Carlos Saura’s début feature film, Los golfos combines a novelistic source with neorealist elements by filming in actual locations and featuring mostly non-professional actors. Small time delinquents attack and rob easy prey to raise the money needed to launch Juan, an apprentice bullfighter. The heart of the beautiful Visi, the muse of the gang, oscillates between Julián, the leader, whose elegance hides his killer instincts, and the talented Juan. Saura commands the film’s pace, lingering on the banks of the Manzanares for a picnic scene, reminiscent of People on Sunday’s nonchalance, before erupting into renewed violence…
Very restrictive, the pre-release censors requested (in vain) that the ending be changed, and imposed an additional scene that was meant to moderate the thugs’ “altruistic” nature. A committee chaired by Saenz de Heredia, the regime’s official filmmaker and director of Raza (the screenplay for Caudillo), nevertheless selected the film to represent Spain at the Cannes Film Festival. Afterwards, the censors cut an additional 11 minutes from the work and placed it in an unfavourable category, which drastically limited its distribution in 1962.

Jean-Loup Bourget, “Positif ”, no. 632, October 2013

The complexity of the film preservation project carried out at the Carlos Saura Centre of Conservation and Restoration of Film Collections of Filmoteca Española, whose initial objective was to recover the pre-censorship version, was based on a comparative analysis of the different versions available, with the aim of locating the fragments removed by censorship orders, as well as the variations that the director himself made in the film, having to partly re-edit the film. The restoration carried out by Filmoteca Española is therefore presented as version that is the most faithful to the one that the filmmaker premièred at Cannes and presented to the Censorship Board, before all the subsequent modifications required for release in Spain. The restoration was carried out by digitising the image and sound negatives on 35mm film. The missing fragments in the image negative, as well as the audio, have been obtained from two combined duplicate negatives and one combined duplicate positive, all kept at the institution.

Patricia Ucida Gil and Javier Rellán Calero