Man Friday

Man Friday (1975)

Englishman Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone on an island for years, is overjoyed to find a fellow man, a black islander whom he names Friday. But Crusoe cannot overcome the shackles of his own heritage and upbringing and is incapable of seeing Friday as anything other than a savage who needs Crusoe's brand of cultural and religious enlightenment. Friday attempts to share his own more generous and unashamed culture, but ultimately realizes that Crusoe can never see him as anything but an inferior being. With that awareness, Friday sets out to turn the tables on Crusoe.

Date of release
1975-03-04
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (36)
Runtime
1h 55m
Genres
Adventure, Comedy
Director
Jack Gold

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Robinson Crusoe

Man Friday is a 1975 adventure film directed by Jack Gold and starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Roundtree. It is adapted from the 1973 play by Adrian Mitchell based on Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, but reverses the roles, portraying Crusoe as a blunt, stiff Englishman, while the native he calls Man Friday is much more intelligent and empathic. The film can be regarded as being critical of western civilization, against which it draws a contrasting picture of Caribbean tribal life.

Production

The film was based on a TV play by Adrian Mitchell which aired in 1972 as part of BBC's Play for Today.Colin Blakely starred.

Mitchell adapted this for the stage which premiered in London in 1973.

The film was one of the first financed by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment. It was meant to be filmed in Hawaii but wound up shot in Mexico at Puerto Vallarta due to cheaper costs. There were two weeks of rehearsal then five weeks of filming in Mexico starting December 1974.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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