A late-comer in the line of movies to use the Pachelbel Canon as background music -- and use it and use it and use it and use it. Interspersed between these uses, in equal proportion, is Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine." This two-tune playlist gets a little silly -- not the desired effect in a movie that tells of the sentimental homecoming of a Spanish-born Nobel Prize-winner, living in exile since the ascendancy of Franco, and now dying gracefully of an unnamed illness. The movie is for the most part embarrassingly sincere, but at least once touchingly sincere. That's when King Juan Carlos turns up at the other end of the telephone line, and the movie makes an unsolicited political endorsement the likes of which it is almost impossible to imagine any other contemporary head of state being able to inspire. With Antonio Ferrandis; directed by Jose Luis Garci. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
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