Carlos Saura's Los Golfos (aka The Delinquents) is a corrosive and impressively assured first feature. Produced by Pere Portabella, the film debuted at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Its portrait of disaffected youth living in the seamy underbelly of Madrid did not meet the approval of Franco's censors. After extensive cuts, a truncated version had a cursory release in Spain in 1962. The uncut print has only recently been reassembled and is available on a handsome looking disc put out by Radiance Films.
The film centers on a group of six young urban miscreants who participate in petty crime to survive, sometimes with the help of their moll, Visi. The hooligans rob blind ladies, pilfer fruit, assault cab drivers, loot garages, and more. No mentors or father figures exist to steer the youth towards virtue, an unspoken legacy of the Spanish Civil War. Much of the film functions as a documentary about the more sordid side of Madrid. However, Saura never flattens the characterizations into a neorealist lump. Each of the six youths is given a vibrant and distinct personality. One of the youths, Juan, shows promise as a matador, so the others pledge to steal enough money in order to jump start his career. They succeed, though at a terrible cost, and the film concludes not with Juan's triumph, but with the most depressing and despairing bull fight ever captured on film; as opposed to all those jolly ones.
Saura combines bracing neorealism with the nihilistic despair of Buñuel's Los Olvidados. The images of slum life, like women gleaning what they can from the town dump, are worthy of that master. Saura's juxtapositions are continually inventive and provocative. Fado and flamenco are contrasted with a Latin dance band out of the 1930s or a hip jazz club where the necking clubgoers are digging Gerry Mulligan. Regardless of their diversions, this is a portrait of a lost generation.
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