The fabled surrealist Spanish director of "Un chien andalou" and "L'age d'or" filming Daniel Defoe's immensely smug novel about British pluck and self-reliance Robinson Crusoe--in Mexico after Luis Buñuel's very tough look at young thugs in "Los Olvidados"? I was expecting a lot more from the long-unavailable film. Surely, Buñuel must have concocted some hallucinations for Mr. Crusoe. And, having enjoyed Michel Tournier's telling of the story from the perspective of Friday, I hoped for at least some shift from the white supremacism of the very colonialist novel about the plucky Englishman establishing dominion over all he found on a tropical island.

What I was not expecting, but alas found, was a listless, mostly boring movie, devoid of surrealistic flair or any interesting hallucinations. There doesn't even seem to be any irony intended when Robinson sanctimoniously tells the pirates to whom he is leaving the island that to survive, they must live in harmony. I asked the screen:" If this how you believe you lived there? with a slave chained-up at night?..."

Actually, after the boredom of watching Crusoe make his home from salvage and seemingly innate British ability to establish order and self-satisfaction. Feverish and very thirsty, Crusoe imagines his even more smug father tantalizing him but denying him water in a remarkably banal scene.

Friday (Jaime Fernandez) at least gets to ask the question (not in Defoe), "If God is all-powerful, why doesn't he quell the Devil?" and the movie is more interesting with a second character, however "naturally" servile a one. Having someone to preach at much cheers up Crusoe and gives him an overdose of feeling superior to cannibals. and "How pleasant it was once more to have a servant." (And the ship that was wrecked was engaged in the slave trade, if I remember rightly.)

Apparently, the Defoe novel that Buñuel wanted to film was Journal of a Plague Year. He was persuaded to shoot another version of Robinson Crusoe as long as he did not have to try to direct Orson Welles in the title role. The producer screened Welles's (1948) "Macbeth" trying to convince Buñuel to cast Welles, but Buñuel was more interested in Dan O'Herlihy, the Irish actor who played Macduff. (Never mind that he couldn't swim, didn't speak Spanish, or had never had the leading role in a movie...)

As if shooting a movie in Mexico in English and Spanish versions was not challenging enough, the movie was the first one shot outside the US on Eastman Kodak color film (though that was cheaper and easier than using Technicolor) and was shot by a cameraman, Max Phillips, who had never worked in color.

Astonishingly to me, Dan O'Herlihy was nominated for an Oscar in "The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." Not that I think he was bad, but I don't think he was particularly good in the role. Plus it was an independent and "foreign" production, albeit of a canonical English classic. O'Herlihy was a stand-out in a genuinely great movie "Odd Man Out" (1947) without getting any award nomination, and the 1954 Oscar went to a guy named Brando in a movie called "On the Waterfront."

I guess that it is not O'Herlihy's fault that he was given sententious and totally unnecessary lines, telling us what we can see for ourselves, thank you very much.

The "restored" color looks unnatural to me, though contrast with the unrestored trailer keeps me from doubting that a lot of work was done. (Besides, there's one of those before-and-after demos included). In some scenes the colors are over-saturated. In many others an ugly (not sepia) brown predominates.

The disc also includes a 52-minute 1985 audio interview of Dan O'Herlihy by David Del Valle that has some good stories about Buñuel, Welles, and the dog that O'Herlihy hated, though Crusoe loved it. There's also a poster gallery.

Allegedly, there are even worse Buñuel movies from the years of his exile in Mexico (and I am far from being a fan of the second most-famous of them,"Exterminating Angel"). Having been mightily disappointed by this, I'm less interested than I was in seeing what Buñuel did with Wuthering Heights (though I like its Spanish title: "Abismos de pasion"). (Although I find a number of his movies boringly one-joke, he made "Los Olvidados," which is a very great film, plus "Virdiana," "Nazarin," and "Tristana.")


© 2007, Stephen O. Murray




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