Review of The Young and the Damned (1950) by Michael O — 21 Feb 2009

Ten years before the new wave, thousands of miles from Italian neorealism, Luis Bunuel made a truly radical movie. It's a story about how society at it's most modern leaves us as cold and desperate as a horny old blind man gushing at the sound of clinking coins. To be a savage isn't to be animalistic. If anything it's to be removed from that which links us to nature. The burros, the chickens, they don't abandon their children, or kill for profit, or dump bodies in ridges meant to be concealed.

It's movies like these that resonate and stir the mind more than the extremist movement in modern day France or even with the devil-may-care antics of the indie-urban-psycho-sex genre of movies like KIDS or GUMMO. Not to take away from their importance within in the social fabric of American culture yet there's something truly impacting about a film that faces the hardships of youth and humanity without romanticizing or fetishizing how different they are from us. The situations and characters in this film aren't viewed like the dancing chicken from STROSZEK but as real people we become involved with.

I'd always found Bunuel's movies simple amusements. Scathing in their commentaries they always poked at the silly customs of the wealthy and the hypocrisy of their clergy. Perhaps that's why his work never really got more than a chuckle or a "hey look, there's toilets in the dining room. get it?" Yet man, when the man really takes his gloves off he does so with the bravery of a sea captain from the 1400s. Where the hell is the Criterion for this?