The Angel Wore Red, also known as La sposa bella in its Italian version, is a 1960 Italian-American MGM/Titanus coproduction war drama starring Ava Gardner and Dirk Bogarde.

As night falls, Loyalist speakers induce a mob to torch the church, and its ranking cleric moves to hide the Blood of St. John relic by giving his deputy the task of taking it to Franco's Nationalists.

The Loyalists are now suffering a great number of desertions because of the missing relic, which is fabled to provide victory to those who possess it.

But because of a well-meaning, disastrous attempt to feed the old priest in hiding, Soledad leads Loyalist security men to his hideout.

The prisoners change hands, but the Nationalist commander decides that he cannot trust them or leave them behind, and he orders that they be executed.

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Eugene Archer wrote: "Conventional though the story sounds, the unusual subject matter provides some intriguing scenes.

... No amount of thoughtful writing or glib direction, however, can salvage the effort when the plot, after going farther than other films toward investigating a religious quandary in the Graham Greene manner, takes everything back at the end and dissolves into a mass of inspirational sentimentality.