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Saturday, June 30, 2018

Death in the Garden A.K.A. La mort en ce jardin (1956)

A French Mexican adventure directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Simone Signoret, Charles Vanel, Georges Marchal and Michel Piccoli.
A revolution starts because the government takes over mining claims in South America. An old man and a stranger who is new in town are blamed for it, so they leave with the man's daughter and prostitute mistress as well as a local priest. They take one of the military men hostage and head into the rain forest. He escapes with their food and meets up with other soldiers before being shot. The group is left to find their way out of the jungle with no supplies.
This was slow to start, but I liked it more as it went on. The plot started off looking like a Sergio Leone fistful of revolution epic, but turned into wilderness survival for the better. The characters were relatively static, but what interested me was that their relationships with one another changed over time. The hero was a typical Indiana Jones dude who came into town like Trinity. Dialogue was all in French, but I found good English subtitles. I thought the acting was spot-on, but stereotypical like the characters. The world already had tons of western cowboys to model the hero and romantic interest after, as well as the old man in 1956. Costumes looked like a standard western, but sets and filming locations went far beyond that old Texas town. There was lots of jungle B-roll and the locations for scenes in the jungle looked good too. I really like those big, weird-shaped trees. Camera-work was definitely to my liking and very much Sergio Leone style. There were lots of long shots showing distance and space, but not many close-ups. Doing a quick click-through, I hear no non-diegetic music. The dialogue would have been the correct volume if I needed to hear some French and the sound effects were mixed loud, but not clipping. IMDb has a rating of 6.9/10 listed and Rotten Tomatoes has 92% Tomatometer with 60% Audience Score for an average of 73.66%. I would go a little bit higher than that and was glad that Rotten Tomatoes had such a high site score for it. I rate this adequate and would recommend it if you want to see a Sergio Leone film starring Indiana Jones on a jungle survival adventure.

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