Customer Reviews

Los Olvidados Aka The Forgotten and The Young and the Damned

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The story of troubled youth and urban violence has been told many times, but this is, perhaps, the best film on the subject ever made. This is an unblinking look at the hell on earth that looks like slums of Mexico City. It is also a masterful combination of gritty realism and Buñuel's surrealism like in the scene of young Pedro's dream of Virgin Mary with a face of his mother whose love he desperately needs but never knows.

All the characters, including a young boy caught up in a criminal world but trying to be good, his tired mother who does not have time to love her children, the brutal and cruel gang leader with his own story that breaks your heart are not just wonderfully written and acted, they are absolutely real and would stay with you long after the film is over. Shocking, erotic, and sad, this is a masterpiece - the perfect film from the beginning until the harrowing and devastating end.

This is a deeply affecting film about the poor in Mexico City, in I believe about 1950. The principal protagonist is a young boy in a large disordered family, whose promiscuous mother oversees alone; he is unloved, but struggling to do the right thing and full of rage. One of his friends is an evil young criminal, whom a gang of kids looks up to as someone who controls his own fate. He is one of those destructive personalities that, if you have the misfortune to encounter intimately, will leave his mark. There are many other characters, all finely drawn and relentless in their brutal realism, including an abandoned peasant boy and his abusive caretaker, a blind musician full of hate.

The young boy is seeking to find what to do with his life and even gets some help from an institution run by a good man, who gets him a job as an apprentice in a silver smith's shop. It is a way ahead for the boy and he takes to it with great energy and hope. Of course, things don't work out the way they should, in what can only be called a catastrophe that no one will ever know about. I don't want to reveal the plot, of course, but Bunuel serves up an awful tragedy with total honesty and an utter lack of sentimentality. I almost wept at the end.

Bunuel adds many subtle twists to the film, such as the criminal's affair with a woman, perhaps a passing on of his bad genes. There is also the blind musician, exulting in death, a laugh that entered my nightmares when I first saw the film 30 years ago. The images are unforgettable, such as the dream of the boy with his mother, when she is offering him meat only to have the criminal emerge from under the bed to take it.

REcommended with enthusiasm. This is a great, even pioneering film that does not end with a happy ending or indulge in any hollywoodian moralizing.

This is one of Buñuel's best films, and one of the most unusual because of its "realistic" characteristics. Its impact remains intact after decades, the images potent, and there are gems to be discovered every time one sees it. Try to count how many times roosters, chickens, and even baby chicks appear in the film, for instance, and why. Or how many visual echoes there are (repetition of particular frames, for instance). The dream sequence is still as searingly beautiful as when I first saw it (gapingly, at age 16!). Not to be missed.

Los Olvidados (Luis Bunuel, 1950)

I'll admit from the outset that I haven't seen all of Luis Bunuel's prolific output, but as far as those films I've seen, Los Olivdados is unique in that Bunuel goes for a realism that would be entirely out of place in a movie like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or Viridiana. This is a movie about the forgotten, the stepped-on, those whose lives are, in many ways, already surreal enough that even the impressive talents of M. Bunuel couldn't do much to augment the general absurdity, lack of love, as dissociation from reality that are a daily part of the lives of these kids. That said, you've seen the main theme of this movie in many of Bunuel's films over the years: the corruption of the innocent (viz. Diary of a Chambermaid, the aforementioned Viridiana, Belle de Jour, etc.). In this case, the innocent is Pedro (Alfonso Mejia, in the first role of a twenty-year career), and the corruptor, or at least the agent of corruption (for at the base, the corruptor is simply the way of life brought on by crushing poverty), is El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), the oldest and pushiest kid on the block, and thus the leader by default. There are times when it seems El Jaibo wants to protect Pedro from the corrupting influence of the life they lead, even while teaching him how to survive ingrains it in his system; one cannot, however, as they saying goes, be in the world and not of it.

