The Exterminating Angel (Criterion Collection) (Restored / Remastered)
- Starring: Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, Jose Baviera
- Director: Luis Buñuel
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Description
The great screen surrealist Luis Buñuel co-wrote and directed this dark, bitterly witty satire. A group of people in formal dress arrives at an elegantly appointed home for a dinner party. However, once dinner is over and the guests retire to the drawing room, they discover that the servants have gone away, and for some reason they cannot leave. There is no explanation why -- there are no locked doors or barred windows preventing them from going home -- but the guests are convinced that they're stranded. Left to their own devices, they slowly but gradually degenerate into genteel savagery, taking an axe to a water ****** for drinking water, killing and eating a sheep that was to be part of the post-dinner entertainment, hiding the bodies of dead guests in the closet, dabbling in witchcraft, and burning the furniture. Buñuel's dry, quixotic wit is abundantly displayed in this film. Leading the cast was Silvia Pinal, the renowned actress who starred in several of Buñuel's Mexican films (she was married to noted producer Gustavo Alatriste, who produced several films with Buñuel). Other than the short subject Simon of the Desert, El Angel Exterminador proved to be Buñuel's last film made in his adopted homeland. Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Features
- Genre: Comedy Drama
- Category: Comedy of Manners, Satire
- Theme: Class Differences, Party Film
- Release Date: February 10, 2009
- Rating: NR (Not Rated)Rating Opens in New Window - Adult Situations, Questionable for Children
- Studio: Criterion
- Lead Actors: Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, Jose Baviera, Augusto Benedico, Luis Beristain
- Supporting Actors: Rosa Elena Durgel, Claudio Brook, Ofelia Guilmain, Lucy Gallardo, Bertha Moss, Enrico Garcia Alvarez, Javier Loya, Tito Junco Sr., Ofelia Montesco, Antonio Bravo, Enrique Rambal
- Director: Luis Buñuel
- Run Time: 1 hr 33 min
- Language: Spanish
- Subtitle Language: English
- Format: DVD
Additional Information
- DPCI: 246-02-4053
- ASIN: B002IU0YME
- Catalog #: 11372242
- Item can not be gift wrapped.
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- You may return this item to any Target store.Opens in New Window
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- Estimated Ship Dimensions : 7.5 inches length x 5.3 inches width x 0.6 inches height
- Estimated Ship Weight: 0.20 pound.
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Expert Reviews
As a son of old money who later fell on hard times and embraced Marxism, Luis Buñuel had a well-earned contempt for the idle rich, and he rarely put it to better use than in El Angel Exterminador. While the opening titles, in which Buñuel coyly proclaims that the film has no literal meaning, seem a perverse challenge, one can watch the film at face value and practically hear the wicked old surrealist chuckling at the fate of his clueless upper-crust types, whose baffling inability to go home confounds all logic but their own. With the inexplicable going on all around them, their puzzlement may not be quite so difficult to understand -- What are the sheep and the bear doing there? What do the servants know that caused them all to leave? -- but the outside world seems to have fallen in line with the delusion: as family, friends, police, and casual onlookers keep watch over the mansion, no one has the courage to go inside. After all, these people have money and power, and if they think they can't come out, there must be some reason why. While the characters seem benignly absurd in the film's early stages, they seem at once dangerous, pathetic, and darkly hilarious as they devolve into animalistic barbarism. Buñuel did not have much use for pity, and he never expends a drop for his characters here. Packed with dark, offhand humor, casually bizarre images, twisted dream sequences (including one that seems to refer to Buñuel's alleged contributions to the B-horror opus The Beast With Five Fingers), and a simple but deceptively intelligent visual style, El Angel Extermindor is the sort of film that only Buñuel could have made; along with Los Olvidados, it's the finest of his Mexican films, and an ideal warm-up for the triumphs of his last period, especially Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, with which it would make a superb double bill. Mark Deming, All Movie Guide