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Travelin' Man and white trash, the "real togetherness" theme. Renoir is the main correspondent, from the rabbit in its death throes to Swamp Water and above all The Southerner, thus Zachary Scott with his resemblance to Pedro Armendáriz. The island is the gamekeeper's world, he lords over it and over the scraggly nymph (Key Meersman) who sobs blankly while untying her dead grandfather's boots. (She doesn't known her own age, he guesses it by squeezing her thigh "like a pig's.") The intruder is the Black musician (Bernie Hamilton) who rows in with the lynching mob's cries of rape still ringing in his ears. The fugitive bites into a speared crab while the teenage girl squishes a spider and tends to bees, they become fast friends—the prejudices churning in the warden are still unformed in this "angel of mercy, ya dig?" Luis Buñuel at home in the Deep South, where clarinet licks at night announce the raccoon in the chicken coop and later the deflowering of the heroine. A matter of still believing in sin and expiation, says the padre (Claudio Brook) who argues Hamilton's innocence but prefers to turn over his mattress before sleeping on it himself. (His dunking of the orphan in the stream during a makeshift baptism surely counts as her second violation.) A joke for Blazing Saddles ("Go get your licorice stick!"), honey and bread and grenades. No other Buñuel film, not even Robinson Crusoe, has a more tangible elemental side, a stark balance of marsh, wood and sea informs Gabriel Figueroa's cinematography. Redneck with the mock-redemption, limping hepcat and steel trap, jailbait wobbly on high heels. "You might say it makes us almost equal." The filming is closely observed by Mulligan in To Kill a Mockingbird, and there's Crahan Denton in both instances. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |