Film Noir in Argentina (Web Exclusive)
by Dennis West

The Beast Must Die

Produced by Laura Hidalgo and Narciso Ibáñez Menta; directed by Román Viñoly Barreto; screenplay by Cecil Day-Lewis, Román Viñoly Barreto, and Narciso Ibáñez Menta; cinematography by Alberto Etchebehere; edited by José Serra; art direction by Mario Vanarelli; costume design by Eduardo Lerchundi; music by Silvio Vernazza. B&W, 104 min., Spanish dialogue with English subtitles, 1952. A Flicker Alley Blu-ray/DVD dual edition.

The Bitter Stems

Directed by Fernando Ayala; screenplay by Sergio Leonardo based on the novel by Adolfo Jasca; cinematography by Ricardo Younis; edited by Gerardo Rinaldi and Antonio Ripoli; production design by Germen Gelpi and Mario Vanarelli; music by Astor Piazzolla; starring Carlos Cores, Julia Sandoval, and Vassili Lambrinos. B&W, 90 min., Spanish dialogue with English subtitles, 1956. A Flicker Alley Blu-ray/DVD dual edition.

In his pioneering and oft-cited “Notes on Film Noir,” first published in Film Comment in 1972, theorist/filmmaker Paul Schrader contends that noir is unique to Hollywood during WWII and the postwar period, and that it does not constitute a genre. In the ensuing decades, the genre question has persisted unresolved, with some critics and historians resisting that designation in favor of conceptualizing noir in terms of style or as a movement or discourse. There is, however, widespread agreement as to the characteristic stylistic, thematic, and other elements of noir.

Noirists past and present identify the following elements as essential: a visual style in the service of tone and mood that showcases low-key lighting and chiaroscuro effects, the irregular arrangement of space within the frame, and unconventional camera angles. The German Expressionist influence appears frequently. Convoluted chronologies and fragmented or scrambled narrative structures, such as flashbacks and intermittent voice-over, contribute to a hopeless or fatalistic mood, as do the shadowy, frequently nocturnal, and foreboding urban settings. Inhabiting this labyrinthine ambiance are disillusioned, betrayed, despairing, or vulnerable male protagonists gripped by a bleak, cynical, or paranoid worldview. They are dangerous and, frequently, armed. The trench coat, optional.

These characteristics appear to varying degrees in the Argentine features The Beast Must Die (1952) and The Bitter Stems (1956)—both seldom seen historically in the Anglosphere. They can now be viewed in superb new Blu-ray/DVD dual format releases from Flicker Alley and the Film Noir Foundation. Eddie Muller—founder of the Film Noir Foundation and a noir savant—spearheaded these projects, which promise to deepen our appreciation of international noir.  

Schrader’s Hollywood-centric conception of film noir has long since faded, and international noir studies have mushroomed. My designated noir bookshelf groans under the weight of scholarly tomes on European and Asian noir. A recent addition is David George and Gizella Meneses’s Argentine Cinema: From Noir to Neo-noir (Lexington Books, 2018). This first English-language scholarly book on the subject provides a well-researched, informative, and clearly written introduction. American academics are not the only ones to recently discover Argentine noir; the exhibition sector has also taken note. In 2016, for instance, New York’s Museum of Modern Art programmed the landmark retrospective “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina.” 

It is productive to situate Argentine noir—loosely defined—as a genre of considerable economic and artistic significance in the nation’s motion-picture industry during its so-called Golden Age from the 1930s to the 1950s. The heyday of Argentine noir is generally delimited as the mid-1940s to the mid- 1950s. In the year 1950, Argentina boasted approximately a dozen studios serving a notably moviegoing public: a population of approximately seventeen million sought entertainment in 2,190 cinemas that projected fifty-six new Argentine releases. This studio system—Hollywood writ small—featured a star system, fandom, specialized technical personnel, considerable shooting on sound stages, genre expectations, and the like. The social importance of moviegoing in Argentina at this time is glimpsed in The Beast Must Die in a fireside scene in which an elderly inhabitant of a remote village implies that life there would be rather unbearable if she could not attend the cinema at least twice a week. Moviegoing also constitutes an important social activity in The Bitter Stems, where a dating scene set in a cinema during a screening serves to suggest the protagonist’s unhealthy fascination with battlefield mayhem.  

During the presidential terms (1946–1955) of the caudillo Juan Perón, the Argentine motion-picture industry subsisted largely thanks to his protectionist policies, such as production subsidies, state bank loans, and screen quotas privileging domestic production. The year 1950, however, heralded the upcoming and definitive decline of the studio system in Argentina: theater attendance dropped by thirty percent as slipshod “quota quickies” proliferated; a new competitor, television, loomed on the cultural horizon; and a deal signed with American distributors opened the door to intense foreign competition at the box office.