IMDB's trivia section notes that when the film was originally release din its native Mexico, its theatrical run lasted just three days; pressure from the upper classes and the government closed it down. That says more than I ever could about the truths to be found in this movie. After all, you know you're doing it correctly when you piss off the right people. ****

After a silence of years, Buñuel has a new movie: Los olvidados. If this film is compared to those performed with Salvador Dalí, surprised all the rigor with which Buñuel carried to its extreme limits its first intuitions. For one thing, Los Olvidados represents not only a high point of artistic maturity, but a turning point that wit takes us back to the Hurdes, but then there is a suffocating despair: sleeping doors closed, leaving only that of blood and primitive violence.

Until now, the action described is accurate as clockwork, amazing like a dream and unforgiving as the silent march of the lava. In this film, the blood, horror, hatred, desire, desilussion, death, hopeless and wickedness twin themselves. Such is the weight of his realism, which finally seems unbearable, because that's the reality in nature, wild and unforgiving where justice, forgiveness, redemption and mercy are absent, as occurs in nature.

Buñuel rediscovers that behind the apparent inevitability that freedom brings, it hides behind the mask of destiny. This clash between human consciousness and the external fatality is the essence of the tragic event.

As far as my memory can remember, I can only name a film with similar characteristics: The Greed of Erik Von Stroheim.

And of course, we can not ignore the tacit fact that underlies in the historical moment in which it was filmed. Los olvidados is the homage paid by Buñuel to Italian Neo Realism.

In that sense, this film is not only a masterpiece in itself, but a movie out of its time. Hence its beating actuality, because those suburbs Mexicans differ very little respect to any other place in the world: the naked violence that precedes death.

See it if restrictions. It is a true icon in cinema history.

The true reality of youngsters living in the harsh streets of Mexico City. Universal topic and never outdated, as the situation for the youth has not changed even after half a century. Was banned in Mexico when it came out and had to be released in France, which caused a big outcry in the European countries. Mexico did not like this and the movie dissappeared "mysteriously" to be found in the 80's in the basement of the film archaves, stashed away in the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I use it to parallel story with EL Lazarillo de Tormes and to teach Realismo Mágico (Magical realism). Fair warning that it is violent and has some disturbing content,for which I warn the audience before showing it.I Highly recommend it.

This is at least the 3rd time I have seen this film. "Los Olvidados" is ultimately a cautionary tale, a battle between good and evil filled with various archetypes--vicious, amoral El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo); conflicted Pedro (Alfonso Mejia), his partner-in crime, who although basically good, is attracted to El Jaibo's delinquent world; decent, hard-working, compassionate Julián (Javier Amézcua); Don Carmelo the blind musician (Miguel Inclán), a misanthrope who, in wishing death upon all the misfortunate children, thinks he is doing them a favor. Pedro's difficult, put upon mother (Estela Inda) neglects him and causes him to rebel; she also ends up being seduced by evil (in the form of El Jaibo). At one point in the picture, Pedro is placed in a type of reform school, and his given his freedom by the director. However, immediately upon leaving the school, Pedro encounters El Jaibo, and his downward spiral recommences.

Highlights include the famous dream sequence of Chapter 3, and El Jaibo's dream-hallucination sequence in the final scene of the film. In those sequences, Bunuel's surrealism appears, although otherwise the style of the picture could be described as brutal realism. The score by Rodolfo Halffter is melodramatic, moody, and an excellent complement to the film. The set and background features a smoky, dirty atmosphere accentuating the gritty life of the characters. There are creepy fairy-tale like touches as well, for example, the exterior of Meche's (Alma Delia Fuentes) Dickensian shack, the interior of which is crowded with humans; burros and chickens reside in the adjacent shack. Supplemental material is featured in the "características especiales" portion of this DVD, including biographies of the picture's participants and an alternate "happy" ending to the film.

Stephen C. Bird, author of "Hideous Exuberance: A Satire"

this wasn't available on dvd for a really long time, good to see it finally is. it should be noted that this was released in 1950, not 1959 as the amazon description states. will comment on the quality of the picture when i get the disc in hand.

I paid highly for this version thinking it was in color and had subtitles wrong!

Movie itself was interesting. It has been mentioned as a predecessor of Sin Nombre. Just go see Sin Nombre!