Viridiana

Luis Buñuel came back to Spain after decades of exile to make Viridiana in 1961, and the result was one of cinema's great scandals. It shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The Franco regime, which had hoped the prodigal's homecoming would polish its international image, then banned the film outright and dismissed the officials who had approved it, and the Vatican newspaper condemned it as blasphemous.

Silvia Pinal plays the devout would-be saint, a novice on the eve of her vows, with the great Fernando Rey as the wealthy uncle who paid for her education and whose estate she visits. Buñuel brings his lifelong arsenal of irony and provocation (fetish, dream, sacrilege, the cruelty hidden in piety) to bear on religious idealism and on her plan to do good by sheltering a band of beggars, and the film contains one of cinema's most notorious images: those beggars arranged into a grotesque parody of Leonardo's Last Supper, scored to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah.

The controversy only sealed the film's reputation. It is among the most pointed works of the Spanish-Mexican director, the film in which his surrealist instincts and his anticlerical fury came together most completely. Viridiana is savage, mordantly funny and utterly unrepentant, and it bit the hand of every institution, sacred or political, that had tried to claim it for its own.