Marsal, at night and without witnesses, kills a man and driven by his passion for María Rosa, causes conclusive evidence of his crime to fall on Andrés, her husband.

Moreno, a playwright and theatre director, made his film debut with an adaptation of the play by Àngel Guimerà (a prominent Catalan author). With superb acting direction, majestic, physical black-and-white photography, and a striking mise-en-scène, it makes us regret that it was his only work.

Beyond a love triangle disguised as a Greek tragedy, with the makings of a Western, it is fundamentally the chronicle of sexual obsession, beyond the conventions of the time, while escaping censorship. With a stellar pair of actors (glorious Núria Espert and Paco Rabal) who managed to fill the screen with repressed desire and sexual drive, but also with love, in its most volcanic and primitive form. It was also the first Catalan-dubbed film to be commercially released after the Civil War, when Catalan was still officially banned.

Javier Garcia Puerto