There’s a scene in Fernando de Fuentes’ La devoradora (US: The Devourer) in which the legendary María Félix smiles excitedly while unwrapping her new, fancy clothes with a fresh corpse lying on the floor six feet away. It’s the perfect image to capture Félix’s film career during the 1940’s, a decade in which she became Mexico’s gold-digging ice queen on the big screen. The third in a trilogy of films directed by de Fuentes and starring Félix in similarly wicked roles (see also 1943’s Doña Bárbara and 1944’s La mujer sin alma), La devoradora is the most noir of the three and established Félix as the campy femme fatale we’d love to hate in future films like Roberto Gavaldón’s The Kneeling Goddess (1947), Rafael Gil’s An Ordinary Woman (1949), and Tito Davison’s The Devil is a Woman (1950). Félix plays Diana de Arellano, a social climbing ice queen whose young lover Pablo Ortega (Felipe de Alba) shoots himself dead in her apartment on the eve of her marriage to aging, ailing millionaire Don Adolfo Gil (Julio Villarreal). When Diana calls Adolfo to come help dispose of the body, he brings his dashing, pencil-mustached nephew, Dr. Miguel Iturbe (Luis Aldás), the moral hero of the story whom Diana immediately targets as her next romantic conquest. More melodrama than crime film, Le devoradora is unmistakably entertaining, offering dark shadows as needed, especially during the corpse disposal sequence, and, of course, obligatory scenes of Félix lying in bed or silhouetted behind a shower curtain.