Among Bu-uel's Mexican films are commercial comedies and potboilers which nevertheless are infused with the director's incisive black humor and his profound exasperation with bourgeois morality and human pettiness. In El Bruto, Pedro Armendariz plays a young slaughterhouse worker who becomes a bourgeois lackey when a landowner harnesses him to strongarm tenants. He kills one tenant with a single blow, greatly impressing the boss's sexually bored young wife (Katy Jurado) who becomes his mistress. Even the redemptive love of the daughter of the man he killed cannot save the life of this doomed figure. Ado Kyrou has described the film as "a sublime melodrama...All the elements of traditional melodrama accumulate, but they are transformed by Bu-uel's social grasp of the subject and the vision which constantly opens up into Surrealism despite its realist appearances: the senile grandfather gets up in the night to steal chocolates, the abattoirs are protected by an image of the Virgin Mary...love as pure as in L'Age d'or changes the destiny of men and makes them rediscover life...(A) minor film (but) one of Bu-uel's best directed."