The Discreet Charm of Luis Bunuel

That picture of every Old Hollywood director meeting at Cukor's house in Buñuel's honor is really, really odd – who'd have thought that Rouben Mamoulian and George Stevens were fans?

Certainly John Ford was to be expected, but some of those others...

Was Lewis Milestone there?

Was Ford even there? I seem to remember seeing his eyepatch

He and Fritz Lang couldn't make it. Apparently Don Luis was quite nervous about meeting Lang, even asking for an autograph.

That thing he wrote about Metropolis that's in An Unspeakable Betrayal is pretty great.

I always thought those old directors were kind of celebrating themselves and using Don Luis as a pretext. Well, not a pretext exactly, but..

Any excuse for a booze up

Exactly

Ford came to luncheon at George Cukor's house that Bunuel wrote about in MLS. He mentioned that the event was notable because it was the last time any of them saw Ford alive.

He passed away shortly afterward, his last moments spent cradled in Peter Bogdanovich's arms.

Then again, it's conceivable that the directors of The Greatest Story Ever Told and Ben-Hur loved Viridiana and The Milky Way.

What about the producer of The Robe, Frank Ross?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

l'age d'or.

should have been left to make films of whatever length rather than spin them out to the industry standard.

the welles comment is, typically, cant. "A superb kind of person he must be. Everyone loves him." false on both counts.

what would be the point if everyone loved him?

why is john ford "to be expected" a fan, and "certainly" at that? everyone likes to schmooze a critical favourite, but is there some hidden affinity connecting ford and bunuel?

Don't be cranky! Regarding Welles' comment, the context is clear: Bunuel's a superb person because of his iconoclasm. No analysis is required.

Moreover, if I were to judge his acumen by the quality of his oral remarks to the fawning Peter Bogdanovich, Welles was an intermittently superb film critic. Must have been all that time between films.

Don't be cranky!
Nice try.

i think he one of the saddest careers really. he did actually work on, maybe even direct, a few films in the 30s... maybe in madrid even, but somehow never had the opportunities renoir had. 'exterminating angel' and 'discreet' are a great double-feature tho.

redd, i have no idea who you are but you called me a dick on some thread so whatever.

Had one of the best careers ever.

No, Enrique, I gave you a hard time on one of those films threads, but I didn't call you that (I think the only time I called anybody that was ethan during Katrina)

What a Bunuel-Carriere script: Ethan During Katrina.

He "spun out" his best films following the "industry standard"! He learned concision and restraint -- both Surrealist virtues, no?

I used to get annoyed when I would tell my slacker Austin friends I was watching a Bunuel and they'd say "Cool: is it Surreal?"

(Now I remember why I was mad at him. He was accusing everybody of liberal handwringing when many were worried about actual people they knew down there)

I guess I should have said: "They're all Surreal, even when they're not!"

x to quitney

I think he got to do mostly what he wanted from 1960 til death. Which is more than most people in his line of work. The 30s movies are something else but the post-Mexico movies wouldn't've been the way they were without that experience of making commercial genre flicks. His intent and execution are along-side Hitch and Lang for me.

OTM. Years ago I tried to have a discussion here about Hitch, Lang and Bunuel being three directors who had started in the silent era and were still working productively in the 60s but I can't find it. I think it went nowhere because I worded it incorrectly and amateurist jumped on me.

I voted for "Él" just because it's the craziest indictment of Latin machismo ever put on screen. And Buñuel was a bit of a machista hisself! Also, it's hella Surrealist: amour fou and all that. My second choice would be "L'Age D'or" -- especially because it's sexy as hell. But they're all great!

should have been left to make films of whatever length rather than spin them out to the industry standard.

There's only one word for that - bollocks.

otm

Bunuel's later films >>>>>> Lang and Hitchcock's.

Where is the line drawn for "later" with the three?

after 1960?

Lang made movies after 1960?

