[These daily posts will cover little known actors or people that have appeared in more recent films and TV series. Various degrees of information that I was able to find will be given and anything that you can add would be appreciated.]
Antonio del Amo Algara was born on September 9, 1911, in Valdelaguna, Madrid, Spain. A cinephile since his adolescence, he abandoned his studies when he was twenty years old to collaborate as a critic and essayist in specialized film magazines and in the Madrid Cine Club Nuestro Cinema. He was a member of the Communist Party, being the author, together with Fernando G. Mantilla, of the documentaries produced during the Civil War by the Líster Brigade, of the Republican army, whose film section they both managed. At the end of the war, he was repressed and put in prison, and Rafael Gil finally interceded to prevent him from being shot. It was precisely the friendship with Gil that allowed him to reintegrate into the world of cinema, first as a screenwriter for Emisora Films and, later, as an assistant director in Rafael Gil's team, as well as alongside Antonio Román and Ignacio F. Iquino.
But Antonio del Amo was a scholar and a theoretician of cinema and, as he had already shown in the early years of the 1930s, he continued to collaborate in the following decade in specialized film magazines, especially in Experimental Cinema, even publishing a Universal History of Cinema in 1945.
He made his debut as a filmmaker in 1947, bringing to the screen “Cuatro mujeres”, a film that was followed by others with a script by Manuel Mur Oti, combining this activity with his dedication to teaching cinematographic art, teaching at the Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences (IIEC), between 1948 and 1958, and at the Official Film School. during the three-year period from 1965 to 1968.
In 1951, he established himself with the only type of socially committed film that could be attempted at that time: the feat of a priest who frees a couple of wayward young people from marginalization and delinquency, a narrative subterfuge used before and after him by those who wanted to visually address such environments. The film was entitled “Day after Day”, it took place in Madrid's Rastro and achieved to a large extent what it intended, which was nothing more than to reflect the misery of certain sectors of society that some did not want to see and others did not even know existed. His inclinations in this direction, probably the result of his experiences on the left, can be glimpsed even in stories as innocent as “El pescador de coplas”, where the not strictly musical has a certain neorealist density, and, if the sense of observation is sharpened, even in Joselito's films. In fact, in the mid-1950s he abandoned all efforts to make a personal cinema that made him join the so-called "group of renovators", together with Mur Oti, Nieves Conde and Ruiz-Castillo, to make films considered as successful by-products, shot with Antonio Molina and, above all, with Joselito, the "singing boy", which enjoyed great popularity in their time and even crossed Spanish borders.
His success led him to found, in 1958, the production company Apolo Films itself and to build his own studios in Los Negrales, located in the Madrid town of Villalba. However, he was unsuccessful in his attempt to make Maleni Castro in “The Twins” a child star, and in the 1970s, after a couple of westerns under the pseudonym Richard Jackson, he made one last foray into denunciation cinema with the film Single Mothers and an inappropriate swan song with “What's Up With You, Uncle?”, and then definitively separated himself from a world in which he had lived since he was twenty years old.
His last 25 years were spent writing books that he self-published such as Estética del montaje in 1972, and El video-estilo in 1984, making films that he abhorred and trying to raise projects that did not come to fruitio
Antonio del Amo died on June 19, 1991, in Madrid when he was stuck by a car
His only Spaghetti western appearance was in an uncredited role in “El hijo de Jesse James” (The Son of Jesse James) in 1964.
del AMO, Antonio (aka A. del Amo, Richard Jackson)
(Antonio del Amo Algara) [9/9/1911, Valdelaguna, Madrid, Spain – 6/191991,
Madrid, Madrid, Spain (hit by car)] – producer, production manager, director,
assistant director, writer, cinematographer, film editor, married to ?, father
of María Jesús del Amo, grandfather of
producer, director, writer Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Rodrigo Sorogoyen del Amo)
[1981- ], uncle of producer, director,
writer, José Luis Madrid (José Luis Madrid de la Viña) [1933-1999], great-uncle
of director Sebastián del Amo [1971-
], founded Apolo Films [1958-1971].
The White Horse – 1962 [production department]
The Son of Jesse James – 1964
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