Little did I know ... a favorite movie from my youth turns out to be the work of none other than Sn. Luis Bunuel: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954). Despite the poster, Dan O'Herlihy spoke English, I'm pretty sure. All his Mexican co-players were dubbed, I assume, but that would probably have escaped an eleven-year-old. Haven't seen it since I sat down to watch it--probably one of a double-feature--at the old Avalon movie palace in Chicago (see DM for earlier references--way too many of them for a healthy childhood). What a shock it was to discover, in looking over the director's corpus last week, that he played a then-anonymous part in my formative cinematic years and beyond. I had either read the book before or soon after the Avalon, but at any rate I felt at that young age I had a real fix on Defoe "academically," long before I caught up with his if-not-better-works: Journal of the Plague Year and his true classic, Moll Flanders--later in life.You may have noticed a rather conspicuous gap in the Spanish auteur's career, as I have presented it anyway, between the 1929 Dog and his breakout Mexican/French films of the 60's--amazingly, that figure also represents his age! Briefly: after his exile from his homeland, he did menial dubbing and editing work in Hollywood for awhile, before settling in Mexico permanently, where for a couple of decades he ground out essentially B-movie, commercial fare of little consequence at all. Except for Crusoe. It was released internationally to some acclaim--again, much of this comes as late-breaking news to me--with the Irish-born O'Herlihy in the lead, for which he got his one and only Academy Award nomination. (The actor, a good one, was a man of few significant parts, it seems, though I did recognize him when he appeared later in a major role in Fail Safe (1964), and in many more less-major ones over a long career in film and television.)
Crusoe came out at just the right time, at least for us kids. It was an era of Saturday matinee swashbucklers and desert-island adventures like Treasure Island and Swiss Family ROBINSON, and you can tell from the poster that Bunuel's movie was advertised as such. Moreover, that's the only way I can remember it.
HOWEVER: now that I know that the film was/is a "Bunuel," let me just speculate a review, from a grown-up perspective. We are "musing," after all. Right off, exile and castaway would be the perfect subject-matter for the expatriate and, even more importantly, existentialist director. Here we've got total free-will (except for Friday the "willing" slave), unencumbered by the superficial constraints of bourgeois society that the writer-director satirizes so unmercifully. And, wow, couldn't Bunuel nail this theme definitively when Crusoe finally grants his "man" the gift of complete freedom. Conveniently, Friday's "phantom of liberty" is quite literal, but enslavement in any form to anyone or anything would be Bunuel's idea of the worst crime imaginable, and he probably allows this to play upon his hero's psyche. Why probably?--because I DO recall several nightmare dream-sequences (of course) involving mainly Crusoe's father (a potential Freudian wonderland) in the course of the movie. But I no doubt ignored their thematic significance at the time. They would have been getting in the way of the "aventuras."
And what about Bunuel's trademark imagery? When I revisit the film I'll look for lots of ANTS. They pop up in almost every one of his movies as a symbol of one thing or another, and what better place for them and other scary mini-creatures than a desert island? Here the very real would translate easily to the surreal, and vice-versa. (Incidentally, his collaborator on Dog, Salvador Dali, loved the little fellows too--check out the ant-riddled clock in the lower-left corner of his most famous painting, "The Persistence of Memory.") And I know I'll find nature's sufficiency of Bunuelian megafauna--both the quick and the dead.
But then again ... Netflix notwithstanding, I may just leave his Adventure of Robinson Crusoe as a very pleasant childhood memory.
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