Customer Reviews

Luis Bunuel (Gran Casino / The Young Ones Two-Disc Collector's Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For a long time I thought Luis Buñuel was an arty, removed kind of director. Thanks to DVDs like the ones in this edition it slowly dawns on me that he was extremely prolific and was also adept at tackling different genres. Gran Casino is a kind of a melodrama with humor and songs - it reminded me of Hollywood movies of the 1930s. A lot of the action takes place in the night club cum casino. There is a very long take of a singer who descends the stage, making her way through the audience along the periphery of the room and back to the stage, all the time singing, while the camera performs a 360 degree turn - it's very neat. The main character is a singer from Argentina, she performs a few of the best known tangos accompanied by a moody but competent pianist. There even is a tiny surrealist element: one dance number is performed with the dancers clutching tiny electrical torches which are absolutely out of place and do not seem to belong to the period the movie is set in. With those torches they pick out members of the audience.
The Young Ones is a very beautifully filmed drama in English concerning the coming of age of a girl in a very removed place. The girl reminded me a little of the movie Nell. An African American who has to run from an enraged mob seems to be the first real contact with the outside world. He is a clarinetist, music is an important item of this movie. The way nature is depicted reminded me of movies by Jean Renoir, it's almost like a painting.
I spent a marvellous time with these two movies.

First off, AMAZON, it's THE YOUNG ONE, not THE YOUNG ONES.

I tried to watch GRAN CASINO first. The discs were mislabeled, so I got to see THE YOUNG ONE first instead.

THE YOUNG ONE (LA JOVEN) is set on a island populated by a white game warden and a 13 year old orphan girl in his care. A black musician is accused of rape by a crazy white drunken dowager, and flees a lynch mob in a boat. Guess which island the musician washes up on? Way before it's time when released in 1961, the film flopped at the box office. The few audiences that saw the film during a brief theatrical release expressed a desire to lynch Buñuel. This one pushes all the hotbuttons.

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Warning...spoilers below.
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The black fugitive and white warden play hide and seek around the island. We see the orphan's naked legs. The warden rapes the orphan. The fugitive and warden threaten each other with guns and grenades. We see the orphan's naked feet. A hypocritical reverend and a racist boatman come to the island to baptize the orphan. In this climate of moral ambiguity, the orphan doesn't see herself as a victim, lying when questioned by the suspicious reverend.

Filmed in English in glorious black and white, THE YOUNG ONE is a long unavailable gem that easily justifies the cost of the package.

GRAN CASINO is in Spanish with English subtitles. The film is a semi-musical vehicle for Mexican stars of the day. There is some muted social commentary contrasting the wealth of the casino with the grime of the oil fields, but the prime focus is showcasing the stars. The film is historically interesting as an example of commercial work that Buñuel did at this stage of his career to pay the rent.

THE YOUNG ONE has previously only been available in foreign formats for about $30. This package is a bargain, but GRAN CASINO is light entertainment and a jarring combination with the incendiary YOUNG ONE. A more harmonious package would have included Buñuel's only other English film, ROBINSON CRUSOE.

La Joven:

A black jazz musician on the run from a lynch mob stumbles across the
game warder of a private island and the young, innocent girl the warder
guards over. Sweet and precocious Evy is almost completely unaware of
the world outside her isolated island and unable to defend against the
advances of her guardian, while also not comprehending the nature of
the problem with the musician's arrival.

Bunuel's more well-known films are very impressive, but some of his
lesser-known films aren't given enough attention for what they are. "La
Joven" is a parable of innocence brought suddenly up against racism,
exploitation, and sex, and as a whole is a very morally ambiguous film.
Ultimately, the question must be asked: is one man's life being paid
for by the freedom of a young girl, or will she choose a different,
completely unfamiliar life full of its own trials? Those are the
questions left with the audience by the movie's conclusion.

Bunuel's mastery is reinforced by how well he is able to get into the regional dialect, settings, and character of this film. Here is a director who has shot movies from all over the world and managed to give a rather distinctive feel for each of the locations they've been made in.

Gran Casino:

Two things: 1) I am not the audience for this movie: I don't like musicals in general, I don't recognize the popular songs featured, and I honestly prefer Bunuel's darker movies; 2) however, this movie was still very spectacular (in the truest definition of the word) and is a real testament to Bunuel's gift of visual storytelling.

Basically, the idea here is that a couple of prison escapees (what they did is unclear, but I'm pretty sure they were just taken in for vagrancy) get a job at a oil speculation site just before a series of murders begins to unveil a conspiracy set against the owner. The owner's sister appears, capturing the heart of one of the leads, and now it's a process of figuring out whodunnit, comment on the political motivation (with oil there's always a political commentary, even back when), get the girl despite the usual misunderstandings, and, yes, sing.

