If one had to single out García Márquez’s most successful achievement as a screenwriter in Mexico in the years prior to the publication of Cien años de soledad, there is no doubt that it would be Tiempo de morir. García Márquez himself referred to it as the first film script he produced with an original subject, starting from the image of ‘an old pistolero who learned to knit during his long years of imprisonment’. But there is also a more personal reference in the story: a family memory concerning the author’s grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, who killed a man in a duel in 1908 and had been obliged to flee his home town of Barrancas.

Another aspect of its success was that there were no great delays or hitches in the production of the film, directed by Arturo Ripstein. The text reveals the writer’s ability to conceive and organise a narrative governed by the compositional and structural criteria of the language of cinema while remaining true to his own creative world and obsessions. In other words, this text can undoubtedly be recognised as an example of a film script by an accomplished author whose literary value represents the most significant component in the quality of the ensuing film.

The first merit of Tiempo de morir is its well-calculated dramatic construction, a fundamental element in the cinematic structuring of the narrative. The Mexican critic García Riera highlighted the principle of the film’s construction: ‘the constant presence of death as the main character in the story’ producing ‘that permanent tension which heightens each moment in the film and guides its development’.