The Young One (1960)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

Towards the end of the Mexican phase of his career, Luis Buñuel
made what is, in many respects, his most remarkable film, although bizarrely it is often omitted from discussions of his work and remains his most neglected and underrated film.  The Young One (a.k.a. White Trash or La Joven) is Buñuel's most serious attempt to engage with contemporary social themes since Los Olvidados, which he made a decade previously.  Primarily, it is a film which condemns racial prejudice, and was ahead of its time, coinciding with the first wave of civil rights demonstrations in the United States.  The film also tackles the thorny subject of illicit sex (paedophilia no less), something that would have been provocative at the time but not unheard of (Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita had recently made it into print in America).  Whilst The Young One earned its director a special mention at Cannes, it was a critical and commercial failure.  It was particularly ill-received in America, where the narrow-minded bigotry of some prominent critics consigned it to almost immediate oblivion.   

The Young One was one of only two films that Buñuel made in English for an American producer, the other being Robinson Crusoe (1954).  It was originated and financed by George Pepper, a fugitive of McCarthyism, credited under the name George P. Werker.  Pepper had been a committed supporter of civil rights in the 1940s but fell foul of the anti-Communist hysteria that swept America in the early 1950s.  The starting point was a short story entitled Travelin' Man by Peter Matthiessen, who subsequently found fame as the author of environmentalist works such as The Snow Leopard.  Buñuel adapted the story with Hugo Butler, a Hollywood blacklisted writer living in exile in Mexico, under the name H.B. Addis.

With one notable exception, the cast comprises entirely American actors, with the main white character played by Zachary Scott, who is best known for playing Joan Crawford's playboy husband in Mildred Pierce (1945).  The only non-American in the cast is Claudio Brook, who became one of Buñuel's regulars, appearing in Viridiana (1961), El Angel exterminador (1962), Simón del desierto (1965) and La Voie lactée (1969).  The part of the central black character Traver went to Bernie Hamilton, who later found recognition for his role in One Potato, Two Potato (1964) but is best remembered for playing Captain Dobey in the 1970s TV series Starsky and Hutch.  The 13-year-old girl Evvie was played by Key Meersman, her first of only two film appearances.

When Buñuel began work on the film, the civil rights issue was fast becoming a hot topic in America and was gradually beginning to find a voice in films and literature.  Stanley Kramer had dealt effectively with racial intolerance in his film The Defiant Ones (1958) and Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird had an immediate impact.  As in Lee's novel, Buñuel shows us the absurdity and inhumanity of racism through the prism of a young girl's innocence and argues that racial prejudice is not innate but an entirely cultural phenomenon.  No one is born a racist.

It is significant that, unlike in Matthiessen's original story, the central black character is an inherently good man, innocent of the rape charge he is accused of.  The main white character is also a good man at heart, but he is prey to impulses that he can barely control - his instinctive mistrust of blacks and his lust for the teenager who comes under his care.  Whilst Traver is able to contain his baser instincts (he pays for what he takes from Miller and refuses to give in to an obvious attraction for Evvie), Miller has no such self-restraint or consideration for others and acts without thinking.  It is not until a truly bad man arrives on the scene (Jackson) that we see Miller in a most positive light, and ultimately Miller shows that he is capable of redemption, able to see Traver not as a threat but as a fellow human being.

It may well have been the film's sympathetic portrayal of a black man that caused it to be so badly received by critics and audiences on its first release in 1960.  What is now the most shocking scene in the film (the one in which Miller casually rapes a 13-year-old girl) would then have been completely overshadowed by the notion that a white American should be vilified for abusing a black man.  Buñuel could not bring himself to shoot the grim ending he and Butler had originally conceived for the film and instead opted for a far more optimistic coda in which the white man and his black bother appear to be finally reconciled, to the strains of Leon Bibb singing Sinner Man.  Such an ending would not have gone down well with the majority of the cinema-going public in America at the time.  Owing to some appalling distribution, the film fared just as badly in Europe and barely got a look in outside the UK.

The Young One was unfortunate in that it was released at precisely the wrong time, just a few years before the civil rights movement had begun to have a lasting positive impact on race relations in America.  It was a daring film for its time, but by bringing illicit desire and racial intolerance into the same arena it was perhaps aiming too high and was bound to fail.  Today, the film is far less shocking but it continues to have a resonance, reminding us that few things demean a man more than his intolerance towards others.  Beautifully photographed by Bunuel's favourite cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, in a stunningly picturesque region of Mexico, The Young One has an intensely poetic, fable-like quality that is rarely found in the director's work.  But sadly it remains Buñuel's forgotten masterpiece, totally eclipsed by the string of great films that were to follow.

Film Synopsis

Accused of raping a white woman, a black jazz musician named Traver flees for his life, taking a boat to an island off the coast of Carolina.  The only inhabitants of the island are a game warden, Miller, and a 13-year-old girl Evvie, whose grandfather, Miller's handyman, has just died.  Whilst Miller is away in town, Evvie is befriended by Traver and provides him with the supplies he needs to repair his boat and return to the mainland.  When Miller sees Traver he chases after him with a gun, but the fugitive gains the upper hand.  Traver agrees to work for Miller in return for food and a place to lay his head.  Evvie moves in with Miller and allows herself to be raped by him.  The next day, a preacher named Reverend Fleetwood arrives on the island to baptise Evvie, accompanied by another white man, Jackson. When Miller discovers that Traver is wanted for attempted rape, he calls an end to their truce and conspires with Jackson to return him to the mainland, where he will almost certainly be lynched.  Meanwhile, Fleetwood begins to suspect that Evvie has been deflowered by Miller...