Los Olvidados (1950)

Review by All Movie Guide
Luis Buñuel was little more than a footnote in motion picture history for his two early surrealist films with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, when Los Olvidados boldly affirmed his status as a major international director. A brutal and unflinching look at the ugly circumstances of life for juvenile delinquents and runaways in Mexico City, Los Olvidados seems like the model for many "socially responsible" films about financially and spiritually underprivileged youth that appeared in the 1950s and '60s, as it also looks back toward the Italian neorealism that had begun in the second half of the 1940s. But this is unmistakably the work of Buñuel, the arch cynic and surrealist, and if he casts a relatively kind eye on several of his young protagonists -- most notably the tragic Pedro (Alfonso Mejía), cast off from his family with nowhere to turn -- his view of the adult world is jaundiced beyond redemption (significantly, the most sinister and least sympathetic of the film's delinquents, Jaibo [Roberto Cobo], is also the oldest). In Buñuel's universe, mothers turn their backs on their sons and sleep with their friends, blind beggars play sexual games with young girls, wealthy men proposition young boys, and cripples are so venomous that one feels little or no sympathy for them when they're attacked. The film's sole compassionate adult, the warden of a juvenile home, is decent and caring but ineffectual, an easily surmounted obstacle to the corruption of the outside world. Punctuated by beautifully troubling dream sequences, Los Olvidados was first released in the United States as The Young and the Damned, and the title was apt, though Buñuel makes abundantly clear that if these young men have been condemned to hell, it is one that the adult world (and, implicitly, ourselves) have helped to build and maintain. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide