Not to be confused with the 1946 Argentinian noir of the same name, and certainly the lone film in a sub-sub-category we might call leprosy noir, Miguel Morayta’s Camino del infierno (US: The Road to Hell) plunges two fatalistic lovers into a world of doom which never lets up, concluding with one of the cycle’s most dramatic falls from a high-rise. After participating in a casino heist that goes wrong, the injured thief, Pedro Uribe (Pedro Armendáriz), and nightclub singer Leticia (Leticia Palmer) flee to a remote warehouse where Pedro forces Leticia to hide out while tending to the bullet hole in his hand (she later fetches a doctor who’s forced to amputate the hand in a scene both gruesome and somehow touching). Despite their spiteful personalities, the two end up falling in love while in hiding, later getting married and attempting to live respectable lives while still on the run from the police. Morayta creates a grim atmosphere, particularly in the first and third acts, using low-key lighting to produce fog on streets and shadows on walls, the dissonant score adding sensory depth to multiple scenes (Pedro’s delirium in the warehouse, Leticia’s silhouette at the bar just as she begins her ballad). With a prevalence of nightclubs and musical numbers, the film is often considered an example of the Mexican cabaretera style (sometimes called the rumberas genre as the female lead is typically a rumbera who performs to Afro-Caribbean music) in which “sinful” female performers rebel against social conventions with the aid of melodrama, which reaches extreme heights here: a one-handed man and his leper wife trapped by the police and facing certain death.