The Young One

Luis Bunuel's two English-language films, this picture and the 1952 The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, are among the most neglected of his middle-period Mexican films—made between his early surrealist masterpieces (Un chien andalou, L'age d'or, Land Without Bread) and the late European features (Viridiana, That Obscure Object of Desire) that revived his world reputation. The Young One is a taut comedy-thriller from 1961, set on a game-preserve island off the Carolina coast, though shot, surprisingly, in Mexico. A northern black jazz musician (Bernie Hamilton), fleeing a trumped-up rape charge involving a white woman, arrives on the island and is briefly befriended by a young teenage orphan (Key Meersman), the granddaughter of a handyman who's just died. An unfriendly game warden (Zachary Scott) who's taken a shine to the girl tries to kill the musician; eventually a local preacher (Claudio Brook) and the game warden's boatman (Crahan Denton) also turn up. A satiric look at both racism and sexual hypocrisy that refuses to take sides, this dark, sensual comedy of manners, adapted quite freely from a Peter Matthiessen story by the gifted blacklisted screenwriter Hugo Butler (under a pseudonym) along with Bunuel, is full of poetic asides and unexpected developments, revealing Bunuel's dark, philosophical wit at its most personal. By Jonathan Rosenbaum