La mort en ce jardin (Death in the Garden). 1956. Mexico/France. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Screenplay by Buñuel, Raymond Queneau, Luis Alcoriza, Gabriel Arout. With Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli. In French; English subtitles. DCP. 104 min.
Buñuel’s growing reputation in Europe allowed him to secure French financing for the first time with this slyly ambivalent imperialist adventure film, filmed in bright Eastman color and set in an unnamed Latin American country where the unhappy residents of an up-river hellhole include several Europeans down on their luck: Charles Vanel as a diamond miner ready to take his loot (and his deaf daughter, Michèle Girardon) back to Marseilles; Simone Signoret as a prostitute with no signs of a heart of gold; Michel Piccoli as a missionary of flexible moral standards; and the films ostensible star, the now mostly forgotten French matinee idol Georges Marchal as a mysterious adventurer who knows his way around the tropical jungle. Surrealist asides abound (Girardon gets her long hair entangled in a tree, in one unclassifiably perverse image) but Buñuel also provides the thrills and chills the genre demands. Raymond Queneau, the great French experimental novelist, contributed to the screenplay.