Among Friends: the Generosity of Judy and Kenneth Dayton

A small, but interesting, show is hidden in the Walker Art Center's attic, concealed, I think, because it contradicts the prevailing ethos at this museum.  You will have to walk through many galleries and, then, up an unobtrusive flight of steps to see Among Friends:  The Generosity of Judy and Kenneth Dayton.  Three galleries display works from the WAC's permanent collection, all of them gifts from the couple who were, of course, wealthy Twin Cities socialites -- the Dayton fortune was based on its downtown Department Store, long since sold off and, in fact, now shuttered, I think.  (Once these places were temples of commerce, the pride of the downtown shopping district -- I recall that my family would make a pilgrimage twice a year from the outer suburbs downtown to shop in the place and it was always a memorable event).  But the tone of the WAC is far more socialist than socialite and there is a faint, acrid whiff of old money and privilege that taints the show:  according to the prevailing paradigm, the Dayton's, although liberal Democrats, were part of the problem, not part of the solution and one shudders to think what their opinions might have been about Trans-pride and identity politics writ large.  On the evidence of the show, the Dayton's favored art for arts sake, large-scale decorative objects that would look good against the modernist white walls of their mansion on Lake of the Isles.  The work is cheerful and theoretical and doesn't preach and the exhibitions theme of noblesse oblige is at odds with much of what is shown in the rest of the place.  There's a terrace outside the exhibition on which people are playing miniature golf on artificial greensward designed by local artists.  But you can't get from Dayton exhibition onto the terrace nor vice-versa, it seems.  

The art in the show, with a couple exceptions, is abstract:  the usual suspects, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Sol Lewitt, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, and so on.  A formidable assemblage of knobs and balustrades and lathed columns, all painted midnight black, dominates the exhibition -- this is a work by Louise Bourgeois that was, for a long time, a centerpiece of the WAC collection; it was Judy Dayton's first donation to the museum in 1969, presumably because the thing is too large and ominous to keep in your house.  The two non-abstract images in the show are a Warhol silkscreen showing some flowers and a bronze by Jasper Johns expertly reproducing a flashlight.  There is an odd precisionist canvas by the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein called "Imperfect Painting" that dares  you to figure out how it is defective -- I think it has something to do with patterns of serigraph dots that fill in partially (but not completely) some of the hard-edged geometrical shapes in the picture.  Jasper John's "Green Angel" is a wonderful picture, part of a puzzle series that the artist made around 1990 featuring an enigmatic cloud-shaped form that the artist teased as a reference to some classic Old Master painting -- but that he didn't explain.  The "green" in the name refers not to the apparition on the canvas, a jigsaw of irregular forms painted different colors, but to the dense green background in which two red eyes, with concentric circles, emanate rays like celestial objects.  There's a vague hint of landscape at the bottom of the picture and the figure (for its seems some sort of bulky personage) has flipper-like arms and little feet and carries the puzzle-form on its hips, as it were, like a corpse -- there's a hint of a medieval Pieta in the figure.  This is an endlessly interesting painting make complex by its encaustic texture -- it's made in wax in which sand is mixed as grit. (Additional research reveals to me that Johns' called the form derived from an Old Master painting the "green angel" -- the picture is part of a series of 40 paintings featuring that shape.  Johns said that the image was inspired by a green angel in Gruenwald's Isenheim Altarpiece's central panel -- but the form isn't shaped in any way like the Isenheim angel and this clue seems to be a misdirection by the artist.)  By contrast to the Johns' painting, there are three large panels by Ellsworth Kelly, pure fields of color, in which the artist has labored, it seems, to avoid any trace of human activity -- you can study the panels with a magnifying glass and would find no imperfections nor trace of any brush strokes.  There's a serene work by Agnes Martin, six inch bands of very dilute greys and blues, half-hidden behind a dewy mist of whitewash -- everything painted with the utmost delicacy and both exceedingly precise, with ruler straight lines, and foggy.  A 1953 Philip Guston abstraction provides the eye with a work-out in comparing that canvas to four paintings by Cy Twombly made, I think, thirty years later.  The Guston has a spackled surface showing a roughly rectangular bed of floral marks, scabs of reddish paint that seem to adhere to a wall of crumbling masonry -- although my likenesses suggest something shabby, in fact, the picture is quite beautiful, elegant and mysterious with the blossoms of red floating against a grey and white background.  The Twombly paintings are superficially similar -- they are round clouds of reddish paint, some with fingerprints impressed on the canvas and streaks of white through the centers of the forms suggesting clefts or fissures.  Unlike the Guston, the paint is applied evenly and not textured -- it is pure color without any sculptural qualities.  The two central pictures are red; the paintings flanking them are greyish-blue, but with similar  streaks at their center -- a floating froth of color against empty canvas.  

