During the visit to the museum, a painting titled «Brigitte Bardot» can be seen. The painting was made by Antonio Saura, one of the most important Spanish artists of the 20th Century and brother of the director.
Carlos Saura had previously experienced run-ins with government sanctioned film censors on his earlier films, all of which resulted in edited versions of his final cuts, but Peppermint Frappé (1967) was passed without any scene deletions or censored footage. The movie was not only a popular success in Spain but his first significant commercial success. He won the Silver Bear for Best Director award at the 1968 Berlin International Film Festival; it also won three honors (Best Picture, Best Actor [José Luis López Vázquez] and Best Screenplay at Spain's Cinema Writers Circle Awards ceremony the same year. It was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, which was canceled due to the civil unrest of May 1968 in France.
While the contrasting female characters of Elena and Ana propel the film's increasingly perverse story-line, it is Julian who is the primary focus of Peppermint Frappé (1967) and Saura's embodiment of the traditional Spanish male raised under the repressive regime of Francisco Franco. In an interview, Carlos Saura stated that, "I realized that the Spanish bourgeoisie---and by extension that of the world, including the middle class---has a series of fixed images: a medieval notion, concerning feelings, primarily held by men towards women. It is that notion of woman as object, which fashion magazines show in a very clear way...In Peppermint Frappé, it's somewhat clearer because it contains the myth of the woman-object held by the traditional man with his religious notions and his particular education. He [Julian] can be a terrific doctor, but it doesn't let him get away from his concept of the woman-object...We all know Julian. He is a subjectified character who is traumatized by a horrible religious and sexual upbringing. We are all familiar with this problem in Spain."
After Carlos Saura had completed The Hunt (1966), he cast about for a film project that would serve as a homage to his spiritual master Luis Buñuel. Saura later recalled, "It was in Calanda with Bunuel that I got the idea for the film. You know the story of the drums of Calanda. The year I saw it a beautiful young woman, she was one of Bunuel's relatives, was beating the drum with all her might. I kept that extraordinary image as a persistent memory. This young woman belonged to another world; while all around her thousands of people were playing, she also beat the drum. It was all the more impressive since it is usually the men who do so."
Carlos Saura was one of the guiding lights of the Spanish New Wave movement in the early 1960's, beginning with his neorealistic social drama The Delinquents (1960). Saura would hit his stride with his two subsequent features, The Hunt (1966) aka The Hunt, and Peppermint Frappé (1967), both of which explored the political, social and sexual repression of the Francisco Franco regime through the guise of allegory and psychological melodrama, respectively.