This nearly complete and more or less chronological retro spans the period between Buñuel's first Mexican sensation, the quintessential third-world slum drama Los Olvidados (1950), and his last Mexican feature, the surrealist comedy The Exterminating Angel (1962), which brilliantly exaggerates Buñuel's "bad cinema" aesthetic with a cast drawn from local telenovelas. Another example is the 1951 Susana, which radicalizes a reactionary potboiler by exaggerating its hackneyed femme fatale plot to create a one-joke parody of Civilization and Its Discontents.

Even with tonier material, Buñuel used a similar surrealizing strategy. His deadpan Robinson Crusoe (1954) precipitates an unexpected sexual subtext, while his triumphant Wuthering Heights (1954) is a blatant hacienda melodrama that camps out on poverty row before blasting into the stratosphere—a great movie that successfully travesties a great novel.