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The forgotten details of THE YOUNG AND THE DAMNED after 70 years of its premiere

Rafael Aviña

In the mid forties, Mexico City was suffering the extreme effects of a modernity that strongly defined the division between the possessors and the dispossessed, just as the national cinema of that time insisted on documenting. The extra profits for businessmen and politicians in relation to foreign investments were notorious and, at the same time, the government corruption and the multiplication of the nouveau riche expanded the social gap and the contrasts became evident despite the rise of an emerging middle class.

In contrast to the luxurious mansions located in Lomas de Chapultepec, there were areas such as La Candelaria de los Patos and an infinity of irregular settlements that made up the famous lost cities on the outskirts of the capital, and the same happened with the nightlife. In the nocturnal Mexico of the era of President Miguel Aleman (1946-1952), the wealthy class enjoyed the high life in luxury cabarets such as the Waikiki or El Patio, and the working class had at their disposal hundreds of sleazy nightclubs in the streets of El Organo or in the Nonoalco area and other similar neighborhoods.

The curious thing is that the very start of the project was the antithesis of what turned out to be The Young and the damned. Thus, the first project was centered on a plot entitled: ¡Mi huerfanito, jefe! [My little orphan], inspired by the lottery-selling children, written by Buñuel and Juan Larrea; a rather melodramatic and conventional plot about that precarious childhood, suggested by the producer Oscar Dancigers. However, the box-office success of The Great Madcap (1949) unleashed Dancigers’ enthusiasm and he then urged Buñuel to film a tougher story about childhood poverty. It was then when the filmmaker involved Alcoriza and traveled along with him and the Canadian scenographer Edward Fitzgerald to several of the lost cities and proletarian neighborhoods of Mexico City, in an attempt to document abandoned childhood.

As if that were not enough, Buñuel showed the exodus of thousands of provincial people who left their ranches to try their luck in the urban illusion that the city had become, represented in the character of Ojitos (Mario Ramírez), an indigenous boy abandoned by his father in the capital. All of its protagonists were teenagers, almost children, in a hostile society that generated criminals and victims to be sacrificed, such as the blind Carmelo (Miguel Inclán) states when he hears the shots that put an end to the life of Jaibo (Roberto Cobo): “They will fall one by one! I wish they would kill them all before they are born!

And so, between February 16 and March 9, 1950, and with a cast of young, non-professional actors, Buñuel began the shooting of The Young and the Damned at Estudios Tepeyac and in various locations in Mexico City, such as Nonoalco, the neighborhood of La Romita, the wasteland where the Medical Center would be built years later, the small town of Tlalpan, San Juan de Letrán and more. And precisely one of the “damned ones” of this remarkable film is the figure of José de Jesús Aceves, actor, writer, theater director and manager of the small theater El Caracol. His role in The Young and the Damned was decisive, as Aceves was the dialogue director and the one responsible for making believable the performances of the children protagonists of this story, perhaps the best Mexican film of all time and one of the key works of world cinema.

Nevertheless, the most curious lost detail of The Young and the Damned is its double ending, which the UNAM Film Archive randomly located among several cans of cellulose nitrate in a cellar at Estudios Churubusco rented by Manuel Barbachano Ponce. The original negative had nine rolls when it was supposed to be eight: the ninth included the alternative ending. Dancigers protected himself and asked Luis Buñuel to shoot another ending, in case they were forbidden to exhibit the original one. In fact, Buñuel shot two different endings without anyone noticing. One, devastating and of an unbearable rawness that has prevailed since its release. And an alternative one, where evil is punished and good consciousness triumphs over a made-up reality: the one of a country where melodrama has been its main bet.

Translated by Adrik Díaz