A breathtaking work of socially conscious surrealism, Buñuel’s unromantic portrait of Mexican slum life in 1950 has lost none of its clout in the years since it first appeared. Charting the misfortunes experienced by the street children of the title, Los Olvidados plays hellishly with the conscience of the viewer and culminates in the
death of its doomed principal characters. Though clearly influenced by the conventions of Italian neo-realism, the poetry is not in the pity. Rather, Buñuel paints a series of nightmare tableaux of drunken fathers, unfeeling shrewish mothers and children who prey or the weak and the old. This stark tale is made all the more disturbing by the director’s fiercely jarring imagery – dogs are dressed like children, children die like dogs and an oedipal dream sequence featuring raw meat is impossible to forget.