In addition, Argentina at this time occupied a weak position in the lucrative Latin American market as Mexico continued to exert the dominance it had achieved during WWII thanks in large measure to the financial and technological support provided by its grateful “Good Neighbor” ally, the United States. The Argentine industry, on the other hand, had been hamstrung during the war by the effective U. S. campaign to deny it raw film stock, a difficult-to-obtain product that was not manufactured in Argentina at that time. American policy aimed to punish Argentina because of its declared neutrality until very late in the conflict. This film stock fiasco came to emblematize for many national observers the Argentine industry’s dangerous technological dependency.

General Perón—a champion of the working classes—was a charismatic, authoritarian populist-nationalist leader with deep-rooted profascist and pro-Axis tendencies. His all-powerful Subsecretariat for Information and the Press (subordinate to the Presidency) functioned as a veritable ministry of propaganda; and it exerted a far-reaching control over the motion-picture industry via repressive measures such as censorship and blacklists. Some prominent figures were driven into forced exile, such as superstar Libertad Lamarque and the prolific director Carlos Hugo Christensen—two of whose noirs screened in the MoMA retrospective. For many Argentine artists and intellectuals, Peronism’s dark side—particularly its cultural obscurantism—conjured up the murky, oppressive, and destabilized ambiance inhabited by film noir denizens.

Unlike other Latin American countries, Argentina enjoyed a strong tradition of crime fiction; and this literature provided inspiration and source material for film noir production. The Bitter Stems, for instance, is based on the 1954 prize-winning, bestselling novel of the same name by Argentine journalist Adolfo Jasca. The renowned Jorge Luis Borges was himself a writer of such fiction—think, for example, of his endlessly studied and anthologized 1942 short story “Death and the Compass.” Furthermore, in 1945, Borges and co-editor Adolfo Bioy Casares launched a line of detective novels translated from English for the venerable Buenos Aires publishing house Emecé. The first in the series was Nicholas Blake’s dark psychological thriller The Beast Must Die, originally published in 1938.

Argentine film noir production featured a marked cosmopolitan dimension in terms of both source material and industry personnel. Nicholas Blake was actually Cecil Day-Lewis, an Irish-born British poet and author—and father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis—who wrote detective novels under a pen name. The director and co-screenwriter of The Beast Must Die was the erudite and multitalented Román Viñoly Barreto, an Uruguayan who had worked as a translator, Bible scholar, and theatre director in Montevideo before entering the Argentine movie industry. Soon after completing The Beast Must Die, he co-wrote and directed The Black Vampire, a strikingly noirish reimagining of the Fritz Lang masterpiece M. The cast of The Beast Must Die included co-producer and sultry leading lady Laura Hidalgo, who hailed from a Romanian-Jewish background. In its 2005 obituary, the leading Argentine newspaper La nación remembered the popular Hidalgo as one of the most “refulgent divas” in the history of the nation’s cinema. The male lead and co-screenwriter was Narciso Ibáñez Menta, a Spanish actor particularly famous for his persona in horror films. A profile included as a bonus feature reviews his long and storied career in Spain and Argentina.  

Claude Chabrol’s 1969 adaptation (This Man Must Die in English-language markets) of the Day-Lewis novel remains the best known, but Viñoly Barreto’s is the first. In this version, the co-screenwriters have in a striking manner restructured Day-Lewis’s narrative. Viñoly Barreto opens his film with an on-screen biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes, which ominously seems to equate beasts and humans. Then the opening credits sequence locates the action out on the flat, far-reaching Argentine pampa, as an early 1950s model Buick convertible—a swanky status symbol—wheels into a country estate, finally stopping in front of an imposing Tudor-style manor house. The villain descends and enters the mansion; we are deeply in medias res.  

Inside this opulent dwelling the biblical equation is unsubtly brought to life—and death—in a climactic dinner-table scene. The loathsome, bestial bully Jorge Rattery (Guillermo Battaglia) coarsely insults and threatens his sister-in-law (Laura Hidalgo) in the presence of other family members just before himself rising from the table, staggering about clutching his chest, thundering that he has been poisoned—and then finally collapsing onto the floor. A Dutch-angled close shot captures the bug-eyed horror frozen on his face. This melodramatic scene plays out in an “overheated” manner as Muller understates it in his on-screen introduction included as a bonus feature. 

