Given today’s youth culture of hype and special effects, it’s not surprising Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana failed to fill all the seats at the showing I recently attended in the Donnell Media Center of The New York Public Library -- and that only one viewer appeared to be less than middle-aged at best. Buñuel’s masterwork was one of five similar-length classics and two essential shorts comprising “The Moral Vision of Luis Buñuel" series. 

For a variety of reasons, not least of which was an invariable combining of cinematic vision and leftist social critique (though not the mechanics of revolution), beginning in 1932, Buñuel did not get to direct during a lost decade and a half when he wandered as dubber, producer and technical advisor in France, Spain and the United States (Hollywood and then New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he was removed from wartime propaganda documentaries because, he claimed, former collaborator Salvador Dalí “called me an atheist”). Confounding expectations, he re-emerged as director in Mexico, to enjoy critical and, surprisingly, not negligible commercial success. Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned won him Cannes’s 1951 director’s prize, and ten years later that festival’s jury hedged its bets when Viridiana co-carried the Palme d’Or. The latter scalding of the Catholic Church, among the usual targets, was filmed by invitation in Franco’s Spain.

Having asked for, and received, minor changes in the screenplay, the Generalissimo’s censors approved the sensational film, only to ban its being shown. From Pérez Galdós’ uncredited novel Halma, the director and Julio Alejandro de Castro co-wrote the story, which is frequently dissected as allegory, the gone-to-seed hacienda equated with Spain itself, the mourned-for bride who died unfulfilled on her wedding night filling in for the lamented Second Republic. But while the film is unsparing in skewering naïve do-gooding, the myth of the decency of the poor and the hypocrisy of religion, it would probe deeper into psychological earth, into suppressed lust, greed, resentment. The much highlighted Last Supper parody, burned crown of thorns and knife-headed crucifix have attracted attention but in the end are added symbols, for at the core is a despairing picture of the dark cavern of the human heart.

Except for brief moments, the concentrated location is the unfruitful country estate of sad Dan Jaime (Fernando Rey), who has neglected both his lands and, emotionally, his Grace Kelly-ish niece Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) even while paying for her convent studies but who now summons that reluctant novice to visit on the eve of her retreat and final vows. Distant but not unkind with his few workers and cared for by devoted Ramona (Margarita Lozano), whose fatherless daughter Rita (Teresita Rabal) treasures his gift of a jump rope, he soon conceives a passion for the austere, sleepwalking relative. His proposal of marriage turned down, he has her put on a fetishly preserved wedding dress, drugged and, with Ramona’s dutiful help, carried to his bedroom. Spied on by Rita, he is about to consummate his lust, but seems to repent or despair of it, only to present the act as fait accompli in the morning and then reverse the claim.

She leaves for the convent but in the next village is summoned back to view his body hanging by the neck from the jump rope. Soon his illegitimate womanizer son Jorge (Francisco Rabal, Teresita’s father) arrives with his mistress Lucia (Victoria Zinny) to claim his own and modernize house and farming techniques. Viridiana will stay, too. Feeling responsible for uncle’s suicide, she cannot take the veil but plans instead to do good works by inviting local beggars to live and toil on the estate and get religion. Guardedly deferential in her presence, out of it they are repulsive, nasty, ungrateful, greedy, thieving and lustful.

In a storage attic where a cat pounces on mice, Jorge beds adoring Ramona but, as jealous Lucia notes on leaving in a huff, has his antenna turned towards cousin Viridiana. This son’s blunt pragmatism brings about reforms, and he even is nice enough to rescue a maltreated mongrel dog -- ironically, another unhappy case limps by unnoticed in the opposite direction -- but, to the “Hallelujah Chorus,” Viridiana’s piety and sacrifice turn to ashes, a second unnatural death occurs, and it is not at all certain that her virginity is not taken by a scrofulous savior.

In what was reportedly another bamboozling of Madrid’s watchdogs, the camera slowly backs away as practical rake Jorge needs little to urge both Ramona and defeated cousin Viridiana to learn to play cards while tinny pop “Shiny Doll” replaces Handel’s heaven.

Hitchcock has been referenced -- mordant humor, plot twists, the substitution of one blonde for another -- but Buñuel’s blanket disgust is more Molière sans deus ex machina. Used every man after his desert, none shall scape whipping.

(Released by Kingsley-International Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)