and coin follow, but the gift comes leashed to a rule he can't outrun. The candle that is his own life is already guttering before he understands the bargain.