CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

cstotlar-1 After having made some films in Europe, two ostensibly co-directed with Salvador Dali and causing some scandal, Bunuel turned to the Mexican market and illustrated that he was perfectly capable of making a standard commercial film with success. For those looking for any surrealism or bizarreness of the later (or earlier) Bunuel films, there's not really much to see here but a very capable craftsman doing his job. I was frankly unaware of the Mexican musical in general so this served somewhat as an introduction. The musical numbers didn't spring out of the dialog or the plot as much as they were interspersed throughout the film at regular intervals. The tunes were lovely and quite entertaining in fact. Again, this was light fiction with nothing as shocking as, say, "Los Olvidados" a few years later. I'm glad I caught it though.Curtis Stotlar

MartinHafer While the print for "Gran Casino" was quite nice, I really, really felt irritated at the horrible captioning. That's because there is quite a bit of singing in the film and each time a song occurs, the captioning just stops! They make the assumption that we must either automatically KNOW what they are singing about or don't care! This is just sloppy and unnecessary--captioning the songs wouldn't have taken that much extra effort.As for the film, you'd not suspect that it was the first full-length film by famed director Luis Buñuel as the film is extremely conventional--extremely. None of the bizarre surrealism of his early shorts (such as in "L'âge d'Or" or "Un Chien Andalou", the anti-religious elements (such as "Simon of the Desert"), overt sexuality ("Belle Du Jour") or the cheeky humor ("That Obscure Object of Desire") you'd normally expect from the guy. Instead, it looked like a normal film--quite unremarkable in many ways. It was obviously filmed in a sound stage (despite supposedly being out in oil fields), has musical interludes throughout the film and the plot is so gosh-darn easy to understand. In many ways, this is a great film for Buñuel haters as it seems more like an early John Wayne film! The film is about a group of Mexican employees whose boss has disappeared--most likely due to some thugs who have been pressuring him to sell the oil wells. Instead of the employees going home when the boss is absent, they work hard--trying to make a go of it. In the meantime, the boss' sister has just arrived from Argentina and they'll have to tell her the sad news--he's been gone for nine days and they have no idea where he is or if he's even still alive. And, as the result of a mix-up, the man running the project in the boss' absence and the sister get off on the wrong foot. Later, when they fall in love, it seems contrived and awfully formulaic--again, what you would NOT expect from this famous director. What follows, however, did seem more expected from Buñuel as a plot involving evil corporations unfolded. This was by far the best part of the film, but it was too little too late to make it worth sitting through the film for this. Overall, this is a very ordinary film aside from its anti-capitalist turn at the very end. Too much sappy music and a plot that rarely engaged, this is NOT a must-see unless you are a completist who MUST see all of Buñuel's film.

Polaris_DiB Two things: 1) I am not the audience for this movie: I don't like musicals in general, I don't recognize the popular songs featured, and I honestly prefer Bunuel's darker movies; 2) however, this movie was still very spectacular (in the truest definition of the word) and is a real testament to Bunuel's gift of visual storytelling.Basically, the idea here is that a couple of prison escapees (what they did is unclear, but I'm pretty sure they were just taken in for vagrancy) get a job at a oil speculation site just before a series of murders begins to unveil a conspiracy set against the owner. The owner's sister appears, capturing the heart of one of the leads, and now it's a process of figuring out whodunnit, comment on the political motivation (with oil there's always a political commentary, even back when), get the girl despite the usual misunderstandings, and, yes, sing.Many people don't recognize that Bunuel also had the ability to be a popular entertainer. "A Woman without Love" is a testament to that fact, as well as this movie. For what it's worth, this movie really wouldn't feel all that out of place as a studio musical classic, only it just happened to be Spanish. What I liked best is that all of the music is diegetic: the sound and singing originate within the narrative and the story doesn't necessarily stop just to have people sing. The songs fit in as realistically as possible in the world, covering up for the sound of prison escape, setting a moment of hopeful joy, performances in the background... some of the songs are interrupted by the audience, some of them are stopped because they're practice, and a lot of them feature some dazzling uses of realism in environment and choreography. So for what it's worth, Bunuel scored big time on that.--PolarisDiB

