MEXICAN BUS RIDE (Luis Buñuel, 1951)

Boisterous, ebullient, warm, overflowing with humanity, Luis Buñuel’s Subida al cielo, literally, Ascent to Heaven, but known in the States as Mexican Bus Ride, is among my favorite films of his now that I’ve seen it belatedly for the first time. It isn’t as accomplished or satirically brilliant as other Buñuel films, but it’s endearing, gracious and here and there, unexpectedly, very moving. Essentially it’s a comedy, but one so elastic as to embrace two deaths, those of a young child and protagonist Oliverio’s mother.
     It opens with Oliverio’s wedding in a small town that has no church and is therefore happy. But Oliverio and his bride are interrupted in the enjoyment of their honeymoon when word arrives that Oliverio’s sick mother’s health has taken a turn for the worse. They rush back home; his mother gives Oliverio her will, which stipulates that her other two sons, who are vultures, don’t get her money and that her young grandson—Oliverio’s sister is deceased—is raised by Oliverio and his wife and is provided with the chance for an education. Thus Oliverio takes off on his bus ride to get the will ratified in the nearest city.
     The bus ride takes up most of the film. The bus overflows with passengers and animals. Steamy, curvacious Raquel tries to seduce the sturdy young peasant (shades of Buñuel’s later Simon of the Desert!), who nevertheless hews to his mission. Along the way there are festivities, including a celebration of the bus driver’s mother’s birthday. With his mother’s death looming, Oliverio himself (with the driver’s permission) takes to the driver’s seat so as not to lose time.
     As the film unfolds, one is too engaged by the various characters to note some poignant connections, such as Oliverio’s mother’s deathbed wish to provide her grandson with the schooling she couldn’t provide Oliverio.
     The final shot shows the camera rising to the sky—a reference to the close of Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio from the preceding year, but also a sign from the skeptical Buñuel—at one point he famously and slyly said, “I am still, thank God, an atheist”—that he believes that if there is such a thing as heaven, which he doubts, the spirit of Oliverio’s mother will have no problem getting in.

THE BRIDGE (Bernhard Wicki, 1959)

The senselessness of war: the nobility of this theme did nothing to raise David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) above a level of hollowness and mediocrity. From West Germany, based on an actual incident recorded in Manfred Gregor’s autobiographical novel, Die Brücke achieves a finer, more powerful result. It, too, is a facile film, but small and reasonably honest, not something driven by fear of commercial extinction to generate meaningless “stupendous” effects because of the imagined competition of television. Bernhard Wicki’s film can mine and develop its identical theme more capably by focusing on this rather than splitting its time between enemy imprisonment and jungle adventure.
     However, it also is blatant, schematic. The first half does three things: individuates the eight 15- and 16-year-old schoolboys who will be called up for military service as the Third Reich experiences its last gasps in spring 1945; enmeshes these lives in their small town’s increasingly desperate, demoralized state; visually marks the centrality of the bridge that the boys will end up defending by mistaken military order. In the second half, following one day of training, these boys, on their own after their commander is killed, defend to their deaths the bridge that their side plans on blowing up. Ironically, both the brutal Americans, by air and by tank, and the Germans themselves unwittingly conspire to doom these ridiculously gung-ho boys to their fate. One boy will survive to tell the tale, and the whole incident will be considered too trivial even to be written up by the German command.
     One enormously effective brusque cut shows these boys moving from short pants to military uniforms. With the assistance of his cutter, Wicki “gets the job done.”
     Beyond this, shots of fog passing over the bridge haunt.