One of my two or three favorite directors didn’t make a single film unmarred by a bad idea or ineffective execution, and that’s why I love Luis Buñuel. Orson Welles did too:
He’s a rich feeding ground for that sort of critic, because it’s all true about him. You can take off and say he likes feet and all that. Jesus, it’s all true. He’s that kind of intellectual, and that kind of Catholic. He is a deeply Christian man who hates God as only a Christian can, and, of course, he’s very Spanish. I see him as the most supremely religious director in the history of the movies. A superb kind of person he must be. Everyone loves him.
Like Hitchcock, Hawks, Kurosawa, and Sturges, Don Luis is one of the few pantheon filmmakers whom cineastes watch for unalloyed pleasure; he’s the film equivalent of Al Green.
After the convulsions of his Surrealist period and a grim post-Spanish Civil War period of American exile, Buñuel moved to Mexico, which became a second home; one can make a strong case that it can claim him as a Mexican director. As much as the work of Sam Fuller, those Mexican films make an airtight case for the virtues of the B-movie ethos as practiced by an artist. Take Mexican Bus Ride, Susana, or Wuthering Heights. The acting is at best listless when not atrocious, the production values a little better than fifth graders using construction paper and papier-mâché, but man! He was never more authentically subversive and hence surrealist. The cheapness of the effects and the guerrilla editing accentuated the shocks. Thanks to a uni library that owned the sudsters in VHS transfers of reel-to-reel, I watched minor things like Illusion Travels By Streetcar and Fever Mounts in El Pao in the early nineties. I’m shocked Criterion hasn’t acquired Los Olvidados, the greatest of his films unavailable widely on DVD or Blu-ray. Winner of the Best Director award at Cannes in 1951, this terrifying film presaged Pixote, My Own Private Idaho, and every film about street toughs but outpaces them in terse poetry. Buñuel doesn’t mistake sentimentality for realism. In Las Hurdes, depicting a Spanish province whose poverty rivals feudal times, Buñuel understood how even the documentary requires moments of disruptive, savage lyricism for verisimilitude.
Working with Jean-Claude Carrière on the script for Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964, Don Luis discovered a late manner dependent on the financial stability offered by international producers who understood the power of what we call now his brand. He had perfected his methods as finely as a sous chef does the flow of appetizers from his kitchen. Those late films could be one-joke contrivances; I’ve given That Obscure Object of Desire and The Milky Way more chances than they deserve, and prefer the parched earth of Susana. I like to think that had he never gotten the chance to direct again after L’Age d’Or this descarado would have been an excellent freelance gag writer. Consider: the rubber chickens in Discreet Charm, the young woman sticking her tongue out at her insistent lover in Un Chien Andalou, sending up the prejudices of the Mexican upper class by giving one of his monsters the line, after a window gets smashed, “It was a passing Jew” in The Exterminating Angel.
For a director who loved literature but was contentedly as he put it “agraphic,” Buñuel left a voluminous account of his working methods. My Last Sigh remains among the most delightful of memoirs, and Objects of Desire, a compilation of interviews with a couple of adoring but scrupulous Mexican critics, should be part of any serious home collection of ci-ne-mah texts.
Finally, I owe Buñuel for the recipe for a perfect martini.
Meh
Susana
The Milky Way
Illusion Travels by Streetcar
The Brute
Death in the Garden
Fever Rises in El Pao
That Obscure Object of Desire
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Sound, Solid
Nazarin
Las Hurdes
Viridiana
Wuthering Heights
Mexican Bus Ride
Tristana
The Young One
The Phantom of Liberty
Good to Great
Belle de Jour
Los Olvidados
Un Chien Andalou
L’Age d’Or
El
Robinson Crusoe
The Exterminating Angel
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Simon of the Desert
Humanizing The Vacuum 