One of Manuel Mur Oti’s best films tells the story of the love of a poor employee of a Madrid fashion house (who looks after her sick mother) for her bohemian partner. In expensive, secretly-borrowed dresses she invents another life, but her misappropriation is revealed, she loses her job, and finds herself with still more ill fortune. Her mother is dying and her troubles culminate with the discovery that she is probably going blind. In her despair she thinks of suicide by jumping off a bridge. Melodrama, influenced by neo-realism, records the eternal conflict between reality and wanting, poverty and money, sickness and death. The closing travelling shot is especially uplifting, following the heroine along the Madrid street Bailén, from the viaduct to the church of St Francis.
1951 CEC Awards for Best Film and Best Actress: Susana Canales.