General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Young One

The Young One (Spanish release title La joven) is a 1960 black-and-white drama directed by Luis Buñuel, a Mexico–United States co-production shot in English about a Black jazz musician who flees a false rape accusation to a game-preserve island off the American South.¹^•² It was Buñuel's only film set in the United States and one of only two English-language films he made, the other being Robinson Crusoe (1952).³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Luis Buñuel, 1960; Mexico/USA, English dialogue, 95 minutes, black and white¹
Source	Screenplay by Buñuel and Hugo Butler (credited as H. B. Addis), based on Peter Matthiessen's story "Travelin' Man"⁵
Cast	Zachary Scott (Miller), Bernie Hamilton (Traver), Key Meersman (Evvie), Crahan Denton (Jackson), Claudio Brook (Rev. Fleetwood)¹^•³
Key crew	Cinematography Gabriel Figueroa; production Producciones Olmeca; producer George Pepper, credited as G. P. Werker¹^•⁴
Cannes 1960	Screened in competition; MoMA described it as winner of Extraordinary Mention at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, and the Melbourne festival archive records a Special Prize for direction⁶^•⁷
US release	Released by Valiant Films; MoMA invitational showing on January 12 preceded its world premiere at the Victoria Theatre on Broadway⁶
Other titles	Circulated in the US under the exploitation title Island of Shame; Italian distribution title Violenza per una giovane¹

Spoilers

Plot

Traver (Bernie Hamilton), a Black jazz clarinetist, is falsely accused of raping a white woman in a Southern town and flees a lynch mob in a stolen motorboat.³ Running out of gas, he lands on a small game-preserve island where he encounters Miller (Zachary Scott), a racist white game warden, and Evvie (Key Meersman), a barely pubescent orphan whose grandfather, Miller's handyman, has just died.²^•³ Miller repeatedly rapes Evvie in her bed at night, unbeknownst to Traver.³ The situation tightens with the arrival of the Reverend Fleetwood (Claudio Brook), who discovers what Miller has done to the girl, and of a neighboring boatman, Jackson (Crahan Denton), who learns of the charges against Traver and forces him to run again.¹^•³ Caught between the minister's indignation, his own guilt, and a growing identification with the fugitive, Miller ultimately helps Traver continue his escape.¹

Production

The film was produced through Producciones Olmeca and shot entirely in Mexico, near Acapulco and at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, despite its Southern United States setting; some accounts have misreported the location as South Carolina.⁸ Buñuel wrote the screenplay with Hugo Butler, an American screenwriter blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era who had relocated to Mexico, and Butler was credited under the pseudonym H. B. Addis; the producer George Pepper, likewise a victim of the House Un-American Activities hearings and resident in Mexico, took the pseudonym G. P. Werker.⁴^•⁹ Buñuel had already worked with both men on Robinson Crusoe (1952).⁴

Gabriel Figueroa, the cinematographer celebrated for dramatic contrast and depth of field, was asked by Buñuel to keep the imagery more banal and serve the narrative action; when the camera turns on characters, it boxes bodies into the frame, an effect read as Evvie's and Traver's existential entrapment.⁹ The only soundtrack music is the folk singer Leon Bibb performing "Sinner Man," a song about a man on the run, heard over the opening credits and the final sequence.⁸ Buñuel reported so much difficulty directing the young Key Meersman that he almost closed the production, though her unpolished performance came to be regarded as one of the film's strengths.⁸

Themes and style

The film treats two explosive subjects for 1960: American racism and the sexual relationship between an older man and a young girl, the latter echoing the contemporary success of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.⁷^•⁸ Its treatment of race departs from the postwar liberal problem picture: rather than a blameless victim and a legible villain, Buñuel refuses to label any of the five characters as hero or villain, and the priest's compassion has limits, as when he has Evvie turn her mattress over so that he will not sleep on the side Traver used the previous night.¹⁰ Buñuel himself connected this refusal to the film's fate, writing in his 1982 autobiography My Last Breath that "this rejection of Manichaeism was probably the main reason for the film's failure."⁹

Although the Surrealist interludes familiar from his other work are absent, the film carries recurring Buñuel motifs: feet and legs, animals, and what he called impartiality. Asked by the critic José de la Colina whether it was his least personal film, Buñuel replied that he considered it one of his most personal, citing "the corpse's feet, the spiders, the hens, the impartiality."⁴ The Melbourne festival archive described its straightforward presentation as giving the film "the forcefulness of a parable," while noting uneven acting and dialogue that veers between the naturalistic and the stilted.⁷

Reception and later standing

The film screened in competition at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and drew serious critical attention in Europe, but its American reception was hostile and confused.¹¹ The New Yorker gave it a dismissive paragraph, the Manhattan dailies were hostile, and, according to Buñuel, "a Harlem newspaper even wrote that I should be hung upside down from a lamppost on Fifth Avenue."⁸ Some critics, misreading Buñuel's refusal to sentimentalize his Black protagonist, accused the film itself of racism, and it circulated at times under the exploitation title Island of Shame; it was a commercial failure.¹¹^•⁸

For many years it was among the least-seen of Buñuel's films, receiving scant attention in most studies of the director; the first book on Buñuel published in English, Ado Kyrou's study translated by Adrienne Foulke, did not even mention its original English title.⁸ Only later, with the help of restoration and new releases, did the film's critical fortunes recover, and it is now widely seen as a minor but genuinely provocative Buñuel with flaws, rather than as an unimportant one.¹¹ Richard Brody, writing in The New Yorker in 2017, called it a fierce look at "the depravity of American racism" that dramatizes the relentless threat of violence against Black Americans and the moral rot white supremacy both depends on and fosters.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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