Personally, I'd mark the first film of Hitchcock's "late" period as Marnie, which I think is grebt. Not sure about Buñuel, tho. Everything from Viridiana on feels of a piece.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse was released in 1960 and that was it. But yeah, Alfred's inequality is pretty much otm.

Two votes for Ensayo!

Why does that deserve an exclamation point? I might have voted for it and made it three.

It was not a predictable choice (I like it fine).

(xpost)
But maybe I add a star for that one because of the backstory of Miroslava Stern having an affair with legendary bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin, about-to-be husband of Lucia Bosé, who herself appeared in a Buñuel film or two, and father of Miguel Bosé, who played the cross-dressing judge in Almodóvar's High Heels. Who I don't think is the same Dominguin who helped get Viridiana get made, but is the Dominguin who once said something like "I have over four hundred scars on my body, and every one bears the name of a woman."

Hm. Looks like he had something going with Ava Gardner too. Yet another reason to finally start reading that Lee Server bio, Love is Nothing.

Wow, I didn't know half the story of Miroslava. Wikipedia en español has the sad scoop, calling her "a Mexican Marilyn Monroe" and providing not one but two versions of her death, one a suicide, and one a complicated mysterious plane crash.

Re Lang, B-pictures like The Blue Gardenia are really pretty well done- by far the best of these is The Big Heat - but still not a patch on the pants of Spies, Mabuse, The Weary Death, etc.

No doubt it helped to have Mr. Nicholas Musuraca behind the camera.

Oh darnit. If I'd seen this I'd have voted Tristana, for the simple fact that he redeemed the elements of the Galdos novel that made me itchy. Novel is quite cool and proto-feminist but then virtually makes Tristana disappear in the end.

At long last: Simon of the Desert on DVD. I can throw away my secondhand VHS copy.

The Discreet Charm is one of my 5 favourite films ever fwiw, but I only saw it long after this poll closed

Have you seen "The Phantom of Liberty" yet?

I've only seen Discreet Charm and Viridiana which are both awesome, the former more so.

Go watch the Criterion prints of The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert. Suffice to say, they've never looked better.

I gotta say: SOTD, one of my favorites, now looks minor: a very amusing one-joke movie (I can't see how it could have been any longer); but TEA is much better than I remembered (I remembered it as a slacker, poorly acted prototype for The Discreet Charm).

I dont think he was capable of making a non good film. There's only 5 I haven't seen.

lol i was gonna say more or less that, tho maybe i'd say non-enjoyable rather than non-good

I don't think he was capable of mixing a bad martini.

Thanks to that MoMA retrospective, I've now seen most of his films, and I'm inclined to agree, it's likely he's never made a bad film. Certainly some are better than others - as mentioned in the retrospective's notes, several of those films were very much commercial films with little room to do anything more - but they all have something to like and most have some measure of greatness to them. It's a testament to Bunuel that he made the best of where life took him to an extraordinary degree, going to Mexico to work as a "commercial" filmmaker when MoMA rescinded their job offer, then over the course of a decade building that into a launching pad for a third act as a European arthouse giant.

FWIW, among the Mexican films including Viridiana, which had its state of origin reclassified as Mexico, I'd say he made at least ten genuine masterpieces. Pretty remarkable considering how much his reputation probably rests on his earlier and later films simply because the availability of his Mexican films hasn't been reliable, especially in decent print quality. Hopefully that changes soon - many of those titles had great-looking and very recent restorations.

At worst Don Luis' lesser films suffer from a malnourished idea or a poor execution of a promising idea, neither of which fatal flaws for a director.

I really need to see Subida al cielo again. My memory is not that of a masterpiece, but I've seen so many suggest otherwise

LOL, not surprised I said basically the same itt already

I really liked this one. Wish I could get a physical version of it to watch.
https://letterboxd.com/film/illusion-travels-by-streetcar/

Was the MoMA Mexican series mentioned yet?

Yes, I see that it was, more than once

Just finished. I had some vague intention to get over there but somehow something suddenly came up.