Still in a tie at #157, this is a movie by Luis Buñuel, who you will remember from such movies as Un Chien Andalou. But this isn’t — mostly, there’s a dream sequence — surrealist. It is instead a grounded, realistic movie about the lives of poor children in Mexico City. (A narration in the front claims that it’s a true story, but that’s just Buñuel lying.)

The movie does not sentimentalize these kids at all. Like, you can see that their life is terrible — one kid was abandoned in a marketplace by his dad; another one has a mom who beats him, and says she doesn’t love him and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. It’s all awful.

But… so are they. They steal money from and assault a legless man; they beat up a blind man; they kill each other in various squabbles; one of the kids sleeps with another kid’s mom and then taunts him about it.

But then everyone’s awful: That blind man exploits a “good” kid as a servant, berating and beating him. It’s just a desperate situation all around, and the desperation turns people cruel and violent.

Which is to say, it’s a brutal, grim movie. Which, y’know, makes sense when the subject of a movie is the community of gang life, and the webs of entanglement and enforcement that prevent people from getting out.

And if this sounds a little familiar to you, if you’re already thinking about the various kids-in-gangs movies that this seems a lot like, well, the other thing is that this is from 1950. I don’t know that this literally inspired later movies[1], but it sure set the template for the genre.

I expected to hate this movie, mostly because previous Buñuel movies that I’ve watched have been gratuitously cynical and edgelordy, and this subject felt like one that would fall prey to both of those tendencies. But in fact, it’s surprisingly humanistic; these feel like real people, portrayed with kindness but also with honesty. It’s a lot better than I expected it to be; it still wouldn’t make my top ten (or probably even my top hundred), but I can understand why there are people for whom it did.

  1. As far as I can tell, it’s essentially unavailable right now. This is the first movie that I couldn’t find on either streaming or disc (okay, fine, there was a DVD, but I can’t make myself pay money for a literal DVD), finally watching an unofficial — and terrible quality — rip on YouTube. ↩︎