Almost a decade before Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece, Rocco and His Brothers (1960), a Spanish film from director José Antonio Nieves Conde developed exactly the same theme: a family of peasants moves from the country to the big city to pursue greater opportunities but end up falling into crime, degradation, and murder. Produced during the Franco dictatorship and woefully unknown outside of Spain, Surcos (US: Furrows) borrows from Italian neorealism (describing a movie playing at the local cinema, one character defines neorealism as “social problems”) to depict the Pérez family of unskilled laborers — parents Manuel (José Prada) and Rosario (Montserrat Carulla) plus sons Pepe (Francisco Arenzana) and Manolo (Ricardo Lucía) and daughter Tonia (Marisa de Leza) — so desperate to survive that the elder son (Pepe) takes a job stealing potato sacks off trucks at night for gangster El Mellau (Luis Peña). María Asquerino plays Pili (“I will marry someone with enough money to treat me like a queen”), a worldly woman whose affections for Pepe cause conflict with both his parents and his boss. Conde effectively brings to life the urban squalor and coldness, particularly in the dilapidated tenement building where dozens of residents, especially children, scurry around nonstop with no jobs or schools to attend, while shadowy stairwells, ruined lots, and acts of violence (especially against women) create a growing sense of doom. In the final fifteen minutes or so leading up to a gruesome and prolonged murder sequence, the film becomes almost unbearably bleak.