A Woman Without Love (Mexico, 1952) 91 min B&W DIR: Luis Buñuel. PROD: Sergio Kogan. SCR: Jaime Salvador, Luis Buñuel; based on the story by Guy de Maupassant. MUSIC: Raúl Lavista. DOP: Raúl Martínez Solares. CAST: Rosario Granados, Tito Junco, Julio Villarreal, Joaquín Cordero, Xavier Loyá, Elda Peralta, Jaime Calpe (Columbia Pictures)
A fascinating prospect of what we could have expected from Buñuel if he did make Hollywood movies, Rosario (Rosario Granados) is unhappily married to a miserable old antique dealer Don Carlos Montero (Julio Villarreal), and has an affair with engineer Julio (Tito Junco). Despite this brief flirtation with true love, she nonetheless elects to stay with her ailing husband. Years later, one of her two sons receives an inheritance from a mysterious man, and the truth is revealed: he was conceived from his mother’s illicit tryst.
Reportedly, the director considered A Woman Without Love his worst film, yet I felt this commercial studio piece was a highly effective melodrama, made especially memorable from the moody lighting. My reaction is perhaps biased because I had seen it theatrically. Way back in the 1990s and 2000s, the Revue Cinema would often show early films of Ingmar Bergman (prior to Wild Strawberries) or the 1950s Mexican films of Luis Buñuel, on Thursday nights during the winter months. It was this revival screening (plus another of Wuthering Heights), that turned me on to his overlooked period of moviemaking. Even his “commercial” studio potboilers have fascinating undercurrents. In this film, Buñuel has brought Cain and Abel to the modern age! This film was also made available to VHS by Castle Hill’s Cinematheque Collection, which had lined many video store “foreign” sections. (I picked up several titles on this label, including this one, for peanuts when video stores were selling off their VHS stock to make room for DVDs. Ah, those were the days…)