Los Olvidados

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. Here, as elsewhere, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa gave form to Buñuel’s wicked humor, simply by exerting his unflinching eye for detail. 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.”