With love but without pity, Luis Buñuel unfolds the story of a gang of slum kids who become delinquents as a defense against poverty, lack of affection, and the cruelty of police and pederasts on the city streets. In the characters of Jaibo, the gang leader, and Pedro, his naive victim, Buñuel makes a subtle distinction between corruption and delinquency. But as fellow Surrealist and Buñuel biographer Ado Kyrou pointed out, “there is no moralizing, as in American films of the same type; rather, the film testifies to the great distress of our times.” A gang of youths tipping a legless beggar out of his cart; a chicken staring down a beaten blind man; Pedro's dream in which his mother offers him a side of beef with a saintly smile: such images evidence a passionate surrealism. Buñuel: “There is nothing imagined in this film; it is all merely true.”