| | | A Stunning Companion Piece to Los Olvidados.
Features: DVD, Spanish
Two of Mexico's finest actors star in this fiery melodrama by master director Luis Bunuel. Pedro Armendariz (Maria Candelaria, Three Godfathers) plays a physically strong but simple-minded slaughterhouse worker who is hired by a brutal landlord to evict unwanted tenants. His life is complicated when he falls for the slumlord's seductive wife, played by Ariel-winner Katy Jurado (Broken Lance, High Noon).Bold, brutal, and blistering, The Brute is a highlight of Bunuel's Mexican period, in which he fit his themes and ideas into the popular Mexican melodrama.
"...remains one of Bunuel's crowning achievements." Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
"The hero's wonderful crooked walk in the final shot seems the perfect emblem of Bunuel's own sly subversion in adverse circumstances." Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Editor's Note
A working-class tough is hired to terrorize the tenants of a Mexico City apartment complex by the landlord. He kills one of the tenants and then falls in love with the victim's daughter, only to discover that the vicious landlord is his natural father.
| Features | Audio: Spanish Dolby Digital Stereo | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Facets Multimedia |
| Release Date: 10/23/2007 |
| Running Time: 83 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1952 | | Catalog ID: 95093 | | UPC: 00736899112622 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Video: B&W |
Aspect Ratio | | Standard 1.33:1 [4:3] |
| Cast & Crew
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| | Professional Reviews | New York Times
"...A treat for students of the great Luis Buñuel....Unreconstructed surrealis[m]..." 09/21/1983 p.C22CinePassion.org 9 of 10
The political and the bestial brought together by Luis Bunuel in a burlesque of Victorian melodrama, very radicalized, very funny -- "La ley es la ley," the rich oppressor (Andres Soler) tells the tenants about to be tossed out of their homes, a pan from an ornate Virgin Mary shrine to the slaughterhouse below finds the titular troglodyte (Pedro Armendariz) dragging a carcass across the floor. The plot opens on a note of communal insurrection: the tenants refuse to leave their building, Soler consults his wife (Katy Jurado) about ways to quell their revolt, she responds by scissoring off the heads of her flowers. Armendariz is the boss's Caliban, shanghaied from his leeching family to do Soler's bidding, a bovine hothead who cracks walnuts with the flex of his biceps and grins like a kid at the sight of Jurado sprawled provocatively in his bed...The violence within Armendariz is no match for Jurado's own passion, however; climactic revelations make the revolution an Oedipal matter, the hysteria escalates subversively until it boils over, leaving exposed nerves and Bunuel's superb final jest, human melodrama reflected in the accusatory eye of the rooster perched on a staircase. - Fernando F. Croce
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