The movies have produced a great pantheon of young bad-asses but few are as cruel as the teenaged villain in Luis Buñuel's 1950 masterpiece Los Olvidados (The Forgotten, a.k.a. The Young and the Damned). Fresh out of a stint in the reformatory, Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) terrorizes a Mexico City slum as the leader of a gang of dead-end kids. Not content to rob a poor blind musician and trash his instruments, they rough up a legless man for smokes. But Jaibo outdoes himself when he looks up the kid who he believes ratted him out to the cops, then bashes his head in. A younger ruffian, Pedro (Alfonso Mejia), is the sole witness. While Pedro wrestles with his desire to do right by turning him in, Jaibo frames Pedro for a robbery and gets down with Pedro's mother. Now that's friendship.

Screening in a limited run at Cinematheque Ontario in a new 35mm print, Los Olvidados was the movie that convinced European critics that the Spanish director's work during his Mexico exile could be just as bold and perverse as his early surrealist films (or, for that matter, later hits like Belle de Jour). Andre Bazin praised Los Olvidados for its attempt to present "the objective cruelty of the world," and the movie remains shocking. Buñuel's surrealistic flair -- most famously represented here by Pedro's dream of his mother offering him a slab of raw meat -- adds a fervent psychological dimension to the drama. The strong influence of Italian neo-realism is further subverted by such outlandish sights as a boy suckling at a cow's udder and Pedro hurling an egg directly at the camera.

With the new print comes an alternate ending that was rediscovered in 1996. Ironically, it's more upbeat than the original, sparing Pedro from a horrific fate. Luckily, Buñuel's producers understood that appending a happy ending to such a corrosive vision of human society made as much sense as hiring Jaibo to babysit your kids.

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