The Young One

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Young One another Buñuel movie. It was shot in Mexico with mostly American actors, and supposed to be set of the coast of North or South Carolina.

Story is from writer/producer Hugo Butler, based on a Peter Mathiesson short story. Butler was a leftist who got kicked out of Hollywood in the blacklist purges of the early 1950s, so he went to Mexico, and made a couple of movies with Buñuel – Robinson Crusoe and this one. According to the commentary on the disk, Butler had wanted to make a movie about black-white racial tensions for awhile, and this was it.

Bernie Hamilton plays ‘Traver’ a black jazz musician touring with his band. We see him first as he comes onto the island shore in a small dinghy; in flashbacks we find out why: accused of, maybe guilty of, rape, he had to flee the cops, stole the dinghy, and ended up here.

‘Here’ is a private island serving as a game reserve for a local hunting club. The only people who live on it are Miller (played by Zachary Scott, who had starred in the Butler-scripted, Jean Renoir film from 1945, The Southerner – Scott was a relatively minor star, and there he got to star in movies for two of the greatest directors of all time!) and the grand-daughter of Miller’s just-dead handyman, a sort of girl-woman who doesn’t know how old she is, and has grown up here half wild.

We see Miller at first pretty angry with the girl, and no reason why, and he makes her drop eggs on the floor, and he shouts at her, and orders her to clean herself up and comb her hair. But when she comes back and serves him his supper, she has undergone the usual movie transition into beauty, and Miller feels it. From then on he is lusting after her, and seems unable to control himself. He rapes her on two nights in the course of the movie.

But Traver and the girl develop an easier relationship. He too feels her appeal, but he can control himself; and she treats him as just another person, unlike the others in the story, who are all bigoted to different degrees. At first Miller, when he hears about the black man who’s left money for gasoline and tools to patch the damaged dinghy, he gets his gun and tries to shoot him. But he misses, and that night Traver busts into the cabin and gets the drop on Miller. Eventually a sort of uneasy truce develops between the two, although neither much likes the other, and Miller feels an angry jealousy whenever the girl hangs out with Traver and listens to him play his clarinet or ‘licorice stick’ (!!!)

When a preacher comes with Jackson, another employee of the hunting club, to say the rites over the girl’s grandfather’s grave, all hell breaks loose. First Jackson tells Miller that Traver is wanted for rape; then over night Miller crawls over Jackson’s body to rape the girl again, and Jackson finds out what’s been going on between them; then Miller and Jackson head out and catch Traver and tie him to the cabin porch; then the preacher also figures out that Traver has been ‘abusing the innocence of that child’ and Traver admits it and asks, ‘What if I marry her?’

(Oh, by the way, the girl’s name is Eve or Evie, short for Evelyn, and when she first feeds Miller and he notices how pretty she is, she hands him an apple for dessert.)

The preacher becomes convinced that Traver is innocent of the rape charges. The preacher tries to be open and liberal, but not even he can quite stand the notion of sleeping on a bed that a black man has slept on for one night. Jackson is an out and out racist, and in a speech to Traver tells him ‘I don’t even think you’re human, I think you people got something missing, you don’t have souls.’ So at the end of the movie, Miller, considering what he did to the girl, is willing to help Traver leave, but Jackson attacks Traver with a knife. Traver succeeds in defending himself, and escapes the island in the repaired dinghy with Miller’s help.

The black and white photography is excellent. Acting is so-so, but I think Zachary Scott does a better job here than in The Southerner because this role covers more range. Buñuel moves his camera in almost every shot he can, and gives the film a lot of energy and life.

What’s most interesting here is how Buñuel manages to satisfy his producer/co-writer’s intentions of delivering a ‘message’ film about racism, something that we can accept as a straightforward realistic story, and yet also fill it with his own flourishes and little touches of psychoanalytic bits, bits from legend and fairy-tale, surrealism, and subversion.

Also I liked how the movie refused to obey the tracks that it seemed to lay down ahead of itself. There were several points in the story when I thought I knew just how the story was going to develop, based on what the typical Hollywood film would do – every time the movie zigzagged off to one side and surprised me. For example, it looked like it was going to be a Most Dangerous Game for awhile, with the two men hunting each other through the thick island forests and swamps. Later it looked like Miller would rape the girl, then kill Traver and when the girl complained, blame the rape on the dead black man.

Finally, speaking outside the movie, what surprised me was that everybody in the story was more civilized, more decent, and less ruthlessly savage, than I expected. It seems a black mark against us today, that a movie made on this subject would now have much more violence, less trust, less understanding. Tim calls this attitude ‘badass’ and blames Quentin Tarantino for being the primary exponent of it – a sort of wallowing in, a thorough relishing of violence and treachery that knows no civilizing moderation, and even boasts of it.

(4 April 2009)