Gran Casino

After having made some films in Europe, two ostensibly co-directed with Salvador Dali and causing some scandal, Bunuel turned to the Mexican market and illustrated that he was perfectly capable of making a standard commercial film with success. For those looking for any surrealism or bizarreness of the later (or earlier) Bunuel films, there's not really much to see here but a very capable craftsman doing his job. I was frankly unaware of the Mexican musical in general so this served somewhat as an introduction. The musical numbers didn't spring out of the dialog or the plot as much as they were interspersed throughout the film at regular intervals. The tunes were lovely and quite entertaining in fact. Again, this was light fiction with nothing as shocking as, say, "Los Olvidados" a few years later. I'm glad I caught it though.

Curtis Stotlar