Los olvidados

EN

“The greatness of this film can be grasped immediately when one has sensed that it never refers to moral categories. There is no Manichaeanism in the characters, their guilt is purely fortuitous – the temporary conjunction of different destinies which meet in them like crossed swords. Undoubtedly, adopting the level of psychology and morality, one could say of Pedro that he is ‘basically good,’ that he has a fundamental purity: he is the only one who passes through this mud bath without it sticking to him and penetrating him. But Jaíbo, the villain, though he is vicious and sadistic, cruel and treacherous, does not inspire repugnance but only a kind of horror which is by no means incompatible with love. One is reminded of the heroes of Genet, with the difference that in the author of the Miracle of the Rose there is an inversion of values which is not found at all here. These children are beautiful not because they do good or evil, but because they are children even in crime and even in death. Pedro is the brother in childhood of Jaíbo, who betrays him and beats him to death, but they are equal in death, such as in childhood. Their dreams are the measure of their fate. Buñuel achieves the tour de force of re-creating two dreams in the worst tradition of Hollywood Freudian surrealism and yet leaving us palpitating with horror and pity.”

André Bazin1

“Los olvidados opened in Paris late in 1950, and I flew over for the event. As I walked the streets I hadn’t seen for over ten years, tears came to my eyes. All my surrealist friends saw the movie at Studio 28 and were very moved; yet the following day when I met Georges Sadoul for a drink in a café near the Etoile, he confided to me that the Communist party told him not to say or write anything about it.
“Too bourgeois,” he replied, when I asked him why.
“Bourgeois?” I echoed, stupidly. “What’s bourgeois about it?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “there’s the scene where we’re looking through a window at some boys being propositioned by a homosexual and a policeman comes along and frightens the guy away. According to the party line, your policeman is doing something good and useful, and you know that’s not exactly the position to take on policemen. And at the end, in the jail, you have this kind, humane warden letting one of the boys out to buy cigarettes.”
As criticism, it was hopelessly childish, but there was no taking anything back. Ironically, the Russian director Pudovkin happened to see it a few months 'later and wrote an enthusiastic review in Pravda, after which the French Communist party did an immediate about-face, much to Sadoul’s relief.
This story illustrates one of the major reasons for my antipathy to the Communist party. Another reason is the Communists’ tendency to rewrite history and ignore psychology, as when they declare after a comrade has been exposed as a “traitor” that he’d disguised his hand very well, but was of course a traitor from the very beginning.”

Luis Buñuel2

Max Aub: Making Los olvidados was a way to be yourself again.

Luis Buñuel: Exactly. Los olvidados was a return to the self. We were having a very hard time. Especially Larrea. I still had a little money left from La gran calavera. We had a lot of fun. More than he admits. He was up for anything, as long as it made him some money, and one of our ideas turned out to be Los olvidados. We got the idea of making a melodrama – the cheapest kind of melodrama – about a newsboy: ‘A Little Orphan at Your Service, Boss.’ We had a great time adding scenes, each one worse than the last, lots of it plagiarized, taking stuff from here and there, like a Peter Lorre movie. I told Dancigers the story, and he didn’t like it at all. He said to do whatever I wanted, but to make it worthwhile. Then he said he had a Spaniard who could work with me, a young actor. It was Alcoriza. He introduced us, and I got down to work. Around the same time, Larrea and I read in the news – there were a lot of incidents like it – that they’d found the body of an eleven year old boy who’d been tossed onto a garbage dump. ‘So, this could be a starting point.’”

Max Aub in conversation with Luis Buñuel3

• 1André Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock, translated by Sabine d'Estrée (New York: Seaver Books, 1982),35-36.
• 2Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh. The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 150-151.
• 3Max Aub, Conversations with Buñuel. Interviews with the Filmmaker, Family Members, Friends and Collaborators, translated and edited by Julie Jones (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1984), 82.