Los Golfos
directed by Carlos Saura
starring Manuel Zarzo, Luis Marin
Radiance Films
Carlos Saura’s Los Golfos (The Delinquents) explores the desperate lives of young men on the edges of society in Madrid, Spain, under the weight of Francisco Franco’s dictatorial regime. The neorealist film explores the bonds of friendship and class struggle through the lens of a group of young men who feel trapped by their place in the world and are desperate for a shot out of the slums and into the better life they see around them in early 1960s Madrid. Making its Blu-ray debut, Los Golfos is presented in a striking monochrome transfer on an extras laden release from Radiance Films.
In an attempt to raise their lot in life, a group of friends engages in various schemes to get enough money to move up into Spain’s burgeoning middle class. Some undertake arduous physical labor, while others prefer the petty crime route. Only Juan (Óscar Cruz) has any real ambition, which is to become a famous matador. Juan and his friends come to see the bullring as their ticket out of poverty, and they undertake a series of increasingly risky robberies to raise the entry fee for Juan’s showcase match that will make him a real matador. But Los Golfos is no fairy tale, and it is going to take more than one grand gesture for these men to find redemption. In an ending that is as sad as it is inevitable, Juan and his comrades find themselves humiliated in their attempts to rise above their class.
Although much of the political commentary is kept purposely oblique to avoid the wrath of Franco’s film censors, director Carlos Saura manages to get his point across that the “economic miracle” of the era was clearly unavailable to families who didn’t fit the ideal of a strong patriarch-led nuclear family. This is made crushingly ironic, as the families in the slums lacked fathers not due to vice, but because they perished in the Spanish Civil War and under the boot of Franco’s consolidation of power. Franco created the very underclass he so despised. Fatalism is a specter haunting the characters, repeatedly humiliating them for the sin of harboring dreams and aspirations. Despite the weighty themes of the story, the film itself is actually a delightful watch. The charismatic characters hook you pretty quickly into their story and keep you rooting for them even when their morality is dubious.
Radiance Films’ Blu-ray of Los Golfos boasts a striking black-and-white 4K restoration from a variety of elements and is accompanied by several illuminating extras. Kicking things off is an introduction to the film by author and former director of Filmoteca Catalunya Esteve Riambau, a selection of censored scenes that play alongside the cut versions from the film, and an interview with filmmaker and curator Ehsan Khoshbakht. The disc also comes with a a booklet written by Mar Diestro-Dópido. The whole thing makes for a great package celebrating an underseen gem of Spanish cinema.
