Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959)
A film by Luis Buñuel
French and German versions
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 4:3 | AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | 01:35:12 + 01:25:08 | 7,51 Gb
Versions: #1 French with English and German subs + #2 abridged German dubbed version
Genre: Art-house, Drama
"Fever" is actually one of Bunuel's plottier movies. It's set on Ojeda, an island under the control of a fictional French-speaking banana republic. Its major resources are bananas and fish, etc. But the island's real importance is its prison labor camp (modeled on Devil's Island perhaps?), where political prisoners are sent. When the governor of the island is assassinated, the governorship itself becomes a pawn in two different but intertwined games: the struggle for power on the mainland between the president and his brother and the rivalry for the hand of the former governor's widow (Maria Felix) between the new governor (Jean Servais) and the former governor's secretary (Gerard Philipe). The secretary is the film's nominal hero – an idealist who thinks he can change political conditions from within but who is increasingly corrupted out of sheer necessity for survival. Thus "Fever" also becomes a kind of morality tale. At any rate, it's surely the most politically explicit movie Bunuel ever made.