Legendary Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel made twenty films in Mexico from 1946-64—low budget projects of which only Los Olvidados stands out as a masterpiece. After the initial savagery levied at the film for the bad light it cast on Mexican society, Mexican audiences warmed to the film after it received accolades at the 1951 Cannes Festival, resulting in a groundswell of national pride and causing Mexican officials to "see" the film differently. Having established his reputation, Buñuel could crank out less ambitious fare and produce bankable films with little effort—and that essentially characterizes Susana (The Devil and the Flesh). As Buñuel describes it: "a perfectly routine film about which I've nothing to say."

Despite its predictable melodrama, Buñuel afficionados will find enough to savor in the film. It begins promisingly, with the auteur's staple imagery juxtaposing the religious with the profane. Title character Susana (Rosita Quintana) is forcefully dragged into reformatory prison cell overrun with rats and bats, along with a giant tarantula that crawls over a silouetted shadow of a Christian cross. She breaks down, asking forgiveness from God for making her the way she is and begs for a miracle. It comes in the literally from the window, and Susana crawls to freedom that rainy night.

Susana finds refuge at the horse ranch owned by Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler) and his wife Doña Carmen (Matilde Palou). Lending comic relief, ultra superstitious and devout Catholic housekeeper Felisa (Maria Gentil Arcos) remarks that the thunderstorm portends evil, and shrieks about the demon outside when Susana first peers through a window. Doña Carmen disregards her housekeeper's warnings when the girl spins a tale about her foster father forcing sexual favors from her and "adopts" her into the family. Susana's feigned innocence soon begins to unravel the ranch, as she uses her sexuality to upset their orderly little Garden of Eden by overtly evoking Freud's hormonal theories and Buñuel's trademark sexual obsession theme.

Signature Buñuel leg and foot fetish shots are present, but the most obvious here come from Susana's upper torso, and these capture every male eye on the ranch. First smitten is womanizer foreman Jesus (Víctor Manuel Mendoza). Forsaking all the women he's ever wooed before, Jesus pursues Susana relentlessly, even keeping the news of her reformatory escape secret in hopes of hooking up with her after he's dismissed for sexual indisgression. While flirting with Jesus, Susana uses her sexuality to gain power over the household, agressively going after father and his scholarly son Alberto (Luis López Somoza). Even the most nerdy men forget the books when a buxom blonde throws herself in his path, and the orderly abandon their standards and rules when sexual obsession takes over.

All hell breaks loose when Doña Carmen discovers her husband's infidelity and learns of her son's yearning for the "bitch of bad breeding," but the film ends with an uncharacteristic happy Hollywood style ending, an intended "caricature" that Buñuel later admitted he hadn't pushed hard enough. It works well enough here since the film is so lightweight. We can be thankful that the ludicrous alternatirve "happy" ending that the filmmaker put together for Los Olvidados was scrapped in favor of the unforgettable devastating one, however. Susana certainly doesn't rank with Buñuel's best work, but students will find enough of his satirical material to wink at.