''The Abandoned'' (Spanish:''Las Abandonadas'') is a 1945 Mexican film, directed by

Emilio Fernández Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo (; 26 March 1904 – 6 October 1986) was a Mexican film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most prolific film directors of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. He is best kn ...

, starring

Dolores del Río María de los Dolores Asúnsolo y López Negrete (3 August 1904 – 11 April 1983), known professionally as Dolores del Río (), was a Mexican actress. With a career spanning more than 50 years, she is regarded as the first major female Latin Am ...

and

Pedro Armendáriz Pedro Gregorio Armendáriz Hastings (May 9, 1912 – June 18, 1963) was a Mexican film actor who made films in both Mexico and the United States. With Dolores del Río and María Félix, he was one of the best-known Latin American movie stars ...

Plot

Margarita (

) is a young woman abandoned by her fiancé. She is forced to perform various jobs to raise her son, in a tumultuous 1920s Mexico.

Production

Since its inception, the film was considered a rough project. Emilio Fernández's uncertain relationship with the movie studio Films Mundiales had become somewhat overconfident, judging by his increasingly frequent involvement in drafting the scripts of his films. While Fernandez mixed stories that he had seen on the screen with events of the

Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution ( es, Revolución Mexicana) was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from approximately 1910 to 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It resulted in the destruction ...

, producer Agustrín J. Fink became ill. A cloud of pessimism clouded preparations for the shooting, as the budget went over one million pesos, much of it invested in very expensive clothes that a Hollywood designer drew up for the showcasing of ''Dolores del Río''. Efforts to save Fink's life were useless, and the producer died three weeks before the shooting began. In November 1944, ''The Abandoned'' was ready for release when the ban came exhibition. The then head of the Film Censor Department, under the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico, said he had suggested to Fernandez and Films Mundiales put a caption indicating that the plot was happening "In the turbulent Mexico of 1914." The incident was resolved through the intervention of journalists and film critics, who noted the incongruity of prohibiting the showing of a film whose script had been reviewed and authorized by the same censorious authorities. Finally, in March 1945-and favored by the scandal ''The Abandoned'' was released to great acclaim. This film ranks 93 in the list of the 100 best films of Mexican cinema, in the opinion of 25 film critics and specialists in Mexico.