Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe (1954)

Luis Bunuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954) is a classic example of the auteur film in its initial sense: the director’s vision and style emerge from the tension with the conventional materials assigned him. Later he would make more freeform films with a more blatant style that transcended the term “auteur.”

Bunuel was among three hands scripting the famous novel, which was too famous to highjack. It’s Bunuelian in smaller touches.

His Crusoe exhibits many of the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie. Obviously he’s ingenious, clever, perseverant, what a man who survives 28 years on a jungle island would be. But Bunuel takes his liberties. That pottery wheel seems a Magrittean incongruity. The scale of the hero’s little world seems too impressive, too grand a reward for the Protestant work ethic to be credible.When Crusoe is ultimately rescued he returns to the image of the bourgeoisie, neatly coiffed, elegantly dressed and perfumed, a lord worthy any manner and manners. But Bunuel suggests several kinks in the bourgeois whiz's armour.

When Crusoe leaves the later mutineers to maintain his legacy he envies them for possessing what he lacked: companionship. But those surlies promise about as much community and collaboration as the beggars of Viridiana. Bundle's Friday notes that the white sailors are as murderous as his enemy cannibals, even if they don't eat their victims.

As Defoe describes, when Crusoe accrues his man Friday he un-christianly reduces him from person to weekday and makes himself his Master. He discourages the grovel but encourages frightened awe — and total obedience. Even on a two-man island the European white man is a colonialist. After overcoming his own fears of Friday’s cannibalism and desire to escape Crusoe comes to trust him with the weapons, gives him full training and ultimately rewards him with -- the right to smoke. In '54 that reward was just minuscule; today it's read as fatal. Crusoe will take his savage in full livery to the English jungle, society. That makes Crusoe the model of the European slave keeper. He anticipates the hypocrisy and arrogance of Bunuel's Fernando Rey characters. 

Bunuel’s spirit especially gleams in the religion scenes. (Remember his famous line: "Thank God I'm an atheist.") Crusoe has learned to recite his rote faith well, but flounders when he tries to explain it to Friday. Bunuel gives the pagan (aka  uncontaminated) Friday an impish rational skepticism that Crusoe can’t handle, only feel superior in dismissing.Turning to his parrot for agreement betrays Crusoe as a reciter of unabsorbed rote, unable to respond to basic questions. Unburdened by the cant, Friday can plainly ask: If God keeps Satan alive to tempt man why does he punish man for sinning? 

In an earlier scene Crusoe goes off to his echo vale for the delusion of company, when he cries out to himself and receives his echo. In choosing a Psalm what Crusoe shouts and yearns to hear is a confirmation of his faith, of the existence of his God, a renewal of his soul. What he gets is a hollow taunt of himself. Choosing the psalm makes his need for religious support, which the empty echoes can’t fill. Crying for soul renewal he strides forward to fill the screen with his strictly material presence, his soul unswelled.

Whether or not in Defoe, Bunuel allows his island an immaculate conception. Where Crusoe’s cat found a lover is never known but her litter embodies the fertility and mystery with which the natural wilds outruns our logic and pragmatism.  

Twice Bunuel gives Crusoe the discomfit of erotic stirrings. The first is when he sees a dress blowing on his scarecrow. The second — more angrily suppressed — is when Friday dons a dress and gold necklace and plays at war. The is Bunuel’s delight in tweaking sexual repression rather than DeFoe’s. It's Defoe's classic novel but Bunuel's most promising early film.