L'Age D'Or is a legendary and a living classic, whose humor and eroticism remain undated. "In Paris in the late twenties, Bunuel mixed eagerly with the Surrealists, and both Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or are surrealist films. L'Age D'Or, which until this year was banned for public showing, is distinctly Freudian, suggesting Bunuel's violent reaction to the sexual perversions he had encountered at his Jesuit school. The swelling chords of Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' on the soundtrack add to the erotic atmosphere; the lovers fight continually against everyone else in this symbolic world. Freedom, Bunuel appears to emphasize, exists only in sexual indulgence or, more precisely, in complete unselfconsciousness. The film is rich in cinematic innovations - the interior monologue, the use of mirrors and so on - but it is still deliberately obscure in parts.... 'Surrealism taught me that life has a moral meaning that man cannot ignore,' he has said. 'Through Surrealism I discovered for the first time that man is not free.'" --Peter Cowie, "Seventy Years Of Cinema," 1969