High Heels starts off in camp fashion with a title sequence straight out of the mid-60s Monty Berman school, promising lots more japes in Swinging Madrid.
Instead, however, we get a mother-daughter murder melodrama even more farfetched than the Joan Crawford classic, Mildred Pierce, on which this would appear to be loosely based.
Almodovar, in his double role of writer-director, intensifies this clash of styles and audience preconceptions by locating a just-about naturalistic dissection of family tensions within a milieu which Joe Orton would relish, all lawmen in drag, transvestite bars, and lots of singing.