I’ve seen and reviewed a few Robinson Crusoes over the years. Aidan Quinn was in a good one, Pierce Brosnan did another. “The Wild Life” was a cartoon version that came out in 2016. Georges Melies made it one of his pioneering “fantasy” shorts way back in 1903. It’s been adapted too many times and in so many different ways that it’s hard to keep count.

But I can’t recall ever catching the most straightforward and faithful-to-the-novel and its time version, the one Luis Buñuel made shortly after his international breakout hit “Los Olvidados.”

“The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” which turns up as “Robinson Crusoe” on streaming platform menus, is old fashioned in look and feel and in its “white man’s burden” racial politics. It would fall to later generations to update the 18th century novel into something a little more enlightened.

But as in Defoe’s “first novel in English,” our “hero” is shipwrecked while involved in the slave trade and does experience something of a conversion and a discovery of his own humanity during his trials.

Dan O’Herlihy went on to a long and storied Hollywood career that stretched all the way to “Robocop” and TV’s “Twin Peaks,” but “Crusoe” offered him a rare early lead, and he delivers in one of the iconic roles in all of fiction.

Buñuel faithfully presents this as a long reading from “the book” of Crusoe’s life and exploits — even showing us “the book” as was the style of such films (“Adventures of Robin Hood,” etc). The narrative is largely delivered in voice over by O’Herlihy, who recalls tumbling out of the surf on a Caribbean isle with his folding razor “my only possession, my only weapon.”

This version of the story makes the most of Crusoe’s industry and enterprise, a British Isles work ethic that has him not merely salvaging the wreck of the “Ariel,” rescuing its cat and dog as he does, but setting up his island “castle” with all the comforts of Scotland (the birthplace of Alexander Selkirk, whose true story was the inspiration for Defoe).

The first thing Crusoe reaches for on swimming aboard the wreck is a musket, the second a keg of rum.

Before he’s done, he’s constructed a fortified jungle cave-pit, cultivated grains to make bread and domesticated the island’s roaming (from earlier shipwrecks, Selkirk said) goats and invented the doggie door.

“You can wag your tail,” he notes, forlornly, “but you cannot talk to me.”

Loneliness becomes his greatest enemy, with dreams of the father he left behind and drunken hallucinations about his plight, “one day much like the other.”

And then the cannibals show up, a victim (Jaime Fernández) escapes and Crusoe intervenes, saving a man he names “Friday” who becomes both companion and subservient labor, a native who calls him “master.”

There are but tiny hints of the surrealist artiste Buñuel, the one who first gained notoriety working with Salvador Dali on “Un Chien Andalou” a quarter century earlier. The storm and wrecking of the ship are glimpsed in painterly flashes, but everything that follows is literal and simply if skillfully rendered.

The Mexican shoot skimped on having an on-set armorer. The gunfire is merely a sound effect. No flash or smoke of discharge, nothing that could be “fixed in post” back then. The sound is has a looped feel, as one would expect from an international film of the period, especially one told in voice-over (Spanish and English versions were released).

It was shot in Pathe Color, closer to Hollywood’s washed out Eastman Color than the glorious, saturated Technicolor that make films from that era still seem lush and larger than life dreams.

Still, the Buñuel “Crusoe” holds up like the benchmark telling of the story it has long been, the version every adaption since has referred to, even those that modernized its values and morality.

Rating: Approved

Cast: Dan O’Herlihy, Jaime Fernández

Credits: Directed by Luis Buñuel, scripted by Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel, based on the Daniel Defoe novel. A United Artists release on Tubi and other free streamers.

Running time: 1:30

Rating: Approved

Cast: Dan O’Herlihy, Jaime Fernández

Credits: Directed by Luis Buñuel, scripted by Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel, based on the Daniel Defoe novel. A United Artists release on Tubi and other free streamers.

Running time: 1:30