Él (Spanish: Him; re-issued in the US as This Strange Passion) (1953), by Luis Buñuel, is a Mexican film based upon the novel by Mercedes Pinto.

It deals with many themes common to Buñuel's cinema, including a May–December romance between a woman and her obsessively overprotective bourgeois husband, and touches of surrealism.

[2] The film opens during a foot washing ceremony in a Christian church where a man named Francisco sees an attractive young woman from across the room.

When Gloria finds out that Francisco is the host, she seems wary of this ruse, but ultimately falls for his charm and social standing.

As she tells the story to Raul, the film enters a flashback where the first weeks of Gloria and Francisco's marriage are reconstructed.

In the flashback, Gloria tells Raul of how horrible her marriage is, because Francisco has turned out to be a jealous, paranoid husband whose socially upright, just appearance falls apart behind closed doors.

After Francisco finds out that she confessed everything to Father Velasco, he shoots her with a revolver loaded with blanks in order to "teach her a lesson."

Relations between husband and wife become better for a time, but Francisco's suave veneer continues to fray when he asks Gloria to spend the day with him and takes her to the belltower at the top of a church spire.

His rant escalates until he spontaneously begins to strangle Gloria, threatening to throw her over the rail to the sidewalk below to punish her in jealous rage.

When Francisco realizes that she had told Raul about their marital problems, he regards it as an utter betrayal, and says angrily that he can't forgive her for it.

This scares him off, and he cowers back into his room for the night in dismay and breaks down, as though his actions are spiraling out of his control.

The final shot of the film shows him slowly wandering through the monastery gardens into a dark doorway.

After completing the initial filming of Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and its release being indefinitely delayed, Buñuel decided to adapt Mercedes Pinto's novel Pensamientos about a paranoid husband.

De Córdova had previously been a Hollywood star in swashbuckling roles, but his heavy Bronx accent often hindered his performances.