General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Susana

Susana, also released as Susana: Demonio y carne and in English as The Devil and the Flesh, is a 1951 Mexican black-and-white melodrama directed by Luis Buñuel, in which a young woman who escapes from a reformatory during a storm takes refuge with a wealthy ranch family and destabilizes their household through seduction.¹^•² It was made as a commercial assignment during Buñuel's Mexican period, shot at the Churubusco studios in Mexico City beginning 10 July 1950, and premiered at the Cine Metropolitain in Mexico City on 11 April 1951.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / country	Luis Buñuel; Mexico, black and white, 35 mm¹
Production and premiere	Internacional Cinematográfica, producer Sergio Kogan; shot at Estudios Churubusco from 10 July 1950; premiered 11 April 1951 at the Cine Metropolitain, Mexico City¹
Running time	86 minutes in standard references; some prints and catalogs list 80 to 83 minutes¹^•³
Writers	Screenplay by Jaime Salvador, Rodolfo Usigli, and Luis Buñuel, based on a story by Manuel Reachi⁴
Principal cast	Rosita Quintana (Susana), Fernando Soler (don Guadalupe), Víctor Manuel Mendoza (Jesús, the foreman), Matilde Palou (doña Carmen), Luis López Somoza (Alberto), María Gentil Arcos (Felisa)¹
Music	Raúl Lavista, the first of six scores he composed for Buñuel⁵
International titles	Demonio y carne, The Devil and the Flesh, Susana la perverse (France), Adolescenza torbida (Italy)¹^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Susana, an aggressive young delinquent confined in a state reformatory, prays for release on a stormy night and finds that the bars of her cell window come loose; she escapes into the tempest.²^•¹⁰ Drenched, she appears at the window of a ranch owned by don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), who lives there with his wife doña Carmen (Matilde Palou), their son Alberto (Luis López Somoza), the foreman Jesús (Víctor Manuel Mendoza), and servants including the elderly, superstitious maid Felisa (María Gentil Arcos).¹^•¹⁰ The same night, don Guadalupe's prized mare gives birth to a stillborn foal and falls into an unexplained fever, which Felisa reads as a sign that the devil is nearby just as Susana arrives.¹⁰

Taken in as a maid, Susana seduces the men of the household one after another, first the foreman, whose silence about her escape she buys with sexual favors, then the son, and finally the patriarch himself, sowing jealousy and discord among them.²^•¹¹ The film's most notorious scene comes when doña Carmen, discovering what has happened, whips Susana in a delirious rage.²^•⁴ Order is restored only when the police arrive and arrest Susana; the family returns to normal, and the ending closes on a deliberately saccharine picture of domestic harmony restored.¹¹^•¹⁰

Production

Buñuel made Susana as a hired commercial picture, what Spanish-language scholarship calls a cine de consumo or "cine alimenticio", the kind of genre film that let him keep working in the Mexican industry while developing more personal projects.⁷^•⁸ The shoot began at Estudios Churubusco on 10 July 1950 and lasted about twenty days, a schedule Buñuel managed by carefully planning the film's 88 changes of location or set and noting how many scenes he filmed each day.¹^•⁹ Rosita Quintana, then the wife of producer Sergio Kogan, was cast at Kogan's insistence as a vehicle to promote her.⁹

The crew included cinematographer José Ortiz Ramos, art director Gunther Gerzso, editor Jorge Bustos with Buñuel himself credited on the editing, and composer Raúl Lavista.¹ Lavista's score was the first of six he would write for Buñuel.⁵

Style and interpretation

Melodrama turned inside out. Critics have frequently read the film, against the producers' intentions, as a parody of the Mexican melodrama, with surrealist elements characteristic of Buñuel's work throughout.¹² The Museum of Modern Art, which screened the film in 2024, describes it as one of Buñuel's most subversive films, a pointed exposure of the sexual and social hypocrisies of Mexico's middle class, with gothic details such as storms, spiders, snakes, and black cats mounting as Susana works through the household.⁵ The Harvard Film Archive reads it as Buñuel deconstructing the family melodrama, showing its stock figures, the patriarch, the protective mother, the sheltered son, to be brittle constructions.¹³ Scholarly work has connected the film's treatment of desire to the "voluptuosity of destruction" conceptualized by the Marquis de Sade and adopted by Buñuel from his early films, and has read Susana herself as an ambiguous figure whose unexplained behavior invites interpretation as either infernal evil or simply human conduct.¹⁴^•¹⁵

The film also works within and against specifically Mexican genres. One study describes it as a hybrid of melodrama and comedia ranchera, the ranch comedy, whose conventional values are put to the test by its heroine.¹⁶ The Instituto Cervantes notes that Buñuel shot the film in twenty days while, in his own way, mocking the national melodrama genre, inserting dozens of references to Mexican reality, popular sayings, attacks on religious symbols, and deflations of the archetypal Mexican campesino.¹⁷

Buñuel's own view and reception

The film had commercial success and good reviews, but Buñuel was not satisfied with it.⁷ In his autobiography he wrote that he had nothing to say about it except that he regretted not having underlined the caricature in the ending, when everything ends miraculously well, adding that an unsuspecting spectator could not take it seriously.⁷ He made the same point in a later interview: "I feel I didn't emphasize the irony enough."²

Critical standing has varied. Some critics rank it among his minor works, a director-for-hire picture within his comparatively weak Mexican period.¹⁰ Others place it high in his Mexican output: MoMA calls it one of his most subversive films,⁵ and the Spanish site Filmaffinity ranks it 46th among the best Mexican films of all time in its user rankings.¹⁸ On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.2 out of 10 from about 2,500 users.¹⁹

After its Mexican premiere on 11 April 1951, the film reached Peru on 25 July 1951, France on 24 November 1952, the United States in 1953, and Italy on 30 April 1953.⁶ French distributors retitled it Susana la perverse; Buñuel reportedly objected to the embellishment.²⁰

Awards records disagree on the film's 1952 Ariel nomination for Best Young Actress (Mejor Actuación Juvenil): one Mexican account credits Rosita Quintana with the nomination,²¹ while Filmaffinity and a home-video distributor credit Luis López Somoza.¹⁸^•²²

Restoration

The film was restored by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project at L'Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Fundación Televisa, Televisa, Cineteca Nacional Mexico, and Filmoteca de la UNAM, with funding from The Material World Foundation.²³ The restored version screened at the Morelia International Film Festival in 2012 and in MoMA's "Buñuel in Mexico" series in February 2024.²³^•⁵

Other works of the same name

The title Susana has also been used for unrelated films: Susanna (2000), a Malayalam film directed by T. V. Chandran starring Vani Vishwanath as a woman involved with five men,²⁴ and Susana (1980), a 25-minute autobiographical documentary by the Argentine filmmaker Susana Blaustein about leaving her native country and her lesbian identity.²⁵ A 1951 American Republic Pictures western titled Oh! Susanna, directed by Joseph Kane, is a separate film.²⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1950s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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