AllMovie

Carlos Saura's The Stilts (Los Zancos) features Fernando Gomez as a middle-aged professor/playwright. Falling head over heels in love with actress Laura DelSol, Gomez begins obsessing on the girl, despite her unwillingness to make a commitment. When another, younger man (Francisco Rabal) enters the scene, the drama darkens into melodrama. While the story material in The Stilts may seem old-hat at first glance, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura invests his characters with enough conviction and humanity to keep the viewers riveted to their chairs. Eschewing his previous "nonlinear" narratives (which ignored such trivialities as chronology and reality), Saura directs The Stilts in an austere, near-documentary fashion.