"The first link in a chain binding L'Age d'or to Viridiana" (Ado Kyrou), this is a study of mad love gone truly mad amidst the neurotic compulsions of the haute bourgeoisie. The protagonist, Francisco, is a forty-year-old virgin holding out for perfect-and perfectly respectable-love. Francisco's apparent self-possession masks a ruthless severity, and his painful romanticism girdles insane misogyny. He takes a young wife who tries to adjust to the tyranny of his jealous behavior, until the evening he enters her room with some menacing instruments: a rope, needle and thread, scissors, cotton wool, and antiseptic. "The influence of de Sade is everywhere apparent in a scenario that the majority of the Mexican public took for a run-of-the-mill melodrama on jealousy" (Kyrou). "The character is certainly pathetic. I am touched by this man possessed by such jealousy, such solitude and interior anguish, such exterior violence. I studied him like an insect." (Bu-uel)