The Young and the Damned (1950)
Movie · 1950 · Drama, Crime · 1h 22m · Spanish
Curator score: 9.5/10 (24K ratings)
Overview
A group of juvenile delinquents live a violent life in the infamous slums of Mexico City; among them Pedro, whose morality is gradually corrupted and destroyed by the others.
Ratings
- Curator score: 9.5/10
- IMDb: 8.2/10
- Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
- TMDB: 8.0/10
Director
Luis Buñuel
Production
Ultramar Films
Cast
Estela Inda, Miguel Inclán, Alfonso Mejía, Roberto Cobo, Alma Delia Fuentes, Francisco Jambrina, Jesús García Navarro, Efraín Arauz, Sergio Virel, Jorge Pérez, Javier Amézcua, Mario Ramírez, Ernesto Alonso
Curator Review
Verdict
A devastating, unsentimental portrait of poverty, juvenile violence, and moral collapse, made sharper by Buñuel’s surreal touches and refusal to romanticize hardship. It’s brutal, influential, and still feels disturbingly current.
Best for
- Fans of bleak social realism
- Viewers interested in Buñuel and early art cinema
- People drawn to crime dramas about youth and marginalization
- Those who can handle harsh, upsetting material
Skip if
- You want an uplifting or redemptive story
- Animal cruelty or implied sexual violence is a dealbreaker
- You prefer clean genre plotting over grim social observation
- You’re looking for a warm coming-of-age film
Overview
Buñuel turns a story of delinquent boys into something colder and more unsettling than a standard crime drama. The film is rooted in the material reality of poverty, but it never settles into simple realism; dream imagery, cruel ironies, and sudden shocks keep the world unstable and morally poisoned.
Worth noting
What makes it endure is its refusal to sentimentalize the children or the institutions around them. There is no easy innocence here, only damage passing from one generation to the next, and a city that seems to have abandoned its own future.
Bottom line
It’s a harsh watch, but a major one: formally precise, emotionally brutal, and still startlingly modern in the way it links social neglect to violence. If you can meet it on its own uncompromising terms, it’s one of the essential films of postwar cinema.
Top Letterboxd reviews
laird (5★) · 954 likes
I read a 1950s horror comic last month in which a mad scientist kidnaps two starry-eyed youths who are madly in love and locks them in a cage without food or water as part of a sadistic experiment which he proposes will prove that the bonds of love will easily crumble once the two begin to starve and their primitive animal instincts take over. Luis Buñuel wasn't so sadistic, but he certainly shared this scientist's (and Freud's) view that men… more I read a 1950s horror comic last month in which a mad scientist kidnaps two starry-eyed youths who are madly in love and locks them in a cage without food or water as part of a sadistic experiment which he proposes will prove that the bonds of love will easily crumble once the two begin to starve and their primitive animal instincts take over. Luis Buñuel wasn't so sadistic, but he certainly shared this scientist's (and Freud's) view that men… more
Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋 (5★) · 408 likes
***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.*** SPANISH REVIEW: Luis Buñuel es otro de mis directores gigantes del cine, y estoy orgulloso de presentarles la primera mejor película de su entera filmografía, la cual está considerada también como una de las mejores películas mexicanas de todos los tiempos por una versión de la revista "SOMOS" publicada en 1994, ocupando el segundo puesto justo después de ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1936), de Fernando de Fuentes. A pesar de… more
Ethan Colburn (4★) · 393 likes
Buñuel slays it! This movie is a pretty uncomfortable watch as it’s a brutal look at poverty in 50s Mexico. It follows a gang of kids navigating a life of crime both to survive and often just generally being assholes to hopeless people. This along with the animal cruelty and the implied rape make it visceral but difficult to deny the power of. It’s spectacular in its scope and weight, reminding me most closely of City of God. It feels… more
basty2049 (4.5★) · 361 likes
De las representaciones mas fieles y desgarradoras de la juventud en situaciones precarias. una tragedia totalmente atemporal y actual, a pesar de haber sido estrenada hace más de 70 años. 9 pesos de 10
noen (5★) · 351 likes
What a magnificent, raw, and realistic work about problems so many choose to ignore. An urban narrative stripped of sweetness and euphemism, one that tears apart the romanticized idealizations of a society that refuses to look at its own abandoned children, at the open wounds scattered through the alleys and sidewalks of the city. The work penetrates, without concessions, the marginalized world of youth in poverty, exposing with brutal honesty the failure of the social, familial, and institutional structures that… more What a magnificent, raw, and realistic work about problems so many choose to ignore. An urban narrative stripped of sweetness and euphemism, one that tears apart the romanticized idealizations of a society that refuses to look at its own abandoned children, at the open wounds scattered through the alleys and sidewalks of the city. The work penetrates, without concessions, the marginalized world of youth in poverty, exposing with brutal honesty the failure of the social, familial, and institutional structures that… more
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Topics
social realism, crime drama, bleak, postwar cinema, urban poverty, juvenile delinquency, surrealist touches, moral decay, tragic, black-and-white