Robinson Crusoe (Luis Bunuel, 1954)Adam & Josh's takes (starts at 1:15:42)Robinson Crusoe as adapted by Luis Bunuel ? Sounds crazy right ? As it turns out, it really isn't that crazy or weird, it's just bad. Bunuel is obviously completely uninterested in a story of survival and overcoming one's limitations, which would be fine if he had more to say that "aren't Victorian ideals dumb and hypocritical ?", and I have a hard time seeing anything more in his satire here. Adam & Josh make it sound like Bunuel is being a lot more subtle that it seemed to me : I don't think you could possibly watch this and not realize its subversion of the material, if only because there is nothing of interest here other than Bunuel taking cheap shots at Robinson over and over again. They might be deserved, but because Robinson is never a character here, it's just that : cheap.
Visually, it looks like a badly colorized episode of Gilligan's Island, and that's perhaps its biggest crime. Un chien andalou and L'âge d'or work because they're
interesting to look at, and this is only interesting in the sense that it's ridiculously awful. Part of what makes Bunuel's satire feel hollow here is that it lacks that edge, that unsettling feeling. I suppose one could argue that the dismal production values provide another type of surrealism to this film, but that seems like being overly charitable just because it's Bunuel, to me.
Dan O'Herlihy's performance is probably in the running for the worst performance to ever be nominated for Best Actor : even by silent film standards he'd be hamming it up, and everything he does is underlined by one of the most egregiously redundant uses of voice-over narration I've seen. He gets more tolerable once Friday shows up, in part because the voice-over is less present but also because his buffoonery now has something to be played against... but that's also where such "subtle" bits of interaction such as "You, Friday. Me, Master. Friends" come up.
I wish I had found something in Robinson's finding of religion, but again there's the problem of Robinson never being given any character in the first place : perhaps if Bunuel had cared even a little bit about portraying those first days of survival instead of skipping it and just cutting to Robinson having settled in a relatively comfortable lifestyle... the film is only interested in mocking and ridiculing him, which is ineffective because I was never brought to care about him in any way whatsoever. That is probably the core failing of the film, both Bunuel's of O'Herlihy's.
2/10