An excerpt from “The Landlord’s Fists: The Dark Drives of Luis Buñuel” by Helen Fortescue-Poole and Jonathan Mackris, an essay in the Kill Yr Landlords Zine.
El Bruto (1952), Luis Buñuel’s third and final film for studio Internacional Cinematografia, S.A. after Susana (1950) and A Woman Without Love (1951), was not a film he thought very highly of. The film’s narrative is sparse—a landlord employs the help of his slavish strongman Pedro (played by a menacing Pedro Armendáriz as the eponymous “El Bruto” of the title) in an attempt to evict his tenants, only for the latter to kill his employer in a change of heart during the film’s finale—and this simplicity is complimented by the economy of the film’s production; it was shot in a tight 18-day schedule alternating between three primary sets in addition to a highly memorable sequence at the historic Rastro slaughterhouse in Mexico City. This is not to say that Buñuel was lacking in initial ambition for this project, which reunited him with Luis Alcoriza, the screenwriter with whom he wrote Los Olvidados (1950), which won Buñuel the Best Director prize at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival and reintroduced him to a generation of young cineastes after the war. However, a complete rewrite of the script was demanded by the producer before shooting began, leaving whatever had been intended by the two largely unrealized in the final version of the film. (In their comprehensive study of Buñuel, Bill Krohn and Paul Duncan point out that Buñuel and Alcoriza re-use the names of the protagonists from Los Olvidados—Pedro and Meche—for the protagonists of El Bruto, which suggests some of the initial relation between the two films smuggled into the final draft.) Speaking of El Bruto to Cahiers du cinéma in 1954, Buñuel dismissed the final version as “un film quelconque, pas extraordinaire”—“an average film, nothing special.”
El Bruto is, overall, a far cry from the films François Truffaut called works of “fantastic imagination” in his 1971 essay, “Some Outsides: Buñuel the Builder.” Yet like all of his films, El Bruto is filled with images that stick in the mind. Here, it’s the figure of Pedro Armendáriz in his introduction as Pedro, or better, the eponymous “El Bruto,” pushing his way through towering rows of meat that hang in the thick air of a slaughterhouse. The identification Buñuel wants us to form between the imposing verticality of both “El Bruto” and the meat is so intense that they become one and the same; “El Bruto” is nothing but bone and muscle, an unthinking, obedient tower of flesh. As “El Bruto,” Armendáriz carries himself with the swagger of a lumbering heavy from an early Chaplin short, shoving his way past the other characters in the film with little exertion. Rugged in his star-making roles for Emilio Fernández and John Ford, there’s something boyish to him here: clean shaven with rounded cheeks, not exactly hulking yet still somehow impossibly big. Buñuel exploits this exaggeration in the scenes between “El Bruto” and the landlord Andres Cabrera, who in every way appears his opposite: small, frail, and fragile, cowering at the carcasses dragged across the floor by other butchers at the shop.
“El Bruto’s” body is, of course, an instrument of his patron, who wants to evict his tenants and whose position as a member of the landowning class and haute-bourgeoisie is only possible through the sort of violence and brutality his own fragile corporeality belies—the distance from which must be maintained for the sake of bourgeois nicety. Instead, the landlord carves “El Bruto” into an extension of himself; it’s the landlord’s fists, by means of “El Bruto,” that will quash the burgeoning rebellion. His bovine strength manifests Cabrera’s violence; he makes the violence of property tangible. Through his function as intermediary, Buñuel visually and diegetically demonstrates the processes of distancing and mystification that allow, not only for the cruelty of both rent extraction and eviction, but equally ensure the misdirection of the tenants’ anger toward “El Bruto,” the mere tool, and not Cabrera, the architect of the eviction. But “El Bruto’s” role as a useful pawn does not save him from Cabrera’s contempt. The latter cannot even bring himself to shake the gore-mired proletarian hand through which his violence will be enacted.
El Bruto screens tonight, October 14, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of the series “Kill Yr Landlords.” The Kill Yr Landlords zine is available online, at the Anthology box-office, and at Topos Too and Desert Island.
