Recently some coworkers were waxing about what they would do if they won the power ball. How they would spend the money, where they would go, and also the drawbacks that come in the wake of what seems like a purely golden opportunity.

I’ve never much thought about it, but I do admit for those who are trapped in life (or at least with active imaginations), it’s easy to make the mental leap. I couldn’t get these conversations out of my head while watching Roberto Gavaldón’s La Otra.

It is a movie about a manicurist. Her work is menial and she takes no joy in it, doting over cosseted businessmen with lecherous intentions. It’s a way to survive though her prospects feel like a dead-end apart from her burgeoning romance with an earnest policeman. All throughout the workday before she runs off to spend an evening with her man (José Baviera), the garish lights above her workspace blare with the National lottery: 5 million! Almost as if to taunt her.

La Otra is built out of a premise not unfamiliar to noir. If you read production notes, it sounds like the picture was potentially slated for an English-language release with Bette Davis, though it was deemed too similar to one of her other recent projects. She would end up remaking it a generation later as Dead Ringers.

Because La Otra actually opens with a funeral. María Méndez rushes onto the scene late, and public perception is one of contempt. How improper of her to show up late to a funeral while her twin sister, Magdalena mourns the death of her husband. Although the widow is masked by her veil, we learn soon enough, Dolores Del Rio stars in both roles. Hence, La Otra.

The doppelganger is not a new phenomenon used in all sorts of mistaken identity comedies and certainly in melodrama. Here it feels like it serves a utility to the story, but there’s also something else. The movie plays with the dichotomy and preconceived notions between Mary, the Madonna, and Mary Magdalene, a sinful woman. The movie casts Del Rio in both of these rolls, and they continually shift and evolve over this muddied canvas of morality.

Tension (1949) with Richard Basehart worked the doppelganger angle thanks to hard contact lenses and Del Rio pulls it off by wearing glasses to play her manicurist self. Still, these are only the visual features. It does not consider personality changes.

Meanwhile, we realize in the wake of her husband’s death, Magdalena has come into a great sum of money. She chides her sister while she walks into her lavish closet, “You haven’t learned to face the world with the same weapons it uses.” Namely, cunning, cynicism, hypocrisy…crime.

Soon enough, María does learn what it takes to get ahead in noir, although she must also live with the consequences. Passages of the film feel quite literally like a silent movie, and then with dialogue the scenes come alive played against the otherworldly whirring modulations of the theremin.

La Otra hits its stride with its first twist cut against the chaotic pinata-infused celebration in the city square. María has the opportunity to take over her sister’s life and commandeers it using all the aforementioned weapons at her disposal. Going so far as to scald herself so her signature won’t be disputed.

Still, she is trapped in a life she was not expecting. Because her rash decision only considered the upside — not the tragedy hanging over her head. Instantly, she gains wealth and repute, leaving her life of destitution behind, but she also must give up her man lest she implicate herself in the new life she takes up in its stead.

But also a dashing suitor (Víctor Junco) slinks back into her life — a mysterious man from her sister’s own shrouded past. She’s more implicated than even she realized, and the film is imbued with this sense of Catholic penance. We watched men like James Cagney be sent to the electric chair for their sins, and this woman is resigned to her own fate…

What’s fascinating to me is how this film could have been made in Hollywood — with Bette Davis no less. However, it was made in Mexico and as a result Dolores Del Rio was given unadulterated star treatment. The way she’s dressed, lit, and given full reign over the movie, augments her regality but also her abilities as a screen personality. She owns the movie both in its moments of drama and pathos.

And although it was shot below the border in Mexico City with many actors we aren’t aware of, it functions like a stunning system in parallel with Hollywood. There’s a technical prowess and a commitment to classical storytelling. There’s gorgeous light and shadow, a commitment to the semiotic nature of visual narrative, and also a daring sense of invention.

It feels alive and emotive like all the greatest classic melodramas. Analogous endings could be cropped out of other movies, but as a dutiful policeman, now disaffected in his duties, wanders off into the night, the woman stares back at him through the bars confining her. Her face settles in such a way, first, we see the luminous contours of her eyes before she drops down and they are enveloped in an abyss of shadow.

These are the kind of moments that not necessary for telling a story, and yet somehow it feels elegant and imperative because this final image articulates so much of the journey of this movie and so much of the duality in many of these great melodramas of old. I never tire of them, and it’s always a pleasure to find a new addition to the canon regardless of where it originates from.

4/5 Stars