Les Aventures de Robinson Crusoé

As someone who is not a great admirer of surrealism in any of its forms, and who found works like Le Chien Andalou or The Obscure Object of Desire gratuitously disturbing or pretensious respectively, I was delighted to come across this beautifully sensitive telling of the Robinson Crusoe story. A story not only of survival but also of friendship it is told with great feeling and warmth.

I am sure that fans of director Luis Buñuel probably have very mixed feelings about this film. On the one hand, it's an exceptionally well made film from start to finish, but on the other, it's way too "normal" for the usually anarchic and often surreal director. In other words, the fact that this is a relatively straight retelling of the classic Daniel Defoe story may be held against it. There are no eyes being cut with razors, no devil coming to tempt Robinson nor is there any sexual chemistry between him and Friday--all touches you might expect from Buñuel. However, I am not a huge fan of the director's odd films--though I have enjoyed several of his more "approachable" films. So, it's not surprising that I liked this film very much. It was a fine quality product throughout. I also liked that in this version, Robinson is NOT a perfect man or some sort of saint--he's very flawed--especially in his initially paternalistic attitude towards Friday. It had a lot to say about slavery and the tendency to see all the natives as "savages". Well done--well directed and especially well acted by Dan O'Herlihy. A touching and interesting film.

I saw this film as a small boy in 1954 and it had a profound effect on me.Even as a simple minded boy at the time, it had a power that i've never forgotten.....i've searched for video release of this film but have never found it....i would love to see it again

Robinson honoring the day of the Lord?When you know Bunuel's huge body of work,you do know that scene can only be ironical.If there's a moral to draw from his "Robinson" it's probably "God helps those who help themselves".That's what he says to his prisoner .In "La Mort en Ce Jardin" (1957) Bunuel would go further:his characters ,lost in the jungle ,light a fire with the pages of the Bible.

My favorite scene is Robinson screaming in front of the vast ocean :God is nothing but the echo of Man's voice.

Bunuel's Robinson is rather unpleasant.He is at first an idle lazy young bourgeois who has to work for the first time in his life.As always in Bunuel's canon,the nightmare scene where a mocking father appears is impressive;ditto for the voices of Robinson's old companions singing about good old time.

Robinson's relationship with Friday is very well depicted; the hero confesses he was a potential slave trader :the goal of his voyage?The dialog Robinson/Friday includes these immortal lines:

-If God's stronger than the Devil,why doesn't He kill him?

-God wants to put Man to the test.Man has choice between good and bad.

A writer,Michel Tournier ,was probably influenced by Bunuel for his book "Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique" :he made Friday Robinson's equal.

An essential Bunuel? probably not.But even a minor film by this extraordinary director deserves your undivided attention.

In maybe his only time of giving into a commercial project, Luis Bunuel, deliciously notorious surrealist and satirist, took off his usual run of Mexican-produced films of the decade and adapted The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. On the surface, if one weren't familiar with the director's works at all, it has the seeming quality of being an average B-movie adventure of a man in solitude who is saved by his man Friday and his own resourcefulness. The story of the cast away has ended up having better days, specifically in Zemeckis's Cast Away, as far as with how the actual details of the story unfurl. It boils down to this: Crusoe gets shipwrecked on an island, takes what he can from the ship (some supplies, actually lots, a few animals), builds a camp, and little by little after the novelty of a deserted island wears off he goes near mad in loneliness. That is until the cannibals arrive, dropping off a man whom Robinson names Friday and quasi-domesticates as his servant-cum-friend. This is a story that even school-children know, and has even appeared as a goof on a Peabody & Sherman cartoon.

But the fun in watching this rendition of Crusoe is for fans of the director to see what he does with the material. It's not a perfect affair, truth be told, as Bunuel isn't the greatest director of suspense, particularly in the climax. But what is essential for a film with as basic a plot as this to have is an understanding of what can be subverted, lightly and slightly twisted into personal expression. This is nothing new for many of today's famous filmmakers ala Spielberg or Scorsese, but for Bunuel he approaches it in ways that his best fans will be keen to look for and get in nice quantities. For example, as he is known more often than not as a director of dreams (his best film, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, has dreams within dreams in savagely playful fashion), we see Crusoe having a dream early on where there's soft gel on the sides of the screen (maybe to appease the producers, who knows), and in it Crusoe dreams of his father pouring sauce or other on a pig, and images of Crusoe in water, cut together and acted in truly classic style. It's probably even one of his better dream sequences, followed up by another later on that features a pretty funny image to boot.

Actually, part of what makes Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe so enjoyable is spotting the references to past films- his palm covered with some bugs speaks right away cheerfully to Un Chien Andalou- as well as just mildly absurd usages of animals on screen (how did the cat have kittens?), and even Christian imagery in simply showing Crusoe with his huge beard, which Dan O'Hearlihy sports proudly for most of the film, and even carrying what looks like a cross (!) but turns out to be the stand for a scarecrow. Then there's also the aspect to the bond between Crusoe and Friday, which is almost a pop-art form of one of Bunuel's own treatises on the division of the classes in many of his films (i.e. Viridiana and Exterminating Angel). In a way it works just as well as a simple story anyway, because Bunuel is able to have his cake and eat it, by having a tale that as stilted it might be in its not-quite-high-or-low budget and form of writing/narration at times is fairly gripping in an 'old-school' way, as well as enough room to bring out his flashes of brilliant imagery and jabs of surrealism, and even absurdism.