Among the late Luis Buñuel's Mexican films are several comedies and potboilers which, though aimed at a popular audience, are infused with Buñuel's incisive black humor and his profound exasperation with bourgeois morality and human pettiness. Four of these Mexican films, long neglected by critics, are presented this month (see January 30 and 31) in newly subtitled, 35mm prints struck from the original negatives.

El Bruto
The Surrealist writer Ado Kyrou has described El Bruto as “a sublime melodrama.... All the elements of traditional melodrama are there, but they are transfigured by the social implications of the subject and by Buñuel's vision, which always leads to the surrealistic in what is apparently so realistic a film.... Though El Bruto is a minor film, it is one of Buñuel's best directed.” Pedro Armendariz stars as a young slaughterhouse worker, nicknamed El Bruto, who becomes a bourgeois lackey when a landowner harnesses him to strongarm tenants into paying their rent. He kills one tenant with a single blow, greatly impressing the boss's sexually bored young wife (Katy Jurado), who becomes his mistress. Seeking refuge from vengeful tenants, El Bruto meets and falls in love with the daughter of the man he has killed; her redemptive love draws his affiliation to the tenants and away from the bosses, but previous treachery has already committed him to a violent demise.