Luis Bunuel

The Young One (or White trash in the United States or Island of Shame in the United Kingdom) is one of only two films made by Luis Bunuel in English, the other being The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe made in 1952. Both films share the distinction of being Mexican productions, films made to make Bunuel known in the United States. The Young One (La Joven in Spanish) is confronting in its themes of social justice, treatment of innocent people, prejudice and racism and for this reason it failed at the US box office in 1960. American audiences just couldn't sympathise with Bunuel's social criticism of the treatment of people judged inferior, such as Bernie Hamilton's Traver who is a black man escaping a false charge or Key Meersman's Evalyn who is a 13 year-old girl left in the care of Miller, played by Zachary Scott, after Evalyn's grandfather and handyman for Miller who is a game warden on an island off the American coastline.

El Gran Calavera a dark comedy directed by Luis Buñuel deals with a family's attempt to change the spending habit of the indulgent and hedonistic patriarch, Alfredo (Luis Alconira). The family decides to try to fool him into spending less by telling him that his large fortune is gone. He discovers that this is a ruse but – in order to teach his family that they are all worthless and lazy and to vindicate his own reputation – he continues to feign ignorance while sneaking off during the day to conduct his very prosperous business.

A young man and woman's honeymoon is cut short when the man learns that his mother has fallen ill back at home. The newlywed couple rush there to discover the other sons neglecting their mom in order to plot their squandering of the inheritance. The newlywed son takes quite an adventurous bus-ride to a distant city to get his mother's will notarized to the contrary, and is faced with multiple temptations along the way.

Luis Buñuel’s final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flare, Buñuel uses two different actresses in the lead—Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Angela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel, La Femme et le Pantin, That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harkens back to Buñuel’s brilliant surrealistic beginnings.

The first of what Luis Buñuel later proclaimed a trilogy (along with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty) about “the search for truth,” The Milky Way (La voie lactee) daringly deconstructs contemporary and traditional views on Catholicism with ribald, rambunctious surreality. Two French beggars, present-day pilgrims en route to Spain’s holy city of Santiago de Compostela, serve as Buñuel’s narrators for an anticlerical history of heresy, told with absurdity and filled with images that rank among Buñuel’s most memorable (stigmatic children, crucified nuns) and hilarious (Jesus considering a good shave). A diabolically entertaining look at the mysteries of fanaticism, The Milky Way remains a hotly debated work from cinema’s greatest skeptic.

This wicked adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel is classic Luis Buñuel. Jeanne Moreau is Celestine, a beautiful Parisian domestic who, upon arrival at her new job at an estate in provincial 1930s France, entrenches herself in sexual hypocrisy and scandal with her philandering employer (Buñuel regular Michel Piccoli). Filmed in luxurious black-and-white Franscope, Diary of a Chambermaid is a raw-edged tangle of fetishism and murder—and a scathing look at the burgeoning French fascism of the era.

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined. Fernando Rey, Stéphane Audran, Delphine Seyrig, and Jean-Pierre Cassel head the extraordinary cast of this 1972 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film. Criterion is proud to present The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in an exclusive double-disc special edition.

Luis Buñuel’s final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flare, Buñuel uses two different actresses in the lead—Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Angela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel, La Femme et le Pantin, That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harkens back to Buñuel’s brilliant surrealistic beginnings.