Robinson Crusoe

Crusoe defies his family and goes to sea, and survives a shipwreck alone. He wakes on a deserted island. First he counts: how many days have passed, how much powder he has, which plants can be eaten. He builds a house, keeps a calendar, raises goats. Years pass and his own voice is the only one he hears. Then he finds a footprint on the beach. There are others on the island; cannibals bring victims here. One day Crusoe rescues one of them and names him Friday. Luis Bunuel directs. He adapted the screenplay from Daniel Defoe's novel with the blacklisted Hollywood writer Hugo Butler. Dan O'Herlihy plays Crusoe and Jaime Fernandez plays Friday. It is a Mexican and American co-production. This was Bunuel's first film in colour and one of only two he directed in English; it was shot under difficult conditions in the Mexican state of Colima. Dan O'Herlihy took his only Oscar nomination for the part. The matter it treats is how solitude changes the mind; Crusoe's conversations with himself are at the centre of the film. Bunuel adds scenes on religion and the relation of master and servant that are not so explicit in Defoe's text. The narrative tries to build Friday as more than a loyal helper, but does not fully escape the view of its period. The photography shoots the island less as a real place than as a mental space. The ending closes on rescue. Its limit is representation; the drawing of the Native character carries the moulds of its time. Who it is for: viewers who like Bunuel's lesser known period and classic adventure adaptations. Who it is not for: its period representation is troubling and the ending simple.