“You are so strong,” says the selfish, sex-starved Paloma (Katy Jurado) to the title character in Luis Buñuel’s El bruto (US: The Brute), a dark melodrama bathed in a splendid noir atmosphere of poverty, desperation, and crime. Paloma’s husband Andrés Cabrera (Andrés Soler) is a landlord whose impoverished tenants are fighting his efforts to evict them so he can demolish the building and sell the land. In an effort to intimidate the tenants into leaving, Cabrera hires Pedro el Bruto (Pedro Armendáriz), a crude, barrel-chested meathead who (appropriately) works in a slaughterhouse, to rough them up, beginning with the main troublemaker, Carmelo González (Robert Meyer), whom Pedro kills by accident. Later, once the mob is after him, Pedro seeks shelter in the home of a kindhearted girl named Meche (Rosita Arenas) and immediately falls in love. More murders ensue. The noir look and feel of The Brute is brilliantly rendered by Buñuel and his crew, both interior and exterior settings maximally dreary and depressing, expressionistic lighting popping off the screen, like when Pedro moves in on Paloma or when he flees a mob through the dark, empty streets, chased by rushing piano and muted brass of score composer Raúl Lavista, the most prolific composer in Spanish-language noir. While melodrama dominates, the film maintains a feel of pending doom and violence; in fact, one disturbingly violent scene shows an old man’s head slammed repeatedly against a table and then kicked repeatedly on the floor.