Customer Reviews

El (This Strange Passion) [VHS]

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

 

 

As I watched this 1952 Mexican film by Luis Bunuel, I thought it was just an updated version of Shakespeare's Othello, albeit an excellent version of Othello. But Bunuel is too great an artist to be ordinary. The acting of Arturo De Cordova, who is the perfect picture of jealousy gone mad, and the rest of the cast is excellent. I strongly recommend this film to Bunuel fans, as well as lovers of foreign film. The surrealistic ending alone is worth the price of admission.

The elements exist to create a pristine copy of this film. I've seen it in 35mm and it's Buñuel's masterpiece, and it has been well preserved. This copy however is absolutely unwatchable and worthless.

Buyers should be warned that the DVD has NO English subtitles, and all extras are in printed Spanish (except for a couple of photographs).

I think calling this DVD "absolutely unwatchable" is a bit extreme, however the video quality is uneven. It's particularly bad during any panning shots - possibly due to the digital compression methods used.

Esta es una pelicula perfecta en todos los sentidos. No trata de mostrar mas de lo que muestra y esta dirigida de una manera impecable. No es la mejor pelicula de Buñuel porque no daba para tanto el guión y no lo quizo forzar el propio Buñuel. El tema es el del marido celoso y neurotico, tratado de manera muy refrescante. Muy recomendable si se quiere aprender a hacer cine y si se quiere disfrutar una palicula bien hecha

I just bought from[...]a Cine-Club DVD, double feature with The Criminal Life of Archibald Cruz. Since I paid 2 euro (c. $2) I thought the quality was going to be bad - however the picture quality for El at least (since I have not yet watched Cruz) is excellent with non of the degradation as described by other reviewers. The DVD has removable sub-titles for both French and English and the English version was very comprehensible. Worth looking out for.

As for the film itself - a work of skill with excellent performances, but would the other reviewers have targetted the supposed Bunuel hallmarks so readily if they did not know in advance it was Bunuel film ? - my personal feeling was that this film is much closer to a conventional 1950's study of madness film with the relatively naive ideas about mental illness of those times than is to Chambermaid and later stuff. The church scene at the end I honestly found a bit corny.

This is one of my beloved films of Luis Buñuel. He makes of this simple story a real tour de force between the drama and the comedy showing the sardonic side of the human being. A man obssesed by his wife, inmersed in a world so unreal , castity and all the gallery of spectres absolutely divorced about the real world and the magic of love demands.

This desperation will lead to the madness; the expecxted result for a sick behaviour; a real slap in the face of the Moral League of those times and an irreverent film which will dmand of the viewer all the possible atention.

Excellent picture and supeb description of a psychologic profile. It's useless to state that Arturo de Cordoba has been by far, the best latin american actor in the XX Century.