Reto a la vida

Susana Canales is Marta, a dying young woman who is fooled into putting Pedro Armendáriz in jail. He is at his meanest as Diego Lombardo, a nasty peasant who kills a man working for a "general" who wants to rob the land Diego owns with his brother Juan, a widower who has a little son called Raulito. Marta runs a home for children with her priest brother, and the day she goes to the Lombardo farm to pick up Raulito, she witnesses the gunfight in which Juan is accidentally killed. Then out of the blue she falls in love with Diego, who treats her badly and even abuses her physically in dreams and in one scene in which he hits her and, as he wipes the blood off her face, voilà!, he discovers he loves her! Marta is also crazy about the man, and they sort of communicate telepathically, until a very cheesy ending, done with complete conviction by director Julio Bracho, who made better films as "Distinto amanecer" (1943) and "Crepúsculo" (1945), or interesting experiments as "El monje blanco" (1945).