Simon of the Desert

In the fifth century the ascetic Simeon lives on top of a pillar in the desert and has not come down for thirty-six years. People come expecting miracles; Simon restores a man's severed hands and the crowd finds it dull and wanders off. Satan appears again and again, sometimes as a schoolgirl, sometimes as a bearded figure of Christ. Luis Bunuel directed. Claudio Brook plays Simon and Silvia Pinal plays Satan in her various forms. The film runs 45 minutes and is unfinished; it was planned at feature length. The producer Gustavo Alatriste blamed the budget. Pinal tells it differently: it was to be part of an anthology with three directors taking separate sections. Federico Fellini and Jules Dassin were approached, both wanted to cast their wives, Pinal refused and the project fell apart. That is why the ending is abrupt and strange: Satan takes Simon to a New York nightclub in the 1960s, where a band plays and the crowd dances the Radioactive Flesh while Satan tells him to stick it out till the end. It won both the FIPRESCI Prize and the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 100 percent from 17 reviews. Who it is for: viewers who like short, sharp films that mock religious institutions. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a whole. It ends as though cut off mid-sentence, and that is not a choice but the result of how it was made.