Luis Buñuel’s repute as one of cinema’s mightiest talents rested for a long time on his outrageous early works, made in partial collaboration with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930), and the films he made after his return to European cinema in the 1960s and ‘70s. By that time, the culturati of the Western world were now largely in accord with the once-reviled filmmaker, and better able to admire his ability to lay bare the more contemptible and incongruous aspects of civilisation with a skill at once airy and unsparing. It’s possible, however, that Bunuel’s greatest body of work came from the long period of his exile and subsistence as a commercial filmmaker in Mexico, where his sharp-honed wit dug insidiously into whatever fare he tackled. Whereas Buñuel’s later return to satire laced with surrealism was perfectly in tune with an age of postmodernist and countercultural sentiment eager to sever the last threads of the old social presumptions, whose tyranny was swiftly becoming history outside of reactionary strongholds like Buñuel’s native Spain, his works in the 1950s still have the feeling of a genius outsider carefully treading a fine line in provoking and pleasing his audience, commenting on some issues scarcely anyone was touching at the time. His great output from this period included the fabled drama about street kids, Los Olvidados (1951), which almost got him assaulted at its premiere, the remarkable study in sexual neurosis and domestic violence Él (1953), his uneven but brilliantly conceived version of Wuthering Heights, Abismos de Pasion (1954), the pungently honest racial and sexual drama The Young One (1960), and his parting gifts to the national cinema after he was finding new international success, the ingenious apocalyptic fable El Angel Exterminador (1962) and the pithy parable Simon of the Desert (1965).
Buñuel’s work in Mexico sometimes saw him trying to appeal to the English-language market, as he did with The Young One and with The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the first of his two superlative adaptations of classic novels (out of many he wanted to tackle). Unlike the highly personalised, heavily rewritten Abismos de Pasion, however, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe declines to overtly inflect the work with Buñuel’s twists and tweaks: it is, on the surface, a very faithful retelling of Daniel Defoe’s novel. Buñuel digs and investigates Defoe, however, noting his blind spots as well as amplifying his best, half-latent ideas. Buñuel emphasises Crusoe as a misbegotten product of civilisation’s tendency to create useless people supported by institutions and niceties that keep the people who provide for them in check, and the potential disaster of this: the underpinnings of his voyaging are highlighted early on as a divergent wish to claim independence from his father and to obtain slaves in Africa so he can make his planting fortune. Buñuel plays the first third of his film as a borderline satire of the novel as his Crusoe (Dan O’Herlihy) smoothly and easily adapts to his situation after being shipwrecked on a tropical island off the South American coast, cannibalising his ship’s wreckage and swiftly constructing a little colonial fortress within minutes. Buñuel traces and emphasises the birth and development of Crusoe’s brilliance as a survivor as he learns painstaking method and trial-and-error invention, recreating the basics of civilisation from the seed of his own desolation. “Now it can be said that I’ve truly worked for my bread!” Crusoe declaims proudly once he finally thrashes out wheat he’s grown himself. Notably, the film was co-written by Hugo Butler, who was on the run from the blacklist, giving the film some spiritual kinship with the same year’s The Naked Jungle, also an overtly metaphoric jungle adventure written by a blacklistee.
Buñuel’s zippy, waggish approach to this aspect of the story soon however gives way to a new and different contemplation of Crusoe’s anguish when, once the fear of survival and his quest to regain something of the simple, dignified talent of a subsistence farmer are concluded, he is then faced with bottomless existential angst when his beloved dog Rex dies of old age. Terrified by his own solitude, he heads to the “valley of the echoes” where he bellows the Lord’s Prayer into a chasm to hear the words echoing back at him just for the sake of hearing his human voice as something real. At once he becomes insignificant in the face of an empty world and godlike in presence as the one voice, the lone entity of perspective in that world: the sudden collapse of faith immediately sends him scurrying from Bible to surf with a torch like a suicidal messiah before the life urge kicks back and drives him back ingloriously. The price Crusoe pays for this tenuous balancing point where he resists temptations of self-destruction is to become virulently paranoid: the powerful symbol of the footprint in the sand becomes a spark of maddening disruption in self-absorption, and Crusoe discovers signs that other human beings visit his island, he becomes hysterically fearful and warlike. There’s good reason for this, as the visitors soon prove to be ritualistic cannibals who come to his island specifically to slaughter and eat their human prey. Crusoe, never bothered by them, eventually makes his own live-and-let-live peace with the idea of fellow, brutal but equally self-directed humans, only being forced to intervene and save an escaping man from his pursuers, this of course being the man he dubs Friday (Jaime Fernández).
