The film was based on a screenplay by John Dos Passos, and stars Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, and Alison Skipworth.

Antonio Galvan, a young bourgeois revolutionary home from his exile in Paris to visit his parents, mixes with the crowds while evading the authorities pursuing him.

Don Pasqual solemnly relates, via a series of flashbacks, the details of a fateful relationship he had with the young temptress; his tale the confession of a man in thrall to the devastating girl.

His public prestige and authority were ultimately shattered, and he resigned his commission in disgrace, after which, satisfied with her conquest, Concha flung him aside for a final time.

[8] On May 5, 1935, The New York Times surprised the studio with a remarkably positive review, describing the film "as the best product of the Dietrich-Sternberg alliance since The Blue Angel.

[10] A box-office failure, panned by most contemporary critics for its perceived "caviar aestheticism and loose morals", the film's highly sophisticated rendering of a conventional romantic conceit left most audiences confused or bored.

This diplomatic action was widely reported in Europe, but surviving prints of The Devil Is a Woman continued to be screened at domestic and overseas theaters.

A portion of the complaint cited a scene that showed "a Civil Guard drinking [alcohol] in a public cafe", and depicting the national police as buffoons, who appeared "ineffectual in curbing the riotous carnival".

[13][14] The Devil Is a Woman, in its "worldly attitude toward the follies of romantic infatuation" makes a mockery of Hollywood's standard plot devices that prevailed up to that time.

[16] Ostensibly a light romance, the story examines that fate of a self-respecting and urbane older gentleman who foolishly falls in love with a beautiful woman indifferent to his adoration – and suffers for his passion.

[18] The horror and pathos of the Don Pasqual character is that of a man in thrall to a woman who has no intention of satisfying his desires, and who perversely "derives amusement from his own suffering.

"[19] Andre Sennwald, daily reviewer at The New York Times in 1935, defended Sternberg, calling the movie "one of the most sophisticated ever produced in America" and praising its "sly urbanity" and "the striking beauty of its settings and photography.

"[20] Museum of Modern Art film curator Charles Silver regards The Devil Is a Woman as a veiled confessional of Sternberg's complex relationship with Dietrich.

Both the pathetic old Don Pasqual and the virile young Antonio are regarded more with irony than sympathy: each are "symbols of the endless futility of passion...[t]hey are the last lovers Sternberg postulated for Dietrich’s screen incarnation and their absurdity only marks the death of desire.

"[28]Sarris summed up the film this way: "Sternberg did not know it at the time, but his sun was setting, and it has never really risen again...Still, as a goodbye to Dietrich, The Devil Is Woman is a more gallant gesture to one's once beloved than Orson Welles’ murderous adieu to Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shanghai.