Before expiring, Rattery had failed to articulate the name of the person he evidently suspected of having poisoned him. This question becomes the subject of a following ensemble scene played out in an Agatha Christie whodunit manner: a police inspector questions in the same room of the manor house a gaggle of suspects, almost all of whom may have had the motivation necessary to commit the murder. The movie then shifts into film noir mode in terms of both its fragmented narrative structure and its dark visual style, which is peppered with expressionist motifs, such as the recurring images of crashing waves that reflect a character’s subjective turmoil.  

In extended flashbacks, at times involving the voice-over narration of diary entries, we follow the efforts of the protagonist, detective novelist and widower Félix Lane, to himself become a sleuth with this goal: to wreak vengeance on the still-at-large hit-and-run motorist who on a dark and foggy night had recently struck and killed his beloved young son. The first entry ominously reads: “I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name. I don’t know where he lives. I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him.” As Muller indicates in an interpretative essay included in the disc’s companion booklet, “The objective viewpoint of detective fiction is abandoned for a headlong and utterly empathetic dive into the psyche of a potential murderer.” 

This megalomaniac quest for revenge leads to Lane’s moral corruption, which has been exacerbated by his association with the decadent landed gentry, a class depicted as pleasure-seeking, dedicated to shady real-estate deals, and openly flaunting its immorality and hypocrisy—in short, morally bankrupt. In an ominous dissolve, the face of Lane fades into the face of Rattery. All this leads eventually to the film’s big unanswered question: Is the murder of someone ever morally justifiable? And, of course, there will be a surprise ending.

The Beast Must Die scores several successes. The imaginatively structured narrative unfolds with intrigue and suspense. After finishing the movie, many viewers—just as I did—will return to the opening scenes to puzzle out just how the narrative threads and the suspicions concerning given characters were initially signaled. Alberto Etchebehere’s resplendent “painting with light” black-and-white cinematography shines as a noir gem. A surrealist psychedelic montage sequence strikingly reflects the protagonist’s feelings of loss and guilt upon learning of his son’s death. Audio commentator Guido Segal rightly contends that this stylistically innovative sequence must be inspired by the famous Dali-designed dreamscape in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound.  

Unfortunately, shortcomings mar The Beast Must Die. The occasional scene plays out distractingly studio-bound, as when an automobile lumbers down an incline into a faux creek the better to become predictably stuck therein. Caricature occasionally looms, for instance, in actor Guillermo Battaglia’s id-running-rampant portrayal of the psychopathic villain. Or actor Nathán Pinzón’s over-the-top performance of his character’s unbridled, simpering toadyism and willful cuckoldry. Mario Vanarelli’s muddled art direction randomly offers up occasional motifs such as right-hand drive automobiles and signs written in English in a half-hearted and unconvincing attempt to suggest Day-Lewis’s 1937 British setting. And, of course, there is the problem of the movie’s ultra-melodramatic dimensions.  

The Bitter Stems, a box-office success in Argentina, constitutes a stronger film in terms of artistry and production values. The Argentine Film Critics Association awarded it two important prizes in 1957: best film and best direction. In addition, American Cinematographer magazine ranked it number forty-nine in its list of the one hundred best photographed motion pictures in the period 1950–1997. I suspect that for many viewers the deep focus and noir black-and-white cinematography of veteran Chilean cinematographer Ricardo Younis will represent the film’s most powerful aesthetic dimension. It appears that ace cinematographer Gregg Toland’s work on Citizen Kane may have influenced Younis’s conceptualization of certain shots. Compare, for instance, Toland’s “gazing out the window” deep focus approach and Younis’s remarkably complex deep focus shot leading to the narrative climax: the guilt-ridden and still ill-informed protagonist—in interior monologue mode—gazes out a window from within his house at a darkly ironic scene unfolding in the sunlit yard, where the playful but naive younger generation seems about to discover incriminating evidence in the form of “bitter stems” that have sprouted beneath their feet. 

The talented young Fernando Ayala directed the film, and its success boosted his career. In 1956 he founded with Héctor Olivera the comparatively cost-efficient “independent” production company Aries Cinematográfica Argentina, which became famous across the decades for surviving financially by cleverly alternating the production of frothy commercial fare, such as sex comedies, with more artistic and socially relevant films. Ayala played major roles in the history of Argentine cinema: for instance, as a link between the old studio system, where he had initially trained, and the young, independent, auteurist filmmakers of the late 1950s and early 1960s known as La Generación del 60. In addition to directing forty films, the versatile Ayala also functioned as producer and screenwriter. 

