The Abandoned

A young woman is abandoned by her fiancé. He is a man who plays around and takes no responsibility. She has to raise her son on her own. In Mexico at the start of the twentieth century, being an unmarried mother closes every door. She struggles both to make a living and against the way people look at her. The film tells that weight in the shape of melodrama but without blaming her. Its reckoning is not with the woman but with the order that left her there. The hundred and three minutes are spread over many years. Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz appear in Emilio Fernández’s Mexican film, completed in 1945.