Working with a free hand in his native Spain for the first time in three decades, Luis Buñuel slaps together a rude tale of Virtue Unrewarded that has ample accommodations for his special pleasures: decadent aristocrats, envious peasants, disease, deformity, larceny, lechery, rape, sacrilege, fetishism, Peeping Tomism, sexual symbolism, surrealistic sight gags, and nihilistic social comment. With all that going for it, and more, this movie is in many ways an ideal starting point for anyone unacquainted with Buñuel, or, alternatively, a veritable orgy for anyone well acquainted. It is nowhere near his best, however. It is so unencumbered by the conventions and circumspections of his Mexican movies, in the period just preceding, that his stock-in-trade shocks and shenanigans become brazenly exhibitionistic, and blithely so. With Silvia Pinal, Francisco Rabal, and Fernando Rey. (1961) — Duncan Shepherd
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