EL BRUTO (director: Luis Bunuel; cast: Pedro Armendariz, Katy Jurado, Rosita Arenas, Andres Soler, 1952-Mex.)
One of the excellent early films Bunuel made while in Mexico. He tells the story of an impoverished people, living a day-to-day existence, who are being forced out of their housing because their landlord (Soler) wants to build a new house on that site for himself and his mistress (Jurado). The tenants refuse to leave peacefully, so the landlord upon the urging of Jurado, gets an enforcer (Pedro), known as El Bruto, who works for him in his slaughterhouse, to get rid of the tenants' four ringleaders.
El Bruto hits the father of Rosita, one of the ringleaders, and kills him unintentionally. This precipitates the other tenants going after El Bruto, which results in someone sticking a nail into his shoulder. El Bruto bursts into one of the landlord's apartments and has the attractive Rosita remove the nail from him. He falls in love with her, and the focus of the film now becomes on how the stupid El Bruto comes to recognize who his real enemies are. This is tough for him to do because the landlord has always treated him as a son. But he soon learns that the landlord had an affair with his mother, who worked for him as a maid, and that the landlord is really his father, and that, he does not really like his bastard son.
When El Bruto moves into the landlord's house and begins to work for him as a butcher and enforcer, Jurado falls passionately in love with the brute. She can't let go of him. So when she finds out that he is now living with Rosita, she tells Rosita that he killed her father. She also tells the landlord that El Bruto ravaged her, which enrages the jealous Soler into trying to kill El Bruto. This fails and the landlord is killed. But now the police close in on him and kill him in the landlord's housing complex. The tenants are happy because they will no longer be evicted. But the focus of the film, is on how El Bruto slowly changed his thinking process... The lasting images are very powerful in this politically savy film.
REVIEWED ON 11/12/98 GRADE: B
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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