El bruto

Among Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films are commercial comedies and potboilers that are infused with the director’s incisive black humor and his profound exasperation with bourgeois morality and human pettiness. In El bruto, Pedro Armendáriz plays a young slaughterhouse worker who becomes a bourgeois lackey when a landowner harnesses him to strongarm tenants. Even the redemptive love of the daughter of the tenant he kills cannot save the life of this doomed figure. Ado Kyrou described the film as “a sublime melodrama. . . . All the elements of traditional melodrama accumulate, but they are transformed by Buñuel’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.”