How to Turn a Classic Adventure into a Fever Dream about Madness, Goatskin Umbrellas, and RoboCop’s Future Boss
It’s 3:15 AM. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, the cold pizza on my desk is starting to look back at me, and I am currently witnessing a middle-aged Irish actor, dressed in a highly flammable-looking suit of raw goatskin, screaming the 23rd Psalm at an empty canyon just to hear his own echo.
Welcome, my friends, to the bizarre, psychological, and surprisingly dark world of Luis Buñuel.
If you’ve never heard of Luis Buñuel, congratulations: your film theory textbook is still unopened. For the uninitiated, Buñuel is the legendary father of surrealist cinema—the guy who famously started his career by filming a razor blade slicing a human eyeball. So, when Hollywood producers hired him to direct a family-friendly, Technicolor adaptation of Daniel Defoe‘s classic survival novel, his filmmaking method was a masterclass in artistic sabotage:
- Agree to make a straightforward commercial adventure film in Mexico.
- Sneakily inject weird, haunting, and deeply blasphemous dream sequences when the producers aren’t looking.
- Turn a simple story about a shipwrecked sailor into a disturbing study of isolation, sexual frustration, and religious mania.
The result? Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954).
The “Plot” (If we can even call it that)
We all know the story. Robinson Crusoe (Dan O’Herlihy) gets shipwrecked on a deserted island in 1659. He survives by salvaging tools from the ship, taming wild goats, and building a fortress.
But while other movie versions show this as a fun, heroic camping trip, Buñuel focuses on the fact that Crusoe is slowly, agonizingly losing his mind. He talks to his dog, Sam. He gets a fever and hallucinates his dead, angry father refusing to give him a glass of water. He tries to dress his pet cats in clothes.
Eventually, a group of cannibals visits the island. Crusoe rescues one of their prisoners, names him Friday, and—because Crusoe is a 17th-century English gentleman who doesn’t know any better—immediately chains him up, forces him to wear trousers, and tries to explain the Holy Trinity to him while wearing a massive, homemade goatskin umbrella.
Why You Need to Watch This Tonight
- The Lead Actor is OCP’s “Old Man” from RoboCop: Robinson Crusoe is played by Dan O’Herlihy, who put on such an incredible, intense, and deeply sweaty performance that he was actually nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. If you are an ’80s sci-fi fan, your jaw will drop when you realize this ragged, feverish, goatskin-wearing island castaway is the exact same actor who would play “The Old Man” (the President of OCP) in RoboCop (1987) thirty-three years later.
- The Dream Sequences: Only Luis Buñuel could turn a Disney-esque adventure movie into a psychological horror. The scene where Crusoe, burning with fever, hallucinates his father dipping a sheet into a bucket of water is genuinely unsettling and beautifully shot.
- The Goatskin Fashion Parade: Crusoe’s transition from a dapper, powdered-wig aristocrat to a feral, bearded wilderness prepper is amazing. His final outfit—complete with a towering goatskin hat and a giant, fuzzy goatskin umbrella—makes him look like a pioneer of post-apocalyptic punk fashion.
The Verdict
Is it a good movie? It is easily the best and most unique adaptation of the novel ever captured on film. It avoids the boring, preachy clichés of the book and instead gives us a gritty, sweaty, and deeply human look at what happens to a man’s brain when he has no one to talk to but a parrot for twenty-eight years.
My Rating: 4 out of 5 goatskin umbrellas that would definitely not pass a modern safety inspection.
Wanna see a surrealist masterpiece disguised as a family movie?
Turn off your phone, dim the lights, and go search for this Mexican-American classic on your favorite retro cinema platform. Because it’s a mid-century gem, it is widely available for you to stream whenever you want to see how to survive a shipwreck with style and a serious case of cabin fever.
[WATCH “Robinson Crusoe (1954)” ON YOUTUBE (Opens in a new window)]
