Word: bunuel
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Viridiana (Kingsley International). In the first reel of the first important film directed by Spain's Luis Bunuel, something surreal called Un Chien Andalou (1929), the camera watches closely as Bunuel himself opens a straight razor and with surgical precision slits a woman's eyeball. From that frame forward, Moviemaker Bunuel left no doubt in anybody's mind that he intends to open people's eyes. In his masterpiece, Los Olmdados (1950), he opened people's eyes to the horrors of poverty in the Mexican slums. In Viridiana, a strange but powerful film that contains...
Surprisingly, the film was actually made in Spain. Bunuel is an anarchist, but he is also the most famous Spanish moviemaker, so Franco invited him to come home after 25 years in exile and to shoot a picture with government funds. Bunuel accepted the offer, shot Viridiana. But before Franco's censors could take a whack at it, he smuggled the film out of the country. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it won the Grand Prize...
...portrayal of lower class sordidness and misery, The Young and the Damned has no great social message; it is instead a vivid portrayal of rottenness under the log of a Mexican city. In this role it succeeds remarkably. Luis Bunuel has mixed elements disgusting enough to sicken, with others realistic enough to frighten. The result is a depressing, albeit excellent movie. It contains little of the traditionally tragic. Its themes are frustration, unnatural relationships, and violence; its heroes, street urchins, blind beggars, and murderers...
Despite the subject matter, Bunuel has prevented his film from becoming maudlin. It is frighteningly real and human. With excellent handling of an unobtrusive camera, and skillful direction of a relatively untrained cast, Bunuel deftly portrays naked reality...
...from his ship, wrecked on a nearby reef. With the ship's dog and cat, with a home abuilding and goats to tend, the castaway seems secure in his growing self-sufficiency. But fever comes, and he is finally racked by the even greater terrors of loneliness. Director Bunuel and Actor O'Herlihy are particularly fine in picturing the despair of a man alone. The suggestion of it comes in O'Herlihy's bemused fingering of the women's clothes that he has salvaged from the wreck; the note deepens with the death and burial...