Argentina’s greatest twentieth-century musician, the bandoneón virtuoso and prolific composer Astor Piazzolla, wrote The Bitter Stem’s vibrant score, which inventively combines elements of tango, jazz, and classical music. Steven C. Smith’s informative documentary short on Piazzolla’s life and work accompanies this release as a bonus feature; it offers helpful analyses of key musical moments in The Bitter Stems. The protagonist of the film, journalist Alfredo Gasper, was ably played by the prominent star Carlos Cores; his antagonist, the Hungarian refugee Paar Liudas, by the Egyptian-born and French-educated actor Vassili Lambrinos, who was also a dancer, painter, director, and choreographer. His prize-winning performance as the magnetic hustler Liudas enhanced his reputation as an actor; and he eventually emigrated to the United States, where he enjoyed a successful career acting in motion pictures and TV.  

The narrative of The Bitter Stems launches in medias res, deep in noir territory. In an initially unscored precredits nocturnal sequence, we gaze in high-angle long shot down onto a dark urban street spottily illuminated by light from a nearby subway station and a streetlight. A taxi pulls up under the streetlight. The camera moves in closer, and we watch from a disquieting low angle as two business-suited gents descend. A clock glimpsed on a distant tower begins to gong ominously. The camera tracks with them as they descend the subway stairs; they are sweating. As they proceed through the subway station the gonging ceases; the midnight hour has now arrived. At the ticket window, the protagonist pointedly pays a one-way fare. A death march swells on the soundtrack. After this ill-boding prelude, the narrative develops in two blocks.

Part one follows the two principals on their train journey from Buenos Aires to Gasper’s home in a semirural area seventeen miles distant. Brief scenes in the train show the men involved in small talk concerning their upcoming leisure time. Most screen time, however, is dedicated to Gasper’s interlocking flashbacks, which recount how the two men met and formed a shady business promoting an eventually profitable mail-order journalism enterprise—an outright scam targeting naive aspiring journalists in the hinterland. When the paranoid Gasper finally concludes that his partner Liudas is also swindling and betraying him, he resolves to commit the perfect murder. And then finally does so, he believes, by hammering out an appropriate solution. Next up: the Hitchcockian problem of how to dispose of that awkwardly dead body. Part one ends with the murderer’s burning of—seemingly—all the incriminating evidence.

Part two—with one striking exception—abandons the flashback structure in favor of presenting scenes chronologically. This latter half opens with the unexpected, dramatic appearance of the fresh-faced, blond twenty-year-old Jarvis Liudas (Pablo Moret), the antagonist’s son, an eager beaver just arrived from Europe. This instantaneously creates a mind-boggling problem for the shocked Gasper since he had mistakenly concluded that young man did not in actuality exist—in spite of the fact that Liudas had frequently mentioned him and sung his praises. Will Jarvis learn that Gasper has murdered his father? Can Gasper continue to successfully conceal the perfect crime? Will he plot to murder his victim’s son? A surprise ending awaits.  

The Bitter Stems is an atmospheric, irony-rich psychological thriller featuring an intriguingly multifaceted characterization of the protagonist as he descends into psychopathy. In early flashbacks set in the deep-focused bowels of a newspaper office, we see Gasper’s professional frustration at being ill-used in his reporter’s job. He rants at a co-worker that he had dreamed of significant reporting assignments involving meeting famous people in foreign lands and being lauded for his efforts. But in reality this self-defined underachiever only receives trivial assignments from an overbearing boss, and the pay proves so meager that he must seek informal employment as a translator.

Perhaps it is Gasper’s inferiority complex that triggers a lengthy dream sequence—awash in German Expressionist set design and motifs—in which he chases unsuccessfully after easy money and also appears as a lad on a battlefield and under the domineering influence of his father, a decorated and heroic German officer in WWI. If my reading of Gasper’s implied backstory is accurate, however, he feels guilt-ridden for in fact having himself missed out on enlisting for WWII and fighting heroically, presumably for the Axis. In actuality, Gasper has never found any heroic or good cause to fight for until meeting Liudas.

As Imogen Sara Smith points out in her exceptionally informative audio commentary: Gasper represents a case of arrested development. At age thirty-two, this descendent of European immigrants still lives at home with his kid sister and a mother who babies him. He has failed utterly to “hacerse la América,”—the Argentine vernacular expression denoting a European immigrant’s success at accumulating a fortune in the New World. He is a typically frustrated and disillusioned noir antihero who cannot manage to get his life in order in a meaningful and important way. So, fatalistically, this frustrated small-timer falls prey to the smooth-talking and charismatic Liudas and becomes a partner in his confidence game, even unselfishly offering him extra shares of the profits to enable Liudas to achieve the noble cause he so frequently references. Like so many noir antiheroes, Gasper suffers from a fatal flaw—his tendency to act on insufficient evidence and knowledge. And in this noir universe, things are not what they seem.