Many people don't recognize that Bunuel also had the ability to be a popular entertainer. "A Woman without Love" is a testament to that fact, as well as this movie. For what it's worth, this movie really wouldn't feel all that out of place as a studio musical classic, only it just happened to be Spanish. What I liked best is that all of the music is diegetic: the sound and singing originate within the narrative and the story doesn't necessarily stop just to have people sing. The songs fit in as realistically as possible in the world, covering up for the sound of prison escape, setting a moment of hopeful joy, performances in the background... some of the songs are interrupted by the audience, some of them are stopped because they're practice, and a lot of them feature some dazzling uses of realism in environment and choreography. So for what it's worth, Bunuel scored big time on that.

A comment on the DVD set:

The copy I had mixed up the disc art so that the movies were reversed based on what the disc said it contained. It wasn't that big of an issue as both movies were ultimately included, it's just a curiosity I thought I should mention. Also, the transfer of Gran Casino isn't all that great, featuring missing frames and some jumps in sound, not to mention a lack of subtitles for the song routines. La Joven looked and sounded great, though.

Overall, an interesting set, but not the greatest pairing.

--PolarisDiB

I watched "Gran Casino" and "The Young One" about four times each. I first got into Bunuel from "The Phantom of Liberty" (1974). After watching that, "The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972), "The Exterminating Angel" (1962) and "L' Age D'or" (1930), I thought I had a good idea of what Bunuel consisted of. When I got this two disc set, I found I had been mistaken.

"The Young One" AKA "White Trash" shows alot of separation between Bunuel and the establishment. He paints a picture of a devious preacher, white racism and black innocence in the class struggle from the United States. The entire movie has a depressing, but entertaining quality about it. The movie seems incomplete and lacking gestalt. Whatever it is, it throws out traditional middle-class American understanding of race relations as the fault of the African-Americans. The cinematography develops a superb stifling, claustrophobic quality. The two primary stories in the movie, one of a young orphan being taken advantage of by a racist game warden that her recently deceased grandfather worked with and a black man on the run from an ostensibly false charge of rape get entangled but inexplicably have little palpable conflict. The reproduction is good...not excellent, the sound is good and it has subtitles. The movie content is, lets say 8/10. If the two stories had more overlapping conflict and there was more resonance to the prejudice, it could have made 9 or even 10/10. This movie is not as solid as "The Defiant Ones" (1958), which has more texture to the conflict of bigotry. "The Young One" almost apologizes for the racist characters Miller and Jackson, it makes it a depressing piece of scenery, but fails to give it dimension. The alternate title for this movie is "White Trash" and, if I might be so bold, gives the movie a different shadow that makes the movie's intention more obvious by Bunuel.

"Gran Casino" is more subtle in terms of Bunuel's directing influence, but its there, nonetheless. It is primarily a musical, but the background story, like so many American musicals of the 40s and 50s is more ripe and moving. It involves a criminal who gets a job for a gadfly of an engineer who is trying to buck the powers that be to drill for oil. If you don't speak Spanish, push the subtitle button, but I liked this movie as much as The Young One, the texture of the setting is sweaty and brutally authentic. Its gritty, but Bunuel implies, as he does in "White Trash" that no man is monochromatic, there are no Cowboys and Indians, that there are elements of good and evil in man. He also downplays the righteousness of law and order, whether its in the United states in "White Trash" or in Mexico in "Gran Casino". Bunuel is arguing that a man who is in jail or on the lam is not irredeemable and may have some value in the final analysis. The underlying story is that just because somebody happens to be maligned or under scrutiny, that they may indeed be innocent and suspicion is often unwarranted. The music is good, the reproduction is slightly better than "White Trash" and the sound is slightly better. If I didn't speak Spanish, I must admit, I'd give this movie lower marks as the average watcher might, but I think its worthy of 8/10 too. Close to 9/10. Bunuel apparently didn't like this movie much. He felt the plot was boring, and in the style of a musical, the story is thinner than would be a straight drama. Bunuel, however, squeezed every drop of life and love out of that script as was possible. I think I liked this movie most to see another world, one of Mexico in the 40s. As Quentin Tarantino put it, by way of Vincent Vega: "Its the little differences". This isn't a "Leave it to Beaver" or "Honeymooners" world the movie is set in by any means. It has a very similar feel to the great work of Orson Welles "A Touch of Evil" (1958). That might be exactly what appeals to me about this movie too.

Both of these movies require a rejection of understanding of Bunuel's direction style. I had to watch them once each to just accept that these movies are not representative of Bunuel's legacy, but just dimension to his genius. These don't represent a period in Bunuel's career the way "Through a Glass Darkly" represents a period in Ingmar Bergman's work. They aren't the growth of a young film maker, like Alfred Hitchcock's "Stage Fright" or "Sabotage". These are movies Bunuel did, perhaps, without footnote or reason, perhaps to have a job, perhaps to get more creative control. They are worthy films and need a watch or three each. Forget Bunuel did them and what other films he did and I think the enjoyment factor of them goes up.

