Surrealist director Luis Bunuel’s great, devilish comedy has one of the simplest plots of all time. Three upper crust couples keep making plans for lunch and dinner together only to see those plans ruined again and again before anyone can take a single bite. And that’s it, Daddy-O. It’s like an art film version of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. These characters lose and lose again—the draw is what bizarre gag Bunuel cooks up each time to make it happen. There are misunderstandings about invitations. There’s the visit to a restaurant where the owner lays dead in the next room and unnerves the wives too much for them to eat. There’s the visit to another restaurant that’s run out of everything, including tea, coffee, and water. There’s the 
invitation they accept to a military general’s home only to get there and be served plastic food and have a curtain part to reveal that they’re onstage in a play. The characters here are all hateful snakes, shallow and self-involved. They’re as nonplussed by the interruption of their dinner as they are by everything else. The men are all government officials and businessmen secretly profiting off of drug-smuggling, with Fernando Rey as a South American ambassador who lives under constant threat of assassination. Along the way, we get sly commentary on class tension and the military, as well as complex dream sequences that sometimes turn out to be dreams within dreams, with someone dreaming about someone else dreaming.
The premise here is the inverse of Bunuel’s bizarre 1962 film The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at an elegant dinner party find themselves inexplicably unable to leave.