Film of the Day: 62

The Young and the Damned  (1950)

I think it's safe to say that at the moment, the best director to come out of Spain is Pedro Almodóvar (who I am a big fan of). But before Pedro, there was the great Luis Buñuel who was also a major influence on Pedro and is recognised as the greatest Spanish film-maker.

Luis was born in Calanda, Teruel, Aragón, Spain. In 1917 while studying in Madrid, he met his close friend Salvador Dalí and in 1925 he moved to Paris. Then in 1929 they collaborated and made Un chien andalou, a short dream-like film with a woman's eye being slit with a blade. It is still shocking today.

He then made L'Âge d'Or which was seen to some as an attack on Catholicism, so of course made an even bigger scandal than his short film. In result, the police banned the film for 50 years.

After the scandal, Luis returned to Spain and directed one of the first mockumentaries called Land Without Bread. But to escape the fascism of Franco, he fled to America. There he began working on Spanish language remakes of American films which then led to dubbing. But he later moved to Mexico in 1946 and in 1950 he unleashed Los Olvidados.

This is one of my favourite films of Buñuel and one of the most powerful realism films. Here he shows us the poverty of Mexico City, in the slums. We see the crime that it bears due to its poverty, and the many juvenile gangs. The main two characters in the film are Pedro and El Jaibo (the leader of the gang). El Jaibo is a pure delinquent who's fresh out of jail and seems to have no mercy. When Jaibo finds out that one of his friends (Julián) was the one who put him in jail, he pays him a visit with Pedro and beats him to death with a rock. Pedro is now an accomplice to a murder. He even robs a blind man at one point, destroy his belongings and beat him.

Pedro on the other hand is a young innocent kid who seems to be with the wrong crowd. His mother knows this and cannot stand the fact that he hangs around with these delinquents. Can he reform himself? To me, the most beautiful scene of the film is when Pedro is sleeping and we see a dream-like sequence of him getting up and seeking his mothers love (as it is said that his dreams were the nourishment for his films). It is beautiful scene.

Luis Buñuel

Buñuel later went on to make Él, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Nazarín, The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert and Viridiana in Mexico until he went back to France to start his second French period. There he made some of his most famous films such as Diary of a Chambermaid, Belle de Jour (probably his most famous film), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire.

He later returned to Mexico City where he died in 1983 today. In Calanda where he was born, there is even a head statue of him as he will forever be remembered as the pride of Spain (in film).