This is a Spanish language film form the 1940's showcasing Mexican and Latin American culture of the time. It deals with music, social conflict, businesses and the remains of a colonial past.
A great film by renowned Spanish director Luis Bunuel with the additional treat of the wonderful Argentinean singer Libertad Lamarque playing the leading role. Heartthrob Jorge Negrete plays alongside Libertad Lamarque sharing most musical numbers through the movie. Although the plot does not keep a fast pace all the time the artistic value of the film more than compensates. A very subjective camera keeps surprising the audience especially during the musical numbers: watch out for the supporting vocal trio in the `jail' scene.
It also provides a great opportunity to appreciate Mexican and Argentinean music of the thirties and forties played by two of the greatest performers of the time: Libertad Lamarque and Jorge Negrete.
Very good!

Gran Casino is a lot of fun (typical of Bunuel in that regard), and does not apologize for being a formulaic Mexican Singing Cowboy Movie. The songs (especially the way the affable trio of backing singers keeps popping up in various scenes to assist the impromptus of the hero Negrete) are actually quite catchy, and if you look hard you will find some neat Bunuelisms-- obviously the shattering glass double-exposure when Ramirez (Negrete) conks the bad guy behind the drapes, but also the ever-present, incongruous focus on shoes (and boots), boxes and suitcases; the long, continuous and quite inventive shot of the nightclub dancer throughout her number, and the constant background movement everywhere in the film. Look especially at what is going on behind the lead actors at the oil refinery in every scene there-- guys playing around ineffectually with ropes, one guy climbing, then hanging from a scaffold so that his feet are going up and down in mid-air for several seconds for no apparent reason-- pure Bunuel. The Young Ones is a deceptively simple film (it looks like it could have been quickly filmed for sixties American TV, except for subject matter that skirts various taboos of the time), and is unique for the kaleidescopically shifting morality of its characters, as well as for an erotic shower scene without nudity except for bare legs and feet. Actually, an impossible film to accurately describe-- then again, that statement could apply to any Bunuel film.

Big fan of Bunuel, got the DVD's, Grand Casino two stars, the Young one, five stars. I was surprised by how fresh it felt even though it's close to fifty years old. Worth having in your DVD library just for the young one alone.

In truth I have recently viewed only the second film, but The Young One, on it's own, is surely worthy of discussion. At first glance it could be mistaken for some early 60's derivation of a Tennessee Williams potboiler. Something begging to be Baby Doll meets The World, the Flesh and the Devil.

The story enfolds in a manner that seems to match expectation, and yet maintains a subtle innovation. And it is at this point where the low budget drama turns into yet another unique arrow from Bunuel's incomparable quiver. For as we become prepared to witness a denouement that satisfies our prejudices, he slays us yet again, not with overt surrealism, but with simple grace, that leaves a much greater impression.

I definitely left this film much more satisfied than what I expected from the opening credits.

First of all the cover of the dvd, (at least mine) does not look this cool. It is a cheezy cheap cover with a still from each film inside a film strip design. Secondly, Gran Casino is more than likely a studio project accepted by a hungry Bunuel. It's a musical (which none of the reviews above mention). Unlike many musicals the music doesn't really forward the storyline and is just kind of a showcase for the artists perfroming the music. If the film didn't have this it would showcase the suprisingly intresting storyline it has. Albeit it's better the music doesn't forward the story because they didn't subtitle the songs. The best part of the dvd is The Young One, one of two Bunuel films in english (above they said only one but he also directed Robinson Crusoe). A riveting story, beautifully shot and edited, 5 stars hands down. Best part of this dvd set and worth every penny.

THE YOUNG ONE is one of only two films that the famed Surrealist director made in English. It is a low budget, very dark tale of racism, pedophilia and a particularly nasty moral trade off. Zachary Scott as the prejudiced game warden and Kay Meersman as the young girl whom he lusts after are excellent. Bernie Hamilton as the black fugitive who has the misfortune of picking their island to hide on, seems to do little more than "shtick", but this is more a fault of the script than his acting.
There are two exceedingly disturbing sequences involving animals in this film that I would have been just as happy if I had never seen.
The film is gripping but unlikeable.
GRAN CASINO is a Mexican costume musical about murder, fugitives with hearts of gold vs. cold-hearted killers, night club performers and the politics of oil ! It is so deliciously absurd that I couldn't wipe the smile off my face the whole time I was watching it. It is not a great film, but it is mightily entertaining !
The labels on the two discs were reversed on my copy as well.