Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

were made in Spanish with Mexican actors and technicians. Exceptfor Crusoe, my shooting schedules never ran more than a fast twentyfourdays, my budgets were small, and our salaries more than modest.(On two separate occasions, I even made three films in one year.) Ihad, after all, to support my family, which may explain why thesefilms are so uneven, a judgment I've often heard and can only agreewith. Although I had excellent working relationships with my Mexicancrews, I had to accept subjects I would normally have refusedand work with actors who weren't always right for their roles. Whenall's said and done, however, I never made a single scene that compromisedmy convictions or my personal morality.It would be absurd to list and evaluate all these movies, in thefirst place because that's not my job, and in the second because Idon't think a life can be confused with a work. I'd just like toreminisce a bit about those long years in Mexico and mention a fewthings that strike me about some of my films; perhaps by doing soI'll come to see Mexico from a different angle~through the cameraeye, so to speak.Way back then, Oscar Dancigers had two Latin American starsunder contract, the popular Jorge Negrete, a real Mexican charro whosang the blessing before meals and never appeared without his groom,and the Argentinian singer Libertad Lamarque. Gran casino, therefore,was a musical, based on a story by Michel Weber and set inthe midst of the oil fields. To write the screenplay, I went to thebeautiful thermal spa at San Jose Puma in Michoacan, a paradisicalretreat in a semitropical canyon, where I was eventually to writetwenty scenarios. Busloads of American tourists arrived regularly fortwenty-four sublime hours of taking the same radioactive baths atthe same hours, drinking the same mineral water, followed by thesame daiquiris and the same elegant meals.I hadn't been behind a camera in fifteen years, and if the scenario'snot particularly gripping, the technique, on the other hand, isn'thalf bad. In this musical melodrama, Libertad arrives from Argentinato search for her brother's killer, and suspecting that Negrete is theculprit, she attacks him furiously. Soon enough, however, they man--