Word: bunuel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gang of savage slum children running wild on the outskirts of Mexico City, where they steal, beat up a blind beggar, attack a legless man and commit murder. Filmed in Mexico as Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones), the picture was directed by Spam's onetime surrealist Moviemaker Luis Bunuel and photographed by Mexico's famed Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. The Young and the Damned is in the raw, realistic tradition of such classic juvenile-delinquency movies as the Russian Road to Life, the American Wild Boys of the Road and the Italian Shoe Shine. In some respects...
With a keen camera, Director Bunuel examines the piles of rubble, squalid hovels and garbage heaps where people scrounge for food like animals. The acting, by a cast that is largely amateur, is as nakedly authentic as the settings, particularly in the performance of Roberto Cobo as Jaibo, the frighteningly cruel leader of the gang, and Miguel Inclan as the old blind beggar who intones a litany of hate for the boys, "One less, one less," as Jaibo is shot down by the police...
...movie does not offer any solution to the problem it poses beyond leaving it to "the progressive forces of our time." Says Director Bunuel: "There is nothing imagined in this film. It is all merely true." But, in its unrelieved gloom and its total sociological despair, The Young and the Damned sometimes seems as one-dimensional and as far short of the truth as a lurid propaganda poster. Typical sequence: the body of a murdered boy being carted on muleback to a public garbage dump while his mother unknowingly passes...