“Our love speaks another language. Wounded, it speaks of death,” whispers a doomed lover in this most perverse of all noirs, set in an ultra-sleek, modernized Mexico of jet planes, luxurious estates, and the basest of passions. Arturo de Córdova stars as a married aristocrat who falls for a smoldering María Felix (and a nude statue of her), beginning a love affair that takes him from wealth to madness, with murder along the way. Unapologetically overheated and delirious (“either you are mine or you destroy me!”), The Kneeling Goddess melts noir’s icy cool—and Mexico’s moneyed elite—with Baudelairean passion.