Hailing from Spain in 1955 Death of a Cyclist follows a couple having an affair, Maria Jose de Castro (Lucia Bose) who, by marrying Miguel Castro, (Otello Toso) has become wealthy and privileged, and her paramour Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) an adjunct professor of mathematics. While returning from an evening’s assignation, with Maria at the wheel, the couple run over a cyclist and in their panic at being discovered flee, leaving the man to die at the side of the road. Paranoid at being discovered, each descends into trouble and crisis as their carefully managed affair and lives are consumed in the tangle of their crime.

An excellent character study and noir Death of a Cyclist presents the elements of noir that I find most compelling, ordinary characters caught in a web of extraordinary circumstances propelled forward by a flaw of character that prevent them doing to right thing as their compulsions push them to an inevitable conclusion.

The film is not without its own flaws, however. It does not bear to think at all upon the ages of the actor. The lovely and talented Lucia Bose was a mere 24 when this film was released in 1955 and would have been but 5 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war, hardly a fitting subject for a soldier’s affections. Aside from the disparity in ages Death of a Cyclist is an excellent foreign noir. Shot with expressive intent by Alfredo Fraile the film, while eschewing the typical using of shadowed bars across the characters manages to capture a stark and isolating sensation mirroring the characters’ psychological states as they are consumed by their guilt and paranoia. Written and directed by J.A. Bardem Death of a Cyclist is often referred to as a social realist film but it equally fits the bill as a film noir expressing the universality of human cynicism.