“A woman who is too beautiful cannot belong to just one man.” Not to be confused with the 1935 film of the same name (in English), Tito Davison’s Doña Diabla (US: The Devil is a Woman) is an extraordinary melo-noir that feels like a Latin American amalgamation of many of Joan Crawford’s greatest noirs. Immediate comparisons can be made to Mildred Pierce (1945), of course, but the film also shares elements with Flamingo Road (1949) and The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), among others: it’s a proto-feminist tale of a subjugated woman using her sex appeal to achieve wealth and stature, using and discarding the men who possess what she wants. In this case, María Félix fills in for Crawford to play Angela, a beautiful girl who has been encouraged by the men in her life (her father, her first husband) to get close to guys who can help advance her/their economic station in life. Hurt and disgusted by these suggestions, Angela sends her young daughter to live in a convent while she takes their advice to the extreme and goes all in “prostituting” herself for maximum material luxury while relishing in the downfalls of the men from her past (the scene in which she encounters her first husband desperate and in debt to a casino is very well-done). Many years later, she ends up in competition of sorts with her grownup daughter Angélica (Perla Aguiar) for the affections of sexy drug smuggler Adrián Villanueva (Victor Junco), a conflict that will bring about the mysterious murder hinted at in the first 30 seconds of the film.