The Street Kid, the Gentleman Killer, and the Music Box That Learned to Pray Badly

Bonus Double Feature #6: Los olvidados + The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

by Buzz Drainpipe

for Crease Magazine

Here’s the bonus pairing, and it’s a nasty little miracle:

Art / Social Nightmare

Genre / Murder-Fantasy Black Comedy

Los olvidados / The Young and the Damned

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

Poverty, childhood violence, social abandonment

Bourgeois murder fantasy, erotic death obsession, comedy with a corpse-smell

The city throws children away

The respectable man fantasizes about turning women into dead art

Brutality from below

Degeneracy from above

This is Buñuel looking at Mexico through two different cracked lenses:

What happens to children when society abandons them?
What happens to adults when society politely protects their sickness?

I. Los olvidados: Poverty as a Dream With Broken Teeth

Los olvidados does not do poverty as sentimental suffering.

No violin asks you to be kind.
No noble poor kid gazes beautifully at a loaf of bread.
No clean moral lesson gets handed out like a church pamphlet.

This movie is poverty as pressure. Poverty as bruise. Poverty as a neighborhood where childhood is not protected, only endured. The kids in Los olvidados are not symbols of innocence ruined by society. They are already inside the damage. They steal, fight, betray, dream, panic, and try to survive inside a world that has no soft place prepared for them.

Buñuel’s genius is that he doesn’t turn misery into moral furniture.

He lets it stay ugly.

And then, because he is Buñuel and cannot resist slipping a razor into the breadbasket, he lets dream logic seep into the realism. The film becomes social document and nightmare at once. A city street becomes a psychic wound. A child’s life becomes something society already misplaced and then blamed him for losing.

This is the black altar of the forgotten.

II. Archibaldo: The Gentleman as Failed Monster

Then comes The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, which is funnier, slicker, more elegant, and somehow more diseased.

Archibaldo is not a street kid. He is not hungry in the literal sense. He is polished. Educated. Cultivated. The kind of man who could stand near a piano and make people assume he has read something French.

But inside him is a little murder theater.

A childhood trauma, a music box, erotic fixation, death fantasies, women turned into mental victims before anything has technically happened. Archibaldo wants to be a killer, but reality keeps interrupting his authorship. He imagines himself as a fatal man, a dark artist of death, but the universe treats him like a failed playwright with blood on the stationery.

That is what makes the movie delicious.

He wants murder to mean something.

Buñuel keeps making it ridiculous.

III. The Forgotten Child and the Polished Maniac

This pairing works because it turns Buñuel into a social X-ray machine.

In Los olvidados, violence grows where society has abandoned children.

In Archibaldo, violence flowers inside bourgeois fantasy, protected by taste, money, and manners.

One movie says:

Look what happens when the world gives children nothing but hunger, humiliation, and concrete.

The other says:

Look what happens when a man has everything except moral gravity.

That’s the double punch.

The poor child is treated like a criminal before he has any chance.

The rich man gets to treat crime like an aesthetic problem.

Same civilization. Different rooms.

IV. Catholicism, Desire, Death, and Bad Imagination

This is the sixth chapel in the Mexican cinema run because both films understand that desire and death do not live in separate apartments.

In Los olvidados, desire is basic and brutal: food, safety, mother-love, power, escape, recognition, warmth. These are holy desires when a person has them. They become dangerous when the world denies them long enough.

In Archibaldo, desire is decorative, erotic, theatrical, almost collectorly. He wants women, but he also wants death arranged around them like an exhibit. He wants sin with composition. He wants murder as self-expression.

That is Buñuel’s great black joke:

The street kid’s violence is treated as social filth.

The gentleman’s violence gets framed as psychology.

And somewhere in the middle, Catholic guilt fumes through the walls. Sin, confession, punishment, fantasy, purity, death, the female body as battlefield, childhood as original wound. Buñuel keeps returning to these things because he knows civilization loves to call itself moral while secretly collecting little knives.

V. Morning-on-Mute Verdict

This is a killer bonus morning feature, especially because both are black-and-white Buñuel and both look like reality got dragged through a dream pipe.

Start with Los olvidados on Vix Gratis. Let the streets, faces, poverty, children, and violence set the floor. It’ll give the morning teeth.

Then go to The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz through Max/HBO on Prime. Now the violence has moved indoors. It has better clothes. It has fantasies. It has a music box. It has opinions about women and death.

Together:

Bonus Double Feature #6: The Forgotten and the Fantasist

Los olvidados
plus
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

One film is about children society throws into the street.

One film is about a gentleman who turns murder into interior decoration.

One is hunger.

One is appetite.

One is the city failing the poor.

One is the bourgeois mind failing reality.

And both prove the same awful thing:

A society makes monsters twice: once by starving them, and once by flattering them. 🕯️🗡️