Friday immediately offers Crusoe the opportunity for a relapse into colonialist attitudes as he teaches him his first two English words, his own new name arbitrarily assigned from the day of the week, and, of course, “Master.” With Master and servant comes the fear of brutal revolt, as Crusoe chains Friday to a bed to exculpate his own terror of being murdered in his. But Friday finally convinces Crusoe that he has an actual friend and the two cast away exclusions. Even Crusoe’s attempts to evangelize run aground as Friday – having already been vaulted to the state of pipe-puffing philosopher – immediately picks De Sade’s objection to the idea that God gives freedom to choose between good and evil: “We does he get mad?” Crusoe can only hem and haw. Simon of the Desert and its embattled sky-communer are presaged, as Crusoe often postures as just as sagaciously assured and is just as vexedly confronted. Yet virgin birth occurs: Crusoe’s cat has kittens, leaving Crusoe clueless as to their father, “the one mystery of the island I never solved,” like proof of a watching deity in a prankster humour towards this wayward underling.
Crusoe himself becomes semi-benevolent deity, lording it over the bugs, as he feeds one species to the other. This provides Buñuel’s compulsory insect cameo, Buñuel’s familiar use of them as tactile emblems of the power of anarchic nature partly mitigated and given odd new dimension by Crusoe’s attitude to them, noting the strangeness and beauty of the desire to play and require a god, to adjudge and coordinate the world according to whims of sympathy. Not surprisingly, Buñuel tried to film that notable rewrite of Defoe, Lord of the Flies, for several years afterwards. El Angel Exterminador’s enforced, supernatural stranding is both anticipated and carefully counterpointed here, as the disintegration of the haute bourgeoisie in the later film isolates and forces devolution on its characters who nonetheless learn nothing and must recommence their lesson, whilst both Crusoe and Friday evolve in mirroring processes, as Crusoe learns to adapt to authentic life whilst Friday springs from naked savage to proto-gentleman, each without losing their fundamental character. Rather, towards the end, as proof of the general murderousness of men comes to hand, Crusoe finally asks Friday if he’s not afraid of the civilised world. A scarecrow clothed with a salvaged dress becomes a momentarily beckoning erotic salve for the desperately lonely man; later, Friday appals and entices him by jumping out of nowhere attired in another dress, unaware of its totemic meaning for the European, and profoundly distressing Crusoe with the spectacle of blurred and tempted sexual as well as racial norms. Even more charged: when Friday takes the dress off, stripping with the sudden, clueless but certain introduction of shame into his life.
In spite of his stature as one of cinema’s most definitive artists, Buñuel’s ever-concise, beautifully simple filmmaking was anything but pretentious. His blithe camera precision is constant evidence here, making use of the gaudy hues of ‘50s Technicolor to paint the locations in a fantastical manner (Alex Philips’ cinematography is bright and clean but lacks perhaps the expressive incision Buñuel’s regular collaborator Gabriel Figueroa might have brought to the film). The opening shipwreck is depicted in a shadowy model play, a maelstrom of perverse greens and blacks, a plunge from a dream-world that resolves in the stark brightness and solidity of Crusoe’s new kingdom, a thematically apt inversion that confirms Buñuel’s attitude for the world of men as the false one. A drunken revel lets Crusoe cut loose to the accompaniment of an invisible choir of drinking buddies (“Down Among the Dead Men” their ominous shanty of choice) and then sudden, cold cessation, with Crusoe dissolving in a weeping fit, to be abandoned to grief and solitude via a slow track away. A gently odd dream sequence has Crusoe suffer a fever that passes as ritual cleansing for his rude pilgrim, seeing his father as a judgemental patriarch (played by O’Herlihy too, of course) tasking his son, who suddenly perceives himself as a crucified sufferer suspended in a pool of the water he’s begging for but cannot reach.
O’Herlihy’s performance was nominated for an Oscar when the film gained release two years after shooting in 1954. It’s not hard to see why in spite of the relatively off-the-map film he was in, as O’Herlihy has to carry the film with two difficult modes of expression, as a silent actor who is on screen for much of the film and has to hold that screen, and as a voiceover artist. In the latter art, O’Herlihy utilises his resonant baritone to create an aural character who registers initially as a pompous bluff whilst recording his adventures, and then in increasingly frayed and emotional terms, before resurging in newly natural, confident tones. Fine, too, is the minatory agony that clearly passes through his face and flesh when he sees impossible femininity projected upon his scarecrow and, then, disquiet when he sees it again on Friday. Buñuel offers thrills and action enough too in the meantime to keep his popular audience happy, as he and Friday battle off murderous emissaries from his tribe, whilst the climax sees Crusoe and Friday save a victimised sea captain from his mutinous crew, whose arrival is heralded in a good joke as Friday and Crusoe rehearse doing battle with the neighbours, Crusoe pretending to throw his homemade bomb but hearing a very real blast. A little swashbuckling and some trapper’s cunning sets things right. Crusoe indulges a long last survey of his hand-built, self-made world, dons his dated finery, and takes a look at the man he once was in the mirror, before leaving the mutineers to face Crusoe’s own trial by exile with the hope of cleansing their filthy souls, whilst he and Friday set out to re-educate the world. The film as a whole isn’t in the top drawer of Buñuel’s remarkable oeuvre, but it is quietly excellent nonetheless. More officiously revisionist versions of Defoe include Man Friday (1976) and Crusoe (1988), but perhaps not as effective; more inventive, Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964).
