Movie Type: Juvenile Delinquency Film, Childhood Drama
Themes: Kids in Trouble, Down on Their Luck
Main Cast: Alfonso Mejía, Roberto Cobo, Estela Inda, Miguel Inclan, Efrain Arauz, Alma Delia Fuentes
Release Year: 1950
Country: MX
Run Time: 88 minutes
Plot
The winner of two Cannes Film Festival awards, Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (aka The Forgotten Ones and The Young and the Damned) was the director's first international box-office success. Yet Buñuel showed no signs of curbing the outrageous iconoclasm that made him famous in Europe and South America; one of the more lasting images of the film is the clash-of-cultures shot of a glistening new skyscraper rising above the squalid slums of Mexico City. The story concerns a gang of juvenile delinquents, whose sole redeeming quality is their apparent devotion to one another. Part of the film's perverse fascination is watching Buñuel's street punks cause misery to those less fortunate. The audience immediately identifies with Pedro (Alfonso Mejía), the youngest gang member, who evinces a spark of decency; yet Pedro, like the others, remains a victim of circumstances far beyond his control. Throughout, Buñuel maintains an objective tone; it is our responsibility, not his, to judge the gang members. Seasoned with haunting dream sequences, Los Olvidados was the opening volley in what would turn out to be Buñuel's most creative period. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
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
Mario Ramirez - Julian's Father; Ernesto Alonso - Narrator; Javier Amezcua - Julian; Francisco Jambrina - Farm School Director; Victor Manuel Mendoza; Jesus Navarro - The Lost Boy; Jorge Perez - Pelon; Sergio Villareal
Credit
Luis Buñuel - Director, Carlos Savage - Editor, Rodolfo Halffter - Composer (Music Score), Rodolfo Halffter - Musical Direction/Supervision, Edward FitzGerald - Production Designer, Gabriel Figueroa - Cinematographer, Oscar Dancigers - Producer, Sergio Kogan - Producer, Edward FitzGerald - Set Designer, Luis Alcoriza - Screenwriter, Luis Buñuel - Screenwriter, Oscar Dancigers - Screenwriter
