Bu-uel's account of a night-long (life-long, class-wide) attempt of six wealthy people to sit down to dinner is the comedy of manners to end all comedies of manners. With la cr?me de la cr?me of European actors, Bu-uel produces, in lieu of dinner, the secret ingredients of the bourgeois power base. But "Bu-uel has conspicuously spared them some 'typical' vices of their class. There's no structure of mutual betrayal, no conspicuous pecking order; their plague is not the Exterminating Angel but the Interrupting One. As a French critic observed of Resnais' Muriel, 'La vie moderne est faite de ruptures'" (Raymond Durgnat). Bu-uel was 72 when he made this fresh update on Surrealist thought.