Susana; El Bruto

After his two avant- garde collaborations with fellow surrealist Salvador Dali – Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930) – Luis Buñuel disappeared below the radar in Mexico until reappearing at Cannes with Los Olvidados in 1951. He continued working there until re-establishing himself in Europe in the 1960s as one of the great directors. His mostly little-known Mexican films – rough-hewn, low-budget melodramas for the most part – are always interesting, and these two early ones complement each other as they explore characteristic themes of lust, cruelty, class, hypocrisy and corruption. In Susana , a satanic femme fatale offers up successful prayers for escape from her hellhole of a reform school and proceeds to ingratiate herself into a wealthy bourgeois family where she proceeds to destroy everyone around her. In El Bruto , a violent, ox-like abattoir worker (the great Pedro Armendáriz) is hired to do a slum landlord's dirty work and is destroyed by his corrupt employer and his beautiful young wife (the magnificent Katy Jurado, who became a Hollywood star that same year in High Noon ). Significant bricks in a major oeuvre.