Los Golfos

Authoritarian regimes have a way of shaping art accidentally, not by what they allow, but what they forbid. Filmmakers worm their celluloid fingers into narrow cracks in the wall of what’s permitted to get their message out. So when a film finally does slips through it seems almost miraculous in its honesty, capturing a social reality the regime would camouflage behind less artful propaganda. Spain in the late 1950s was still under Franco’s thumb, yet Carlos Saura’s Los Golfos (1959) landed like a brick through a window when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, laying bare the restless frustrations of working-class youth in Madrid.

The story follows a group of teenage boys, petty criminals looking for an easy score, whose friendship is glued together less by loyalty than by circumstances for survival. But that changes when they work together to steal enough money for Juan – a toreador in training – to stage a showcase of his bullfighting skills in the arena. The gang circles around this group aspiration, scheming ways to fund it in hopes that Juan’s success will lift them all out of the gutter.

Los Golfos belongs to that family of “life on the streets” films that prize texture over polish. Its handheld camerawork and location shooting recall Italian Neorealism, though with a sharper, more cynical edge. The dust of Madrid’s outskirts, the cracked plaster of its taverns, the boredom of its long afternoons. Saura characters are just another a part of this landscape. They aren’t heroes, but they’re not victims either. They’ve adapted to survive in a world that barely seems to acknowledge their existence.

Director Saura’s unsparing gaze makes the film feel startlingly modern, a distant relation to something like Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) with less artistic flourish and needle drops. But like Scorsese’s gangster flicks, the criminal lifestyle is an almost a part of nature…and every chance at escape finds its characters trapped in a narrower cage. But Los Golfos middle finger to the Francoist moral order is a whole ‘nother level of cinematic rebellion, capturing the futility of trying to carve out a future when the world has already decided what you’ll be.

Radiance Films’ 2000-copy limited edition Blu-ray is quite an accomplishment in itself, collecting bits and pieces from various prints to provide the most complete version ever available outside of that original Cannes premiere. The new 4K restoration comes along with interviews, additional censored scenes and some of Saura’s other short films.