Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

Mexico (1946-1961,) 201the painter Siqueiros managed to calm her down, and, like manyMexican intellectuals, he had nothing but praise for the film.Los o/vidados opened in Paris late in 1950, and I flew over for theevent. As I walked the streets I hadn't seen for over ten years, tearscame to my eyes. All my surrealist friends saw the movie at Studio28 and were very moved; yet the following day when I met GeorgesSadoul for a drink in a cafe near the Etoile, he confided to me thatthe Communist party told him not to say or write anything aboutit."Too bourgeois," he replied, when I asked him why."Bourgeois?" I echoed, stupidly. "What's bourgeois about it?""Well," he said slowly, "there's the scene where we're lookingthrough a window at some boys being propositioned by a homosexualand a policeman comes along and frightens the guy away. Accordingto the party line, your policeman is doing something good and useful,and you know that's not exactly the position to take on policemen.And at the end, in the jail, you have this kind, humane wardenletting one of the boys out to buy cigarettes."As criticism, it was hopelessly childish, but there was no takinganything back. Ironically, the Russian director Pudovkin happenedto see it a few months later and wrote an enthusiastic review inPravda, after which the French Communist party did an immediateabout-face, much to Sadoul's relief.This story illustrates one of the major reasons for my antipathyto the Communist party. Another reason is the Communists' tendencyto rewrite history and ignore psychology, as when they declareafter a comrade has been exposed as a "traitor" that he'd disguisedhis hand very well, but was of course a traitor from the very beginning.Another adversary emerged during the private screenings in par is^the Mexican ambassador, Torres Bodet, a well-educated man who'dspent many years in Spain and had even worked on the Gaceta Literaria.He too felt that Los olvidados dishonored his country. All thischanged magically, of course, after the Cannes Film Festival, where