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By the Book

Robinson Crusoe

1h 29m

Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1954 • United States, Mexico
Starring Dan O’Herlihy

Master director Luis Buñuel’s first color film (and first of only two he made in English) is a fascinating, unjustly neglected adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s classic survival novel. His take on the story—in which the eponymous shipwreck survivor (an Oscar-nominated Dan O’Herlihy) faces both physical and psychological peril while stranded for decades on a desert island—succeeds equally as a gripping adventure saga and as a subtly subversive, typically Buñuelian deconstruction of traditional notions of civilization, religion, and man’s place in the universe.

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