header by Emerson Taymor, 2005
2. The Conquest
Bosley Crowther, review of Los Olvidados
March 25, 1952
LOS OLVIDADOS
By Bosley Crowther
A brutal and unrelenting picture of poverty and juvenile crime in the slums of Mexico City is presented in The Young and the Damned, a Mexican semi-documentary that was put on yesterday at the Trans-Lux Fifty-second Street. Although made with meticulous realism and unquestioned fidelity to facts, its qualifications as dramatic entertainment—or even social reportage—are dim.
For it is obvious that Luis Bunuel, who directed and helped write the script, had no focus or point of reference for the squalid, depressing tale he tells. He simply has assembled an assortment of poverty-stricken folk—paupers, delinquents, lost children, and parents of degraded morals—and has mixed them all together in a vicious and shocking mélange of violence, melodrama, coincidence, and irony.
To be sure, Mr. Bunuel does attract unstinted sympathy for a boy who appears the most pathetic victim of the state in which he lives. This lad is the son of a mother who has long since abandoned him, who resists his feeble bids for affection, and who gives herself to his partner in crime. Bullied and dominated by the latter, the boy is led into murder and other crimes and finally is murdered by his partner, who appears some sort of irredeemable psychopath.
Mr. Bunuel also assaults us with visual details of poverty and crime that will stagger the most case-hardened and make the timids' hair stand on end. The vicious badgering of a blind beggar and the ruthless beating of a cripple by a gang of boys are only minor indiscretions. The frenzied flaying to death of chickens is the cue for the beating to death of humans by the bully. The suggestion of madness is plain.
But why there should be this wild coincidence of evil and violence is not explained, nor is any social solution even hinted, much less clarified. A foreword merely states that the correction of this problem of poverty and delinquency is left to the "progressive forces" (whatever they are) of our times.
In the role of the bully, Roberto Cobo is a slashing creature of harsh depravities, while Alfonso Mejia is boyish and touching as the lad who is lonely and doomed. Estela Inda is metallic as the mother, Miguel Inclan is repulsive as the blind man, and a youngster named Alma Fuentes is appealing as a girl of the slums.
This picture, under its original title of Los Olvidados, previously was shown at the Cinema 48 without English subtitles. It is well provided with same in its present showing.