ROBINSON CRUSOE is the onscreen title, yet the 1954 movie is nearly always referenced as Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe. Irish character actor Dan O’Herlihy, 33, drew his only leading role as the hero, and his fine work put him on the Academy Awards ballot roster for Best Actor. Heady stuff against Crusoe-like odds: Marlon Brando (On The Waterfront), Humphrey Bogart (The Caine Mutiny), Bing Crosby (The Country Girl) and James Mason (A Star Is Born). Like O’Herlihy’s fabled castaway, every one of those troubled characters were isolated, either by circumstance or behavior. His long shot didn’t win (Brando was chosen) but his performance holds up, and the film has a number of impressive scenes, as directed by the iconoclastic Luis Buñuel.

Shipwrecked on an island in the South Atlantic, Crusoe spends many years alone, fending for himself with only a dog and cat (the ship’s other survivors) for company. Salvaging goods from the wreck, he teaches himself a variety of skills, but the loneliness has him on the raw edge of sanity. Then fate provides a companion in the form of a young native (from some South American tribe) who Crusoe rescues from cannibals. At first treating this fellow (Jaime Fernandez) he calls ‘Friday’ as a servant (Crusoe’s ill-fated voyage was to purchase African slaves) he eventually acknowledges him as a trusted friend.

“Some day, if you’re good, I’ll teach you to smoke.”

The director knew isolation first-hand, working in exile in Mexico, having abandoned Franco’s fascist Spain. He co-wrote the script with another political ex-pat, Hollywood veteran Hugo Butler, using the pseudonym Philip Ansell Roll after being blacklisted in the States. Daniel Defoe’s classic 1719 novel runs over 300 pages; avoiding the earlier and latter parts of the story, the film concentrates on the main section, still daunting to compress a 28-year stretch of time into 90 minutes on screen. The shoot cost $350,000 and was accomplished in Mexico on the coast near Manzanillo. *

All by himself for most of the running time, O’Herlihy (sporting eleven different beards as the years pass) delivers a a strong, impassioned performance and Fernandez is able as Friday. The movie plays better for kids (my recent revisit was the first since seeing it on a TV Saturday matinee maybe sixty years ago: I wore out my Classics Illustrated comic edition).

Adults today can be forgiven for cringing a bit when Crusoe initially (and for a good while) treats Friday as a menial: “How pleasant it was, once more to have a servant.” Yet the attitude was part & parcel of the time the story was set in, and Bunuel’s handling presents it simply, without taking any moralistic stance: with Friday, as with everything he’d been faced with prior to the meeting him, Crusoe learns and evolves. A big plus is the often striking color camerawork from Alex Phillips. There’s a decent score from Anthony Collins.

Yours, Isolated, can’t find any box office stats for this oldie. Cogerson lists at least twenty-eight 1954 movies that fit into the ‘adventure’ genre, but this is curiously AWOL.

* Fernandez, then 19, became a star and director of note in Mexico, and was the younger half- brother of legendary director/actor/crazyman Emilio Fernandez: the keen-eyed may note that Jose Chavez, who plays the pirate leader, was one of Emilio’s (‘Mapache’s) scurvy soldados in The Wild Bunch.

Hard to Resist Mentioning Dept: the original complete title of Defoe’s tome is The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself. 

Filmed twice as a silent (1902, 1927), then as a pre-Code comedy Mr. Robinson Crusoe (with Douglas Fairbanks, coasting on fumes), it had also been done in 1947—in early 3-D—in the Soviet Union! Da, Robinzon Cruzo. Further go’s: another from ’54, the cheeseball Miss Robin Crusoe (give Miss a miss); the fun 1964 takeoff Robinson Crusoe On Mars; Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. (1966 Disney silliness with Dick Van Dyke); Man Friday, revisionist claptrap from 1975 with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree (stud Shaft taking no honkey shit from simpering whitey); 1988’s well-regarded Crusoe with Aidan Quinn; and 1997’s little-seen Robinson Crusoe with Pierce Brosnan. Next? Robinson Woke? Rescue us.