How much torment can you endure without feeling forced by circumstances and the cruelty of others to commit suicide? That's the question that imposes itself here as you are initiated in the grossest possible injustice imposed by circumstances.
Tormento can be purchased as part of a Criterion Eclipse Set entitled "Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas," and they do indeed runaway and sometimes get lost--but no matter: the camera always returns to the suffering heroine, Anna Ferrari (lushly played by Yvonne Sanson) who endures heartbreak and loss each time she turns around, and sometimes before she gets a chance to get her breath--just as she loses a job, she gets pregnant and her well-meaning hubby ends up for twenty in the slammer--for a crime we know he didn't commit. This is the sort of 50's weepy stuff churned out by the big studios in 30's and 40's Hollywood, often starring Lana Turner who always wore her grief very well and suffered spectacularly in Technicolor.
A mature man , an Indiano called Agustin Caballero (Francisco Rabal) , returns to Spain from South America to meet his relatives Rosalia (Concha Velasco) and Francisco De Bringas (Rafael Alonso). At home he meets a beautiful servant , Amparo (Ana Belen) ,and he falls in love for her .
Anna gets thrown out of her house by her wicked stepmother, her fiancé gets tossed in jail for a murder he didn't commit, she gets pregnant, and her father has a heart attack. And that's just the beginning.