MARIO GAUCI Since January of this year – after I attended the Luis Bunuel retrospective at London's National Film Theatre – this had been the only title left for me to watch out of the filmography of my all-time favorite director; thanks to Lionsgate's 2-Disc "Luis Bunuel Collection" (also containing THE YOUNG ONE [1960]), I finally made it now – an effort which took me all of 15 years to accomplish! The film was a surprisingly pleasant and engaging semi-musical but, clearly, a very minor work in the director's canon; if one weren't aware of the circumstances behind its making (the fact that Bunuel had been kept from directing for 15 years and that his comeback was possible only via a commercial studio product), one would think that the great Surrealist master was playing the ultimate joke on his audience – by delivering a film which is virtually the antithesis of his style (though, in retrospect, the idea of people suddenly breaking into song in a Bunuel movie is pretty surreal in itself)! That said, being the intimate film-maker that he is, he lends considerable attention to the contrasting milieux in which the proceedings take place – the oil-fields and the titular location. Towards the end, the heroine ostensibly capitulates to the powerful foreign organization controlling the territory – only to have the last laugh (with the hero at her side) as the all-important oil-wells are dynamited soon after their departure from town! The male lead is likable, handsome and can certainly carry a tune; he seems to find the overage leading lady desirable – personally, I didn't share his enthusiasm and, in fact, was more intrigued by the younger and more attractive temptress (who, during the course of the film led two men to their doom). Alfonso Bedoya, the leading Mexican bandit from John Huston's THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), here plays the casino owner's grinning lieutenant; he gets his just desserts in a striking (and, in the context of the rest of the picture, quite disorientating) scene showing the hero attacking Bedoya, who's hiding behind a curtain – instead of cutting between the two men, Bunuel keeps the camera on one side of the curtain but then superimposes for a split-second on this same action the image of shattered glass, as if to imply the devastating effect of the blows Bedoya is receiving! Another bravura sequence is the one involving the old female kleptomaniac, a hanger-on at the casino; while in the company of the hero, we see the distorted reflection of her facial features in a shiny champagne bucket he's casually holding (as if to remind us of her crooked nature). The director's hand is also felt in his completely unsentimental handling of a would-be tender moment between the budding lovers: while the heroine remarks about the strong odor particular to an oil-field, the hero nonchalantly picks away at a pool of mud with a stick! Bunuel also manages to incorporate a nod to Hitchcock in this film – the 'safety in numbers' routine often used by the Master Of Suspense: here, feeling threatened by the presence of the rival's thugs at the casino, the hero leaps onto the stage and proceeds to lead the audience in a rousing musical ensemble! Also worth mentioning here is the recurringly surreal presence of the Trio Calaveras, amiable singing peasants who turn up simply to back up the hero's vocals – wherever he happens to be at the time (in jail, at the oil-field, at the casino) and literally out of nowhere; at one point, even he seems surprised by their sudden appearance and acknowledges them with a bemused nod! Two more minor but amusing presences are punters from the Casino: a perennially drunken peon and a bald-headed walrus-like old man with animated eyebrows! I hadn't listened to an Audio Commentary in a long time but couldn't pass checking this one out – since such lengthy discussions of Bunuel's work are a rare commodity. Philip Kemp's track didn't disappoint (incidentally, the British film critic had introduced screenings of Kon Ichikawa's AN ACTOR'S REVENGE (1963) and THE WANDERERS [1973] in a 2002 retrospective of that director's work, also at London's National Film Theater, which my brother and I were lucky to attend), as he went into some detail about this film's production history. Among the things I didn't know, he mentioned that there was an on-set rivalry between its two singing stars – Libertad Lamarque and Jorge Negrete – so much so that they were accorded an equal number of songs but wouldn't agree to appear in a duet (which is certainly unusual for a musical)! Besides, Lamarque was blacklisted sometime before this film's release after a disparaging remark she made about a then-colleague of hers – Evita Peron!! Kemp also mentions that Bunuel was contemplating a remake of Robert Bresson's marvelous debut film, LES ANGES DU PECHE' (1943), before he eventually embarked on this decidedly more modest enterprise (still, the cast of the film is filled with distinguished actors of the time and place – several of whom would re-appear in subsequent Bunuel titles).Finally, one word about the collection itself: while this 2-disc 2-film set is decidedly less impressive than Lionsgate's previous tribute to another cinema giant – Jean Renoir (comprising a good 7 films spread over 3 discs!), one is still grateful for their commitment in releasing two of his more obscure efforts. That said, it was incredibly sloppy of them to have mislabeled the DVDs – so that, in order to watch GRAN CASINO, I had to insert the disc of THE YOUNG ONE instead!