03 · 27 · 25

EL CAMINO DE LA VIDA: THE YOUNG AND THE DAMNED by Matilde Landeta

Rafael Aviña

At the beginning of 1950, the column “Indiscreciones de una secretaria” [​​“Indiscretions of a secretary”] of Cinema Reporter magazine reported that the then screenwriter Matilde Landeta was embarking on “A new adventure called Tribunal para menores, which she hopes will be a real film... Hopefully! Now, not only will René Cardona be director and actor, but also producer...”; the information is attractive since Tribunal para menores was in essence a story very close to The Young and the Damned, not exempt of certain melodramatic situations with a conclusion altered by censorship in the antithesis of Luis Buñuel’s film.

In fact, it would be filmed belatedly six years later under the title of El camino de la vida (1956), directed not by René Cardona, but by Alfonso Corona Blake, with the participation of the children: Humberto and Rogelio Jiménez Pons, Ignacio García Torres, without acting experience, and Mario N. Navarro, —who used to appear in Hollywood B Series productions filmed in our country such as: The Black Scorpion, The Beast of Hollow Mountain or The Magnificent Seven—, as well as the already adolescent Ismael Pérez “Poncianito”, and a very young Enrique Lucero, future star of Los mediocres (dir. Servando González, 1962) and the priest in Canoa: A Shameful Memory (dir. Felipe Cazals, 1975).

El camino de la vida, like The Young and the Damned, not only used children taken from the streets, but it was also filmed in multiple exterior locations and with some disturbing documentary images, such as the area of the showers of the children's hospices of the then Distrito Federal. A film that could have been a twin story to The Young and the Damned, due to its realistic overtones, although it ended up choosing a social moral ending. In spite of this, it provides several elements of enormous rawness and scenes that are clearly documentary about child abandonment in Mexico City in the 1950s.

Made the same year as Gilberto Martínez Solares' La ciudad de los niños, which narrated the experiences of Father Álvarez from Monterrey, a Catholic priest dedicated with heart and soul to rescuing children abandoned to their fate, many of them young criminals, creating for this purpose a sort of altruistic institution that gives its name to the film; El camino de la vida was similar to the premise of The Young and the Damned, but from a more exemplary and paternalistic perspective, influenced, like Buñuel's film, by real stories taken from courts and children's reformatories.

The story opens with Enrique Lucero in the role of a former street kid who has become a good lawyer and works in a correctional center for boys where they try to rehabilitate young offenders. A series of flashbacks take us back to different cases where the sad and conflictive situations of God-forsaken children are narrated, such as Mario N. Navarro: Luisito, who accidentally murders his stepfather, engaged in drowning himself in alcohol and beating his wife. She pleads guilty to the crime to save her son, but he confesses the truth.

Another case is that of the gangly Pedro (Ignacio García Torres), who, due to the constant mockery of his classmates, decides to stick a fountain pen in a classmate's eye. Finally, El camino de la vida closes with the story of Frijolito (Rogelio Jiménez Pons) and Chinampina (Humberto Jiménez Pons), two orphaned siblings who wander through the streets until they are welcomed by a handful of little paperboys with whom they share the daily grind of selling newspapers and the skies full of stars as they sleep with them in the open, sheltered by the news of the previous day, until one afternoon, in the middle of Christmas Eve, Chinampina sees the opportunity to steal a purse and this reckless act ends with the death of her brother, run over by a truck.

With all its melodramatic situations tending towards moralizing and compassion, in which the cases were solved thanks to the good faith of peripheral characters, thus confronting Buñuel's pessimistic vision, in spite of its unpublished double ending of moralizing cut rescued by the UNAM Film Archive, El camino de la vida stands out for some of its veristic images of great documentary spirit, such as the scene of the communal baths where they take the children they remove from the street to take a shower, or the nighttime collection of these forgotten infants with real images of real abandoned children, as well as the delivery of newspapers to the little paperboys in the middle of the dawn in the neighborhood of Bucareli, and the reactions of the child actors who seemed to give life to real characters: a childhood and youth abandoned and subjugated as dangerous adults, as if it were that juvenile madman who caused panic and commotion in those years: Higinio “Pelón” Sobera de la Flor, a necrophiliac murderer who committed a couple of hasty and absurd homicides around 1952.

Translated by Adrik Díaz