No, not that Vertigo. In Antonio Momplet’s not-quite-as-famous Vertigo, based on a novel by Pierre Benoît, we find a gloomy, Gothic melo-noir involving an incestuous sort of love affair that unfolds in a remote hacienda and ends with two of the lovers (and two horses) murdered. Superstar María Félix plays Mercedes Mallea, a beautiful young widow who lives alone on her country estate while her daughter Gabriela (Lilia Michel) studies abroad. This peaceful existence is disrupted the moment Gabriela returns home with her fiancé Arturo (Emilio Tuero in a role that might have been played brilliantly by lovable cad Zachary Scott), who immediately seizes Mercedes’ attention and soon has his way with her (a waterfall symbolizes their first riverside coitus), which creates for her an extraordinary moral dilemma, especially once Gabriela and the housekeeper (Emma Roldán) both catch on. Set in a period before electricity, the film is made visually mesmerizing, especially after the gloom of passion sets in, through copious use of shadows, lamps, candles, thunderstorms, and classical pieces played on the parlor piano. Momplet and famed cinematographer Alex Phillips shoot countless, rich compositions, such as the shadows encaging Mercedes with a cross as she prays to the Virgin Mary or Gabriela’s deep focus framing beneath the grand piano top board while Mercedes suffers emotionally in the foreground by candlelight and thunder.