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A leatherbound edition of Defoe's book dissolves to a shadow over a map then to a storm at sea then to Crusoe (Dan O'Herlihy) washed ashore, three minutes including opening credits. Twenty-eight years in an island make a man think, by the end the lad sports a beard as Biblically lush as Heston's Moses. "Fire—worth more to me than all the gold in the world." Fauna and flora have their role to play in the spiritual cleansing, the egg cracked with a knife reveals a golden hatchling, back on the nest it goes. The spider in the water pitcher, the serpent in the wheat trough. Uneventful days interrupted by a mighty fever, the dry-mouthed protagonist hallucinates the chortling father who washes a vast oinker and disapproves of traveling: "Why did you fling yourself into this stupid adventure?" Luis Buñuel avails himself of the greens and oranges of the Mexican locations and a fine actor's sea-change moods, as in Wuthering Heights following the lyrics of the original while changing its music. A thought crosses Crusoe's mind at the female form on the scarecrow's cross, famished for another voice he later screams a Psalm into the mountains, the echoes fade mockingly on the words "my soul." Hunter, shepherd, builder, baker, literal lord of the flies, and, upon discovery of the footprint on the beach, paranoid. Friday (Jaime Fernández) becomes a good friend, though not before he's fitted into the shackles Crusoe originally brought for slaves. (His revenge comes over rum and cheroots, when a De Sade quote during a theological chat stumps "the master.") The beautifully straightforward filming bespeaks a wholeness of vision that still accommodates jokes like the feline Immaculate Conception, "the one mystery in the island I never solved." A most important work for Herzog, cp. Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Cobra Verde... Cinematography by Alex Phillips.
--- Fernando F. Croce |