Florián Rey on AllMovie

From 1934 through the decade's end, Spanish filmmaker Florián Rey and actress/wife Imperio Argentina, one of Spain's first major stars, made a series of popular musicals; Rey is also well remembered for directing one of Spain's finest films, La Aldea Maldita/The Cursed Village (1930). Before entering the film industry, Rey (born Antonio Martínez del Castillo) studied law and adopted his pseudonym while working as a journalist. A 1920 typographers' strike led Rey to abandon reporting; he changed professions when he accepted director José Buchs' offer to act in La Inaccesible/The Inaccessible Girl. Rey made his directorial debut with an adaptation of a popular zarazuela, La Revoltosa/The Riotous Girl, in 1924. Rey first met Imperio Argentina in 1927 and cast her in his feature La Hermana San Sulpicio/Sister Saint Sulpice. His most famous film, La Aldea Maldita, earned its reputation for an unforgettable depiction of Castilian rural life. First released as a silent film, a sound version with music, effects, and a few dialogue sequences was created in Paris. In 1931, Rey was hired by Paramount Studios as a dialogue director for several Spanish-language films at Joinville Studios. These films included Su Noche de Bodas, a Spanish-language adaptation of Frank Tuttle's Her Wedding Night (1930) and Lo Mejor es Reir, adapted from Alexander Korda's Rive Gauche (1931). Following his marriage to Argentina in 1934, Rey remade La Hermana San Sulpicio; their subsequent musicals were popular in both Spain and Latin America. In 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, Rey accepted an offer from Goebbels to make films in Nazi Germany. Following the war, Rey and Imperio Argentina divorced and he went back to Spain, where he made Spain's first postwar feature film, La Dolores/That Girl Dolores (1939). The film bombed with audiences and Rey's reputation as a filmmaker went into decline. He retired from filmmaking in 1957 and became a restaurant manager near Benidorm.