Few other directors found as much humor in the perversity of human nature than Luis Buñuel, whose sharp eye and subtle wit could transform a routine romantic potboiler into a black comedy of psychosexual obsession. True love, in a Buñuel film, is not far removed from madness, and when Cupid's poisoned arrow strikes a wealthy bachelor in this too frugal quickie production (made during the director's long Mexican exile) it leaves him in a violent, irrational temper. Everyone knows him as a pious, well-mannered aristocrat, but after the love struck blueblood woos and wins the girl of his dreams he becomes, slowly but surely, a jealous monster. The transformation would be pathetic if it wasn't so extreme: his fits of paranoia are funny because they're so typical, but frightening because they're so accurate. Buñuel charts his mounting insanity in an assured, deceptively straightforward style, pausing as always to deliver a few well-aimed punches at the Catholic Church and other sacred institutions.
