La mujer sin alma (The Woman Without a Soul). 1944. Mexico. Directed by Fernando de Fuentes. Screenplay by Fernando de Fuentes, Mauricio Magdaleno. With María Félix, Fernando Soler. In Spanish; English subtitles. DCP courtesy of Filmoteca UNAM. 95 min.
In this ambitious melodrama, adapted from Alphonse Daudet’s 19th-century novel La raison sociale, Fernando de Fuentes directs Félix as Teresa López, an ambitious shop-girl who glimpses high society at a charity ball and decides beauty will be her ladder out of obscurity. One by one she wins, marries, and discards prosperous admirers, wrecking the Velasco-Ferrer family in the process and discovering that the top rung can be as lonely as the bottom. De Fuentes, working again with Félix after Doña Bárbara, creates a study of ambition, class mobility, and power dynamics. Félix keeps Teresa charismatic yet opaque, letting the audience decide whether her ruthlessness is vice, survival instinct, or both.