4/5 The Young One (1960, available through Lion's Gate in a boxed set with Gran Casino)
A wonderful small film. This is one of two Bunuel films done in English with American actors and it's definitely a worthwhile endeavor. A black man flees a Carolina lynch mob by boat and ends up on a small island game reserve which is run by a racist game warden. Evie is a young girl--about fourteen--who had lived on the island with her grandfather, who never cared to get her baptized or show her any of the "feminine ways," and when he dies, the game warden takes her under his wing, although he obviously desires her.
The film takes a little while to pick up speed, but when it gets going, it's a hell of a time--there are plenty of reversals and rounds fired, even some hand grenades. The warden ends up raping the girl and when a preacher and an even more psychotically racist local show up, the local and the game warden hunt down the Traver, the black man, and hog tie him. The girl cuts him free and the preacher finds out about the rape and uses it against the game warden to stop him from killing Traver, who was falsely accused of rape. There is a bizarre redemption sequence for the game warden and an exciting knife fight between the local and traver, ending with the line "I ain't gonna give them a reason to lynch me white trash!"
Bunuel certainly shows an aptitude for black humor (the African-American kind, but also the other) and culture--you feel that he, in the brutal yet sympathetic tradition of his Las Hurdes and Los Olvidados, is a natural fit for telling the stories of the dispossessed. His characterization of racism in America is psychotic and even surreal (at one point the local, who drops the n-word in about every bit of dialogue he has, says "there are some soft people who think blacks are men. You'd have to be a man for me to hate you") and I honestly can't think of another American film as radically pro-black until Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing was released almost thirty years later.
Yet you don't feel that Bunuel is trying to be didactic here either--he's not a propagandist and he lets Traver be a human being who can admit that when a white lady asked to have sex with him, he just wasn't that attracted to her, because she was old and smelled too much like whiskey and cigarettes. Although the preacher is a sympathetic character, Bunuel makes some little jabs at his pretensions too--when he promises the girl a "Golden Key" and then baptizes her, she yells at him and says that she would have preferred the silver plated revolver the warden promised her.
The only reason I can't wholeheartedly endorse this film is its use of child rape, actually. I know that for Bunuel, it's all just a sick joke--the racist white American turns out to be the real rapist, not the black jazz musician. This is all good and fine--even a little funny--and I'm up for showing this racist guy as a complete hypocrite. The game warden's pseudo-redemption is fine (he makes up with Traver, though the preacher may still turn him in for rape), but what I'm not okay with is showing the girl recovering so easily. Admittedly Bunuel gives the girl some time--she is really upset the day afterward, obviously so--and this is more than someone like De Palma would give a rape victim, but I have to bend over backward to find justification for her being cheerful at the end of the film (is she repressing it?) All in all, it's just a little tiresome to see rape portrayed lightly over and over again in film and literature. Bunuel was definitely ahead of his time here and in 1960 there must have been a lot of shock value in showing something like this at all, but for a modern viewer like me it's kind of a turn-off. Check out Belle de Jour though--Bunuel has made a film about women as dispossessed, in keeping with his other films about oppression, and his empathy there is astounding.
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