El niño y la niebla

The keynote is fire ; fire in the night with dantesque pictures of oil wells ;this is the story of a curse : a heredity which obsesses the heroine who anxiously questions the psychiatrists in the hospital where her mother in confined .

There's no love between Marta and her husband ,only a child,a gifted teenager ,Daniel:as far as his education is concerned , the father 's and the mother's roles are reversed ; unlike the macho dad of "tea and sympathy" ,Robert Anderson's play transferred to the screen by Vincente Minnelli , this man wants to let his son follow the way he has chosen : he loves poetry and algebra (two subjects which seem to have no rapport with each other, but "both use letters "),but the mother thinks that it does not make him a man.

"El niño y la niebla" (the boy and the fog) creates a stifling sticky atmosphere ,as the characters move in the fog , the son sleepwalking at night (the scenes are impressive),the calculating mother who is in fact victim of her lunacy which runs in the family.

It's chiefly Dolores Del Rio 's helpless fight with her mind which will haunt the viewer long after the end of the film ;one sees her,slowly but inexorably sink into lunacy ;the actress is extraordinary ,displaying all the nuances of a character who's lost her reason.