Review - Los Olvidados (1950)

Luis Buñuel exposes the desperate, dog-eat-dog existence of impoverished street children in this indelible 1950 drama, an early gem from his fruitful Mexican period. Set in the slums of the capitol city, it concerns a gang of delinquents, the titular "forgotten ones." Their pastimes range from rough-housing and staying out late to relieving cripples and blind beggars of their cash. Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) wants to do right by his aggrieved mother (Stella Inda), but is lead astray by El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), a diabolical older boy whose larger physical build, snake-like cunning and total lack of scruples make him a natural leader, in the Darwinian sense. Try as Pedro does to straighten out and overcome his dismal lot, he cannot dodge the fiendish, indefatigable Jaibo, or evade his own tragic fate.

Sidestepping the clichés of the "juvenile delinquent film" - cloying sentimentality and a neat resolution via altruistic intervention - and the melodramatic excess typical of Mexican productions of the period, Buñuel's account strikes a distinctive balance between psychologically-charged realism and the surrealism he helped popularize twenty years earlier. In the fashion of the so-called neorealist films that dominated European cinemas at the time, the staging is completely authentic, shot on location in the most wretched districts of Mexico City with locals serving as extras, but here there's little of the neorealists' moralistic messaging. Cruelties, from child abuse to murder, occur regularly, and are treated by the camera as they are by the characters, as perfectly natural acts that will be repeated again and again endlessly, marked only by a cut or fade to black.

Buñuel does occasionally tread into the realm of the metaphysical, and revert to his usual phantasmagoric tricks; there's a haunting dream sequence that inverts 'Zéro de conduite's ecstatic slow-motion revolt, and a primal symbolism that runs throughout, every chicken, pigeon and mongrel dog acquiring a latent significance. Still, the focus remains on the very real lives of the hapless youngsters. Thanks to the director's utterly truthful approach, we may not pity or pass judgement on the boys, but we're not likely to forget them either.