Look: I’m not here to force my 21st-century values on a movie from 1954 that’s an adaptation of a book from 1719 that’s set in the 1600s. I’m just saying that the titular character of Robinson Crusoe is a slaver on a voyage to Brazil to buy slaves. After he shipwrecks on a deserted island during a voiceover1, the movie asks us to feel empathy for him as he goes through all the “stuck on a desert island” tropes. It’s tough, though, in the same way it’d be tough to root for Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000) if he were a Nazi or the family in “The Swiss Family Robinson” if they did child beauty pageants or the tiger in “Life of Pi” if he were Martin Shkreli.
Maybe this’ll help explain what I mean. After the shipwreck, Crusoe salvages what he can from his boat2 and sets to recreating his Dutch civilization on the island by hunting, farming, baking bread, and domesticating animals. Many successful years later, Crusoe spots cannibals who have sailed to his island to do a human sacrifice. Crusoe rescues the would-be victim (how brave!) and then immediately enslaves him.
Much, much later, Crusoe and the slave he named Friday3 watch as a group of mutineers land on the island to maroon their vessel’s crew. Crusoe plays an UNO Reverse card on the mutineers by freeing the captain, stealing the boat back, and marooning the mutineers. The captain says he’ll take Crusoe and Friday wherever they want to go, so Crusoe decides to go home after twenty-eight years on the island.
Rating: 2/10, movie would be better if Crusoe were played by a volleyball.
Cast and Crew
Dan O’Herlihy plays the lead in this one and it’s a big role. As he’s the only character we see for 45 minutes (with the exception of a few that show up in brief hallucinations), O’Herlihy needs to hold the viewer’s attention. This is a job for a major movie star—think Sandra Bullock in Gravity (2013) or Will Smith in I Am Legend (2007)—and O’Herlihy is simply not up to the task.
Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe,” was a novelist, pamphleteer, and rabble-rouser. An early pamphlet of his was “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” a “seditious libel” that ended with him in the pillory.4
Two major works from Defoe are “Moll Flanders” and “A Journal of the Plague Year.” You just lived through COVID so I won’t bore you with the plot of “Plague Year,” but we can talk about “Moll Flanders.” Moll is born at the bottom of the heap in Newgate Prison. The book follows her criminal endeavors and quest for social mobility, including her five marriages (one to her own brother). On its face it seems lewd, but in actuality, it’s a morality tale as Moll eventually turns honest and dies penitent.
Is Daniel Defoe Jonathan Swift? Maybe. They’re a pair of contemporaries whose accomplishments blur together in my mind, much like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani, or Ted Cruz and the Zodiac killer.
The Trivia
Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel is often a footnote in the story of another artist, but let’s give the guy his due. He has fifteen movies ranked in the top 1,000 in the “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” list, so he deserves it.5
Buñuel’s career started at the end of the ‘20s by making two surrealist movies with Salvador Dalí in France: Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’Or (1930).6 You may know the former from the Pixies’ song “Debaser,” which has the lyrics:
Got me a movie, I want you to know
Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know
Girlie so groovy, I want you to know
Don't know about you, but I am un
Chien Andalusia [sic]
Un Chien Andalou, as Black Francis is alluding to, has a famous image of a razor blade slicing up an eyeball. That movie was what got Buñuel and Dalí admission into the tight-knit community of surrealists.7 Buñuel then went to work in Spain, where he did the propaganda for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. After the Fascists and Franco took power, he fled to the U.S. and eventually settled in Mexico.
During Buñuel’s “Mexican period,” he created the films Los Olvidados (1950) and Él (1953).8 His later career had the films Viridiana (1961)9, which was another swipe at the church and Franco, and three classics with actor Fernando Rey: The Exterminating Angel (1962), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). These films were more narrative-driven than his earlier surrealist works, though Buñuel never stopped being a provocateur.
Interestingly, Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” in part to demonstrate the character’s (and, by proxy, the author’s) spiritual journey. Buñuel, though, had his issues with religion10, and he cleverly allowed Friday to win a theological argument against Robinson regarding why an all-powerful God would allow the devil to exist.11
Crusoe quotes Psalm 23 from the KJV of the Bible. It’s worth knowing in its entirety:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Yeah, yeah, maybe your local bar trivia doesn’t typically have rounds on Luis Buñuel or Psalms, but when they do, you’re gonna be ready.
Odds and Ends
While ailing from fever, Crusoe remembers that the Brazilians use a home remedy of tobacco mixed with rum; I wouldn’t recommend that…after being rescued, the captain promises to take Robinson and Friday wherever they want, or “three times around the world”; Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the globe, starting his voyage in 151912...Robinson says the phrase “the proof of the pudding”; this expression in full is “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” meaning you have to eat it to know if it’s good (and not, as I once thought, that proof is often kept in pudding)...the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song is wrong on two accounts: it mentions that Robinson Crusoe was “as primitive as can be” (he wasn’t, he had guns) and it pronounces his name Ca-ru-so, like he’s tenor Enrico Caruso…Defoe was likely inspired by the tale of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish buccaneer who was marooned on a Pacific Island off the coast of Chile; the island he was stranded on is now referred to as “Robinson Crusoe Island.”
Yeah, the budget of the movie was only $300,000, so it appears they couldn’t afford an exciting opening set piece.
I’m not going to go full “CinemaSins” on this movie, but Crusoe retrieves tobacco and guns from the boat. He’s still smoking that tobacco and firing those guns twenty-eight years later.
He names his new slave “Friday,” after the day of the week. This is the etymology of the term “his man/girl Friday” for a loyal personal assistant.
In the painting, look at what’s being offered to Defoe: flowers! Legend has it that, instead of being pelted with rotten eggs and trash (which is what usually happened to people in the pillory), people threw him flowers.
That’s the 2nd-most by a director, trailing only Jean-Luc Godard. Robinson Crusoe, unsurprisingly, is not one of those fifteen Top 1,000 movies.
If French isn’t your thing, those movies are called An Andalusian Dog and Age of Gold in the U.S.
Though L’Age D’Or, with its anti-Catholic, anti-state, anti-society leanings, was even more transgressive.
If Spanish isn’t your thing, those movies are called The Young and the Damned and This Strange Passion in the U.S.
Don’t worry, that one’s just a name.
He coined the aphorism “I’m an atheist, thank God,” though later he became bored with that lazy turn-of-phrase and instead explained that he was neither atheist nor Christian and believed everyone must find God within themselves. Good idea!
This is a trivia blog that peddles easy answers and theological questions can be notoriously thorny. This one, which all monotheistic religions have to face, is one of the toughest. Christians can at least point to Job 38:4, which tries to close the book on the argument by saying (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Your all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God lets bad things happen for reasons you couldn’t possibly understand, the end.”
Though Magellan didn’t actually make it since he was killed in the Philippines.