Carlos Saura's penetrating and increasingly violent "The Hunt" … should give the New York cinema intelligentsia a new regard for filmmaking in Spain.

What is surprising about it is that it cloaks in its lean and cruel account of quarreling and ultimate murdering among four men on a routine rabbit hunt a cynical innuendo of what has happened to some middle-aged men of the generation that fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War….

To be sure, the average outsider might not immediately perceive in the seemingly nondescript environment and the accumulating details of the hunt all the subtle hints and signals that colloquially identify these men as veteran Falangists and their background as the civil war.

But any Spaniard familiar with his nation's history and geography should recognize the dry and barren region in which these sportsmen arrive in a jeep for a few days of rabbit-shooting as...