THE SKELETON OF MRS. MORALES [1960]

 BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN WITH A WICKED WIT, LIKE A MEXICAN ALFRED HITCHCOCK MOVIE. 

Dr. Pablo Morales is a taxidermist who also sells organic fertilizer on the side.  He is such a nice guy who is adored by friends, neighbourhood children and even dogs!  Then there's his wife.  Mrs. Morales is outwardly a pious woman who is afflicted with a malformed leg due to an infection.  She has a slight limp.  To the outside world, Mrs. Morales is a godly woman.  To her husband, however, she is a frozen, two-faced harridan who plays up her minor affliction and pleads constant sickness . . . until she's alone with her husband when she's suddenly able to function quite fine.  We first see her in her bed when Dr. Morales comes home for dinner.  Even though she won't eat, she insists on sitting with him while he has his dinner.  Dr. Morales tells her there's no need to put herself through the effort but she insists. 

After a needless song-and-dance requiring Dr. Morales and the maid struggling to get her to the table, Mrs. Morales harps on Pablo to go wash his hands and rub them with alcohol; because she hates his taxidermy work.  Then while Pablo tries to eat his steak, Mrs. Morales constantly retches as if she's going to throw up until Pablo finally can't eat.  She variously berates him and ill-treats the maid.  For a year or more, Dr. Morales has been saving money to buy a camera; Mrs. Morales gives this money to the priest for a shrine in order to "outdo" other donors.  When Dr. Morales finds out, he does get the money back.  The kindly widow working at the camera store uses her employee discount to buy the camera so he can afford it and a happy Dr. Morales takes photos of friends and neighbours, children and dogs who happily greet him.  Later, after the maid catches Mrs. Morales putting rat poison on some meat to feed to Pablo's pet hawk, Mrs. Morales slaps the maid and fires her; threatening to "slit your tongue" if you ever tell.  Then when the doctor returns home with his camera, Mrs. Morales smashes it and then cries out "No, don't hit me!" so all the neighbours can hear and will think Pablo is beating her. 

The exasperated Dr. Morales leaves but when he comes back hours later, Mrs. Morales' sister & brother-in-law are there with the priest and her church friends who berate Pablo for beating his wife.  Mrs. Morales is revealed to have bruises on her face (of course, self-inflicted).  Pablo's bully of a brother-in-law clunks him on the head with a gun and gives Pablo a concussion.  By this point I'm thinking, what the hell is taking him so long to kill her?  I wanted to kill her 10 minutes into the movie!  Needless to say, by this point even the nicest man has had enough and Dr. Morales decides to murder his wife.  And he's pretty well set up to do it owing to his taxidermy business he has access to all sorts of poisonous chemicals, acid baths (to denude the skeleton of flesh), a meat-eating hawk (or falcon or whatever it is) and he has a business providing full human skeletons to universities and medical schools.  So I'll leave you to guess what he does.  And also if he gets caught AND if he gets away with it!

THE SKELETON OF MRS. MORALES  (aka "El esqueleto de la Señora Morales") was a delight from start to finish.   Arturo de Córdova gives a wonderful, sympathetic performance as Dr. Morales; you're in his corner the whole movie which is interesting because, in a Hitchcockian way, the viewer roots for the murderer to get away with it.  Amparo Rivelles is equally as good as Mrs. Morales; she doesn't portray the character as a one-note evil person but one with frailties and psychological issues allow you to sorta understand (but not forgive) her harridan-like behaviour.  In fact, the entire cast is excellent!  Great acting is combined with a fantastic screenplay credited to Luis Alcoriza (who co-wrote my favourite Luis Buñuel film THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL with Buñuel); this goes a long way to showing why the script for THE SKELETON OF MRS. MORALES is so well-written.  The script has such vividly human characters but also quite an amount of genuinely funny, witty comedy.  Also credited with a writing credit is Arthur Machen (!), the horror writer of such classic tales as "THE GREAT GOD PAN" and "THE NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER".  I'm assuming Machen didn't directly contribute to this script but that instead it was based on one of his stories -- but I don't know which one.  The film is superbly directed by Rogelio A. González, who also helmed the wacky classic SHIP OF MONSTERS as well as CONQUISTADOR DE LA LUNA in the same year.  This surely is his finest directorial job that I've seen, anyway.