Spring Chicken

More chicken abuse in Bunuel’s LA JOVEN/THE YOUNG ONE, a really fascinating suspense piece with a bunch of mismatched characters on an island game preserve.

Various animals turn up and suffer — a tarantula is stamped on by the barefoot young heroine, combining Bunuel’s arachnophobia with his foot fetish. A chicken is gorily dismembered by a raccoon. As with LAS HURDES/LAND WITHOUT BREAD, one is less bothered by the sight of animals doing the unpleasant things that come naturally to them, than by the fact that Bunuel has staged it all. Real death in a fictional context. I think probably it’s a bad idea, even ignoring the ethical aspect — real death or sex seems to disrupt drama, expose the artifice. Anyway, I don’t like it.

Zachary Scott — never shy about playing nasty pieces of work, is a racist AND a child rapist; Bernie Hamilton, the captain from Starsky & Hutch, is much thinner here, as a jazz musician on the run, falsely accused of rape. Bunuel said the film confused Americans because the Black man was both good and bad — he isn’t really, it’s just that the film boldly doesn’t bother to affirm his innocence until it’s halfway through. You have to decide to root for him in a state of anxious doubt, but I think you do root for him, or what I mean is *I* did. I’m using the Kaelian “you” which means “me.”

Claudio Brook, Bunuel’s SIMON OF THE DESERT, is a typically ineffectual priest. And the title character is Key Meersman, whose only other film is ARTURO’S ISLAND, meaning she acted only on islands. She’s not too strong on dialogue (her director may have been of limited assistance, with his somewhat faltering English) but her visual expressivity is on the money. And she has a short way with spiders, which one has to respect.

A haunting film, and it has a great acoustic version of Sinner Man as its only score.

The name’s Bunuel. Luis Bunuel.

A VIEW TO A KILL.

If you’re like me, you often wish Luis Bunuel had directed a Bond film. One, probably anything’s better than Marc Forster directing a Bond film, and two, Bunuel was riding high during the heyday of 007, so why couldn’t it have happened?

Looking deeper, we see that Bunuel directed Bond girl Carole Bouquet in THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, in which she played one half of the object, shortly before her appearance in MOONRAKER, and furthermore MOONRAKER bad guy Hugo Drax was played by Michel Lonsdale, seen getting his bottom thrashed in Bunuel’s PHANTOM OF LIBERTY back when Roger Moore was battling Scaramanga.

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

Like Bond, Bunuel’s characters, at least in his later films, are always impeccably turned out, and demonstrate perfect sang-froid even in the most stressful situations, whether it be alligator attack or the army arriving for dinner unexpectedly. Like Bond, they are famous for their discrete charm.

Bunuel’s enthusiasm for fire-arms is well documented. You can even see him shooting a mountain goat in LAS HURDES/LAND WITHOUT BREAD (well, you can see the puff of smoke from the right of frame just before the goat falls off the mountain). Don Luis’s enthusiasm for experimental weaponry had him making his own bullets, playing around with different charges, trying to develop a bullet with just enough momentum to leave the gun barrel before bouncing lightly off its target. This interest in fancy weaponry surely marks him out as the ideal man to bring Bond to life.

“Do pay attention, 007!”

While Bond favours the vodka martini, Bunuel leans more towards the dry martini made with gin and angustura bitters, but that’s a minor point. The martini is a creative drink, also favoured by Busby Berkeley (a Busby Bond? Why not? But later.)

So it’s not an implausible idea, OK?

Scaramanga’s dwarf sidekick, Hervé Villechaise, would have been right at home in any of Don Luis’s films (dwarfs trot through SIMON OF THE DESERT, THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY and several others), and Bond’s tendency to run up against scorpions, tarantulas and other obscure fauna would be quite in keeping with the action of a Bunuel. My Bunuel 100 Anos book (or, as I call it, The Boys’ Big Book of Bunuel) even includes a Bunuel Bestiary in the back.

So, Dan O’Herlihy as Bond. Celtic Bonds have been successful before, of course, and as Bunuel’s Robinson Crusoe, O’Herlihy got in plenty of experience in exotic locations. I’d love to see what he made of the part.

Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Fernando Rey, suavely villainous in Hollywood movies like THE FRENCH CONNECTION, would make a great master-criminal. Could we resist Catherine Deneuve as Bond girl Anne Dalou, and could she resist playing it if the high priest of cinematic surrealism were in charge? Zachary Scott, fresh from THE YOUNG ONE, could play Bond’s CIA counterpart Felix Leiter. Oh wait, he died in 1965. Damn. OK, Bernie Hamilton then. Sean Connery always thought Felix should be black — I presume on the basis that it was the kind of thankless part where nobody would object, and therefore you should make the effort.

Ken Adam, I submit, would have had a great time building sets for Bunuel, who loved “secret passages leading on to darkness”.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL would make a great title for a Bond. Imagine what Shirley Bassey could do with a lyric like that. Much better than QUANTUM OF SLOSH, anyway.

But let’s call our imaginary Bunuel Bond GRAN CASINO ROYALE. The globe-trotting narrative will take us through Spain, the U.S.A., Mexico and France. Bond will battle tarantulas, snakes and flesh-eating ants, and face enemies armed with razors, rifles, burlap sacks and buggy-whips. All in search of a mysterious box with undisclosed, buzzing contents…

That Obscure Odd-Job of Desire.