The Young and the Damned

For all its portrayal of lower class sordidness and misery, The Young and the Damned has no great social message; it is instead a vivid portrayal of rottenness under the log of a Mexican city. In this role it succeeds remarkably. Luis Bunuel has mixed elements disgusting enough to sicken, with others realistic enough to frighten. The result is a depressing, albeit excellent movie. It contains little of the traditionally tragic. Its themes are frustration, unnatural relationships, and violence; its heroes, street urchins, blind beggars, and murderers.

Despite the subject matter, Bunuel has prevented his film from becoming maudlin. It is frighteningly real and human. With excellent handling of an unobtrusive camera, and skillful direction of a relatively untrained cast, Bunuel deftly portrays naked reality.

The hero of the film--if it has a hero--is a little street urchin, Pedro, whose fault is to ally himself with an equally miserable delinquent, Jaibo, who becomes his personal devil. "Born but to die, and living but to err," Pedro is a picture of the frustrated potentiality which is typical of the characters in the movie. When he wants to become a "good boy," his mother throws him out into the street; when he stops Jaibo from beating a friend over the head, the friend is already dead. When he gets a job, Jaibo causes him to lose it. An old blind beggar sums up the mood of the show when he says, as Jaibo falls dead from police bullets, "One less . . . they all will end that way. They should be killed before they are born."

While the children face frustration at every turn, the role of the adults is characterized by the words "too late." The murdered boy's father, a bumbling buffoon in an alcoholic fog, repents the ill treatment he has given his son only after the son has been murdered. Pedro's heartless mother, once repented, passes unknowingly by the mule on which her son's body is being carried away to the garbage heap.

There is enough subtlety retained in the stark violence, nevertheless, to play with one's emotions. Authentic performance of a strikingly real though sadistic plot and good directing combine to present a memorable, though far from entertaining, experience. WILLIAM, W. BARTLEY, III