Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

the Mexican poet Octavio Paz appeared at the theatre door and passedout copies of a wonderful article he'd written about the film aseveryone walked in to see it. It was an enormous success at Cannes,receiving rave reviews as well as the first prize for direction. Themoment was marred only by the fact that the French distributorshad insisted on adding an embarrassingly ridiculous subtitle, makingit Los olvidados, ou Pitiepour eux. Sure enough, the Mexicans cameround soon enough, and the film reopened in a good theatre in MexicoCity, where it played to full houses for two months.That same year, I directed Susana (The Devil and the Flesh), aperfectly routine film about which I've nothing to say. I do regret,however, not pushing the caricature of the happy ending; even todayI worry that someone might actually take that ending seriously. Iremember one of the early scenes, when Susana is in prison, wherethe script called for a huge spider to crawl back and forth in theshape of a cross across the shadows cast by the bars of the cell. WhenI asked for a spider, the producer said he didn't have one. Annoyed,I nonetheless arranged to do without it, when a prop man told methat they did in fact have a huge spider all ready in a cage. Theproducer had lied simply because he thought the spider would neverdo what I wanted, and he didn't want to sit around watching themoney run out while I ran him through his paces. Amazingly, whenwe opened the door of the cage and prodded him out with a stick,he immediately crawled through the shadows exactly as I'd planned,and the whole take took less than a minute.There were three films in 195 I-Lu hija del engatio (Daughter ofDeceit), one of Danciger's more unfortunate titles, since it was reallyonly a remake of Arniches's Don Quintin, a play I'd already adaptedfor film in Madrid back in the 1930s. Then came A Woman WithoutLove, which is quite simply the worst movie I ever made. It wassupposed to be a remake of an excellent film directed by AndreCayatte and based on de Maupassant's Pierre et Jean, and I'd beentold to set up a screen on the set and just copy Cayatte's movie sceneby scene. Not surprisingly, I made it my own way, but it was stilla disaster.