While Gasper incarnates a typical noir figure, the complex Liudas does not, as glimpsed early on in the railway car as he delightedly entertains young children seated nearby. His commitment to fatherhood and his love of children are real, though the sweaty, psychopathic Gasper seen in the prelude has concluded the opposite. As his conversations with Gasper reveal, Liudas perseveres as an unrelenting con artist who envisions naive suckers everywhere, eager to be fleeced. This huckster actually does, however, possess an admirably idealistic or noble streak. This involves his wife and two sons living in post-WWII Europe in precarious conditions. Liudas seeks to accumulate the money needed to bring them to safety in Argentina, where they can prosper. Eventually Liudas’s noble plans crash against the actual social situation he has been living in Argentina: he has fallen in love with a nightclub hostess, Elena (Aída Luz); and they have established a serious, respectful relationship. Liudas does finally break off this relationship in order to remain faithful to his longstanding commitment to his family in Europe.

Ayala and screenwriter Sergio Leonardo’s conceptualization and treatment of the secondary character Elena is unusual. She differs greatly from the femme fatale figure so central to many noirs. Elena appears mysteriously in part two and represents—as Smith indicates—the “noble fallen woman” type. The filmmakers allow her the only flashback of part two and the only one in the entire film not originating in Gasper’s consciousness. This approximately five-minute-long segment offers from Elena’s perspective further insights into Liudas’s personality and her relationship with him; and there is a moving exploration of her doomed hopes and dreams of abandoning her demeaning hostess gig and enjoying domestic bliss with her lover.

American films noirs are not overtly political, and The Bitter Stems follows this pattern. “Perón” remains unuttered in dialogue, unheard on radio, unwritten on walls or in newspapers. But for many Argentine spectators at the time, did not “Perón” represent a structuring absence? Viewing the film today, I seem to glimpse shadows of a political subtext invoking Peronism’s vast populist appeal. A political reading of the film would center on the Gasper–Liudas relationship, with the latter in the role of a powerful, rhetorically skilled, and charismatic figure à la Perón enticing his prey—an undistinguished, fretful, and underachieving little man in search of easy money and a cause. A political reading may also surface in a scene in the newspaper office, when a colleague criticizes Gasper for his lack of initiative and for being a natural-born follower prone to remain a subordinate and to unthinkingly grant allegiance to powerful figures. The Bitter Stems premiered in 1956 during a period of sociopolitical instability, since Perón had only months earlier been deposed in a military coup.

The impressive preservation and restoration work on both these motion pictures was accomplished by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with funding from the Film Noir Foundation. The technical dimensions of these Flicker Alley Blu-ray/DVD dual format releases prove, overall, first-rate. I did miss in the credits recognition of the translators whose culturally sensitive linguistic decisions appear in the subtitles. In addition to the aforementioned bonus features, these attractive packages include optional closed captions, optional subtitles in English, companion booklets (with stills, illustrations of posters and lobby cards, etc.), as well as videos of in-depth conversations with Argentine film historian, curator, and archivist Fernando Martín Peña and another with Daniel Viñoly, the son of Román Viñoly Barreto. For me, the most illuminating discussion concerned the fine-tuned challenges facing restoration personnel in terms of grading black-and-white motion picture footage in order to achieve a desired look—a goal so essential in the esthetic conception of noir films.  

The most shocking revelation of these conversations for many viewers will be this unsettling fact: Argentina—in spite of its prominent place in the history of Latin American motion-picture production—possesses no appropriately funded, extant public institution (e. g., a national cinematheque) capable of systematically preserving this priceless cultural heritage, which, across the decades, has been disappearing. What Argentina does have is the tireless Fernando Martín Peña, whose commitment to film preservation received international acclaim in 2008 with his discovery in a museum in Buenos Aires of a full-length copy of Lang’s Metropolis—a cinephile’s supreme coup. He is also responsible for having located the original film elements needed to restore both these noirs. Chapeau! May he track down other long-lost Argentine noirs and may they also be properly restored.

Dennis West is a Cineaste contributing editor who has published widely on Latin American cinema. He was traveling in Argentine on July 1, 1974, when Juan Perón died; the banks closed, trains stopped running, and the nation confronted the dark uncertainty of a Perón-less future.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 3