Bunuel saw, as did Defoe, that Crusoe's struggle, often clusy and inept, against conditions on the island, was fascinating on its practical pedestrian level; he records, simply, the flat, absorbing routine of Crusoe's daily life. Imaginatively Bunuel pierces further, looking into the heart of the man to see there the desolation and anguish of someone isolated from all human contact.
-- Tony Richardson in The World of Luis Bunuel, edited by Joan Mellen (Oxford University Press, 1978)
One doesn't hear much about Bunuel these days and this is the first time I have mentioned him in this blog, mostly because I had seen his films long before I began posting here. Bunuel made films in Spain and France in the twenties, sometimes collaborating with Salvador Dali, went to Spain and, briefly, Hollywood in the thirties and then to Mexico, where he made dozens of movies in various genres before making his last six films in France in the sixties and seventies. While in Mexico Bunuel made strange and beautiful personal films with the low-budgets he preferred because of the freedom it gave him. Robinson Crusoe was producer Oscar Danscigers attempt to break into the international success with Bunuel's first film in color and English, starring Dan O'Herlihy. It follows Defoe's novel fairly closely while diverging from Defoe's themes, emphsizing the sexual frustration and absence of God that plague Crusoe in his dreams. Once Friday appears and helps fight off the cannibals Crusoe asserts himself as master, remembering that the ship that he was originally on twenty-five years before was sailing to Brazil to buy slaves.
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