Stories about castaways and isolation are usually pretty tough going. Tom Hanks' movie was very slow at times. Even when there are two characters instead of just one, and even when the characters are Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin in "Hell in the Pacific," there are likely to be longueurs. And it's no wonder that no one has done movie called "Walden Pond" -- "First I adzed this, then I adzed that."
I've never read Defoe's novel but the movie seems to stick closely to the original, with the elisions necessary in converting a long and episodic novel to a screenplay. The spoken narration helps. In the film, Crusoe gets only two pet animals, a dog, Rex, and a cat, instead of two cats. The single cat in the movie provides the occasion for a joke when she gives birth to a litter of kitten -- "Where did you find the father?" Crusoe is stuck on this Caribbean island for twenty-eight years and I can say seriously that when Rex the dog dies of old age, I've never felt sadder for the death of a fictional dog.
I'm going to mostly skip the story. Crusoe almost goes mad with loneliness and when he runs across his native man, Friday, he doesn't derive much comfort from his devoted companion. He and Friday finally make a successful escape from the island.
Crusoe is Daniel O'Herlihy, whom I admired a great deal in "Odd Man Out," in which he's a nervous and not particularly bright terrorist in Belfast, and he was fine as a reserved liar in "Home Before Dark." He was nominated or an Oscar for his performance here but he seems strictly functional to me. None of the other performances amount to much.
But -- Luis Bunuel, when he was still in his prime? It seems directed by an amateur. When Crusoe gets drunk to celebrate his fifth anniversary of isolation, the periphery of the screen is blurred. Even the absence of expected clichés -- there are no sweeping vistas of the tropical beach -- seem to have been forgotten rather than deliberately avoided. When Crusoe resorts to reading the Bible, I half expected God to appear and tweak Crusoe's nose.
But, for all that, it's a gripping movie, easy to be swept into. Ontogeny repeats phylogeny. We watch an ordinary man, who has rescued only one or two small rafts of supplies, reenact the history of Homo sapiens. He learns how to make fire. He learns to domesticate animals and then he domesticates plants like wheat. He learns the art of self protection. He first embraces, then rejects the idea of having a slave, settling for having a willing servant. He finds comfort in the Bible. He discovers that currency is meaningless on the island but it saves his bacon in the end. The last we see of Robinson Crusoe, in 1686, he's dressed in colonial finery and is setting off for England, a wealthy man with his "servant".
Defoe was a Puritan. I don't know what he was getting at in this story, if in fact he was getting at anything. But, though the movie looks cheap and easy, it ought to keep a viewer interested enough to follow it through to the end.
I've never read Defoe's novel but the movie seems to stick closely to the original, with the elisions necessary in converting a long and episodic novel to a screenplay. The spoken narration helps. In the film, Crusoe gets only two pet animals, a dog, Rex, and a cat, instead of two cats. The single cat in the movie provides the occasion for a joke when she gives birth to a litter of kitten -- "Where did you find the father?" Crusoe is stuck on this Caribbean island for twenty-eight years and I can say seriously that when Rex the dog dies of old age, I've never felt sadder for the death of a fictional dog.
I'm going to mostly skip the story. Crusoe almost goes mad with loneliness and when he runs across his native man, Friday, he doesn't derive much comfort from his devoted companion. He and Friday finally make a successful escape from the island.
Crusoe is Daniel O'Herlihy, whom I admired a great deal in "Odd Man Out," in which he's a nervous and not particularly bright terrorist in Belfast, and he was fine as a reserved liar in "Home Before Dark." He was nominated or an Oscar for his performance here but he seems strictly functional to me. None of the other performances amount to much.
But -- Luis Bunuel, when he was still in his prime? It seems directed by an amateur. When Crusoe gets drunk to celebrate his fifth anniversary of isolation, the periphery of the screen is blurred. Even the absence of expected clichés -- there are no sweeping vistas of the tropical beach -- seem to have been forgotten rather than deliberately avoided. When Crusoe resorts to reading the Bible, I half expected God to appear and tweak Crusoe's nose.
But, for all that, it's a gripping movie, easy to be swept into. Ontogeny repeats phylogeny. We watch an ordinary man, who has rescued only one or two small rafts of supplies, reenact the history of Homo sapiens. He learns how to make fire. He learns to domesticate animals and then he domesticates plants like wheat. He learns the art of self protection. He first embraces, then rejects the idea of having a slave, settling for having a willing servant. He finds comfort in the Bible. He discovers that currency is meaningless on the island but it saves his bacon in the end. The last we see of Robinson Crusoe, in 1686, he's dressed in colonial finery and is setting off for England, a wealthy man with his "servant".
Defoe was a Puritan. I don't know what he was getting at in this story, if in fact he was getting at anything. But, though the movie looks cheap and easy, it ought to keep a viewer interested enough to follow it through to the end.