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The film recaptures life in rural Spain during the first years of Franco's dictatorship, around 1942. It represents the difficult relations between those victorious and those who have been vanquished. Furthermore, the movie unveils the black-market economy prevalent during the first decade of the regime, and how the Right-Wing ideologists control the underground economy. They also maintain a repressive society enforcing a set of strict, Catholic morals that they themselves do not practice. Gutiérrez uncovers their hypocrisy and double moral standards through the watchful eyes of the boy-protagonist. Gutiérrez also defeats those values by having the two female protagonists unite and expose the archaic macho culture as repressive and immoral. Juanito, the hope for a tolerant Spain, in the end ascribes a role of power to Angela and Ana. Juan, his father, a devastated Casanova, loses their respect bt trapping himself in gambling and womanizing, and becomes an outlaw. To fully understand this film the viewer must know early Twentieth-Century Spanish history and the two fighting factions in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In this way one can understand Gutiérrez's ironical treatment of post-war relations and how he compels a divided society to look forward to a desired unity.
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