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Roberto Gavaldón’s The Kneeling Goddess (1947) is about people who not only won’t get what they most desire — the pursuit of it will bring them to their ruin. The title of the movie refers to a statue purchased by a businessman, Antonio (Arturo de Córdova), as an anniversary gift for his wife, Elena (Rosario Granados). The marble figure, mounted prominently in their sprawling home’s courtyard, is a vexing one to have: the statue’s model was actually Antonio’s lounge-singer mistress, Raquel (María Félix). Their affair isn’t rooted in genuine love. Raquel expectantly digs for gold; Antonio is motivated purely by desire. But the fling seems to be nearing the end of its rope not long into the movie.

Things are complicated, though, when Elena, bedridden often because of a chronic illness, suddenly dies. Whispers abound that Antonio killed her with cyanide-laced cognac. That lethal gesture makes Raquel more enamored with Antonio than she’s ever been. To love her enough to kill for her is a sort of ultimate turn-on. She feels like an accomplice to the crime by virtue of being, she thinks, the reason for it happening in the first place. The problem is that the drink might not actually have been meant for Elena, who was at a party Raquel was also attending around the time of her death. There’s also the fact that it’s Elena whom Antonio truly seems to love.

The Kneeling Goddess, part melodrama, part film noir, part shadowy Gothic soap, doesn’t stir up genuine emotion. It’s the kind of twistily plotted, breathlessly performed movie where what you find yourself feeling most is excitement — the excitement you get from being beholden to a plot where the worse things get for the characters, the more fun it is to watch. There’s a masochistically satisfying tidiness to how The Kneeling Goddess activates its desire-equals-death narrative arc. In this movie, Félix, gorgeous in a way that can make her closeups especially practically startle you, becomes a sort of angel of death whose beauty runs in such surplus that the feeling of being knocked out simply by looking at her as a viewer becomes much more literal for the hapless protagonist who is maybe too ordinary to take it in firsthand. He’s punished for the dual sin of cheating on his wife and daring to love a woman who is this beautiful whose sense of morality happens not to be made equal in its matter-of-factness. Naturally, Raquel too will be punished rather than rewarded by the time she’s actually ready to pursue a romance with a man she’d at one time been looking at as not much more than a meal ticket. 

The Kneeling Goddess feels of a piece with 1946’s Gilda, a movie where Rita Hayworth’s allure is as fetishized as Félix’s is here and where both get to externalize much of their sultriness through dance numbers. None featured in Gilda has much to do with the plot; they’re merely excuses to get Hayworth in lavish dresses talented at sartorially boosting her seductive powers. But in The Kneeling Goddess, they indelibly feature lyrics that complement, with comical on-the-noseness, the woman singing them. Raquel through song is made to embody a woman, though it’s not much of a stretch, to whom it’s explicitly stated would be unwise to get married — who is better off single. (The white Félix wears evokes marriage, but its cling conservatively suggests that that might not be what she’s necessarily “good for.”) The movie only gets more nightmarish as it goes on. Predominantly that nightmare is being had by Antonio, whose rash homicidality goes so awry that the ensuing guilt practically envelopes him. But The Kneeling Goddess also isn’t willing to confine Raquel as a femme fatale incapable of herself being overcome with regret. It’s her nightmare alone the film allows the final word.