Death at the Grindhouse: Women in Krimi (V): Elisa Montés, the real girl from Rio...

As I am finishing the last touches to our KRIMI! magazine, the last article I wrote was about "Todesrächer von Soho" co-star Elisa Montés, just to find out that she died yesterday, (Oct, 9th 2024) at the age of 89.

Elisa Montés was born in Granada as Elisa Rosario Valeriana Angustias Francisca de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Penella , December 15 , 1929. She was the daughter of the fascist politician Ramón Ruiz Alonso but the family had a strong artistic background. Her father was a staunch supporter of Generalissimo Franco and left Spain a few days after his death and moved to the USA.

At a young age she decided to dedicate herself to the world of acting, debuting on the big screen in 1954 with the film Elena, by Jesús Pascual and she won an award for her performance.

Throughout the decade of the 1950s she worked assiduously in the cinematographic medium with remarkable interpretations, but her movies were almost never internationally distributed (outside of the spanish-language world, that is).

With her daughter Emma in 1961, she seperated from her
husband in 1970 and divorced in 1982. Her daughter lived
with the father.

With the emergence of the german-spanish-italian co-productions she and her "exotic" looks get some roles in peplum and western movies.

The joyous spanish only Krimi la Cuarta Ventana
sees her and her female buddies (her actual sisters
Emma Penella and Teresa Pavez) entangled in some
strange crime...

She starred in

the Eddie Constantine movie "As if it was raining"

the Hildegard Knef-vehicle Geheimagentin in Gibraltar /"Female Spy of Gibraltar"

the Viking-epos (!) "Erik the Viking"

the peplum "Samson and the Mighty Challange"

the spaghetti-westerns: "Django the honorable Killer", "Mutinity at Fort Sharpe", "7 Dollars to kill", "Texas Adios", "The Taste of Vengeance"

the hollywood-made Return of the Magnificent Seven

In "The Return of the Magnificent Seven"

the spy movies "An Ace and Four Queens" and "The Cobra"

the extremely obscure German-Spanish horror film Das Geheimnis der Todesinsel by German schlockmeister Ernst von Theumer...

... and of course she became a regular actrice for Jess Franco, starting with

99 Women

Girl from Rio

Poor Irene, what is Sumuru going to do with her??

In Girl from Rio she played Irene, the secretary of Sir Marcius, who is captured and tortured by Sumuru. Ironically, Irene is from Rio while Sumuru is not. So I assume that the movie is about Irene and not Sumuru or Ulla ;-)

Her last big-screen appearance would be in the Jess Franco-Bryan Edgar Wallace movie Der Todesrächer von Soho where she played alongside krimi-heavyweights Horst Tappert, Barbara Rütting and Siegfried Schürenberg a woman called Helen Bennett, the wife of one of the suspects...

Above: Montés scenes in "Todesrächer"

Subsequently, her appearances in film and television gradually decreased, although in spain she stayed popular through her role in one of the best spanish tv-novellas ever: Verano azul (1981). She played the mother of two teenagers on summer vacation in a small costal town; the 19-part series drew 20 million viewers and has become part of Spain’s common cultural memory.

She did extensive stage-work throughout the 1980s and returned to the big screen in spanish productions in the early 1990s and then retired. Her daughter Emma Ozores became a TV actress too.