Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

Pro and Con 22 5doice vita. To my regret, I've never seen I vitelloni, but I distinctlyremember walking out of Casanova well before the end.I knew de Sica well and especially liked Shoeshine, Umberto D,and The Bicycle Thief, where he succeeded in making a machine thestar of the movie. And I love the films of both von Stroheim andSternberg. On the other hand, I detested From Here to Eternity, whichseemed to me little more than a militaristic and xenophobic melodrama.Vajda, too, delights me; I've never met him, but I like hisfilms very much. A long time ago at the Cannes Festival, he declaredthat my early films inspired him to make movies, which remindsme of my own admiration for the early films of Fritz Lang and theirinstrumental role in determining the course of my life. There's somethingvery exciting about this secret continuum between films andcountries. Other favorites of mine are Clouzot's Manon, Jean Vigo'sL'Atafante, the delicious collection of English horror stories calledDead of Night, Flaherty's White Shadows of the South Seas, which Ithought infinitely superior to his Tabu, which he made with Murnau,and Portrait ofJennie with Jennifer Jones, a mysterious, poetical, andlargely misunderstood work. (On the other hand, I detested Rossellini'sOpen City; the scene with the tortured priest in one room andthe German officer drinking champagne with a woman in his lap inthe other seemed both facile and tactless.)Although I haven't seen his most recent films (I never go to themovies at all anymore), Carlos Saura is another director whose workI admire. I loved La caza and La prima Angelica. In fact, Saura andI have known each other for a long time; an Aragonian like me, heeven persuaded me to play the hangman in his Lhtopw un bandicio.I also loved Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was shotnear San Jose Puma. A great director and a wonderfully warm person,Huston saw Nazarin while he was in Mexico and spent the nextmorning telephoning all over Europe and arranging for it to be shownat Cannes.Leaving movies for the moment, I have a soft spot for secretpassageways, bookshelves that open onto silence, staircases that go