LOS OLVIDADOS Movie Review

The Young and the Damned

After an eighteen-year hiatus from filmmaking—for political reasons that had the surreal, nightmarish logic of one of his films—the surrealist master Luis Buñuel returned to the screen triumphantly with this brilliantly lucid and utterly haunting portrait of gang youths in the slums of Mexico. Buñuel's vision is disturbing because these aren't kids who steal a loaf of bread to feed their poor mothers, or to buy clothes for school. These are children who kill each other; who throw a legless man in the street to see him in pain; who stone a blind man trying to earn money as a street musician. Buñuel claimed that the genesis of Los Olvidados (released in the U.S. as The Young and the Damned) was in the impoverished children of Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine; yet this unsparing portrait of a sociopathic generation seems light years away from De Sica's tender neo-realist work. The images here are unforgettable and searing, but their clarity and honesty negate any hint of exploitation. It's as passionate and fully felt as any “coming-of-age” film ever made, but without the reassuring balm of condescending sentimentality. The reaction was hostile at the film's initial screenings in Mexico. Buñuel wrote later that Diego Rivera's wife wouldn't speak to him after the movie, and that the Mexican ambassador to France claimed that the film dishonored his country. Yet when Buñuel was awarded the Best Director Prize for Los Olvidados at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie became an international hit, and even played to full houses in Mexico. For a number of years Buñuel continued to work in Mexico, returning to his native Spain in 1961 to begin the great final portion of his career with his brilliant—and shocking—Viridiana.

NEXT STOP … Nazarin, The Exterminating Angel, Pixote

1950 88m/B MX Alfonso Mejias, Roberto Cobo; D: Luis Bunuel. Cannes Film Festival '51: Best Director (Bunuel), Best Film. VHS HHT, DVT, NOS