There are some photographs of Mrs. Dayton (who died in 2021) standing proudly next to Jasper Johns and a grinning Ellsworth Kelly.  All of these pictures are owned by the WAC.  If you're in the museum, seek out this hidden gallery.  But it's not worth traveling any distance to attend this show. 

Beau is Afraid

 If you are acclaimed as a "visionary" director, sooner or later, someone will pay you to realize your visions.  Freed from the ordinary constraints that impede free expression in the motion picture industry, the visionary gets to put his obsessions on film.  The result is usually catastrophic.  David Lynch, undoubtedly a visionary, was able to finance Lost Highway and the even more rebarbative Inland Empire -- both films in which his obsessions were laid bare for all the world to see.  Griffith persuaded people to let him make Intolerance.  Michael Cimino foundered with Heaven's Gate.  The profoundly capitalist enterprise of movie-making financed Bernardo Bertolucci's mammoth 1900, a film with more red flags than Kremlin square.  All of these pictures were labors of love but profoundly flawed, self-indulgent and, in some cases, well-nigh unwatchable.  To these follies, one must add Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid, a three-hour confessional film in which the director seems to have been encouraged to work out themes lurking beneath his very effective and highly popular horror movies, Hereditary and Midsommar.  Somewhere along the line, Martin Scorsese declared that Aster was a great director (I think it was in reference to Midsommar, the film that proved that Hereditary wasn't a mere fluke) and this opened the floodgates for the funding necessary to produce the epic Beaux is Afraid, a picture that features a crazed performance by no less than Joaquin Phoenix as its crazed titular protagonist.  Aster is a talented horror director and his material is clearly motivated by certain obsessions, but it's probably a bad idea to encourage him to dramatize those obsessions in free, improvisatory form without the constraints of a genre plot.  Ask yourself:  would you like to explore the obsessions of Tod Browning (Freaks) for instance or David Cronenberg or, for that matter, even the relatively urbane James Whale (The Bride of Frankenstein)? -- there are certain dark crannies that it's best not to investigate and, on the evidence of Beau is Afraid, Ari Aster's personal nightmares are very dark indeed, but, also, like most people's intimate fetishes, more or less ridiculous to the point of seeming comical.  I'm not trying to persuade you to not to invest three hours in this picture; I'm just providing fair warning -- but, I suppose, the double negative here is, more or less, indicative.  

For all of its arduous huffing and puffing, Beau is Afraid is the ultimate Jewish Mother movie.  Here the monster is Beau's insanely demanding mother, a female executive named Mona Wasserman.  (Many years ago, Woody Allen made a short picture called Oedipus Wrecks in which a passive-aggressive Jewish mother grows to the size of Godzilla and tears down half of Manhattan.  Aster's picture is three hours of the same content.)  The picture begins with a blurry colors shot through a sack of amniotic fluid -- this is Beau's birth, accompanied by his mother's shrill screams and recriminations; no sooner is the poor bastard born but his mother commences tormenting him.  At the film's end, Beau rides a rowboat with a little puttering outboard motor across some more turbulent fluid, entering a vaginal grotto of ragged-looking cliffs and, then, emerging from this stony birth canal into a vast womb-shaped auditorium, with thousands of spectators lining the walls, where he is tried, apparently somewhere in his mother's uterus for crimes against her (the prosecuting attorney is none other than the famously Semitic Richard Kind who rails at poor Beau from a tribune high above this watery Circus Maximus).  Of course, Beau is duly convicted; his little rowboat's motor bursts into flame and explodes and he sinks into the black ooze, apparently ensconced in his mother's womb.  The underside of the rowboat bobs on the fluid like the coffin at the end of Moby Dick -- it's passive-aggressive mother as the Great White Whale.   This will give you some idea of what this picture is like.  

Beaux plans to visit his mother.  But an elaborate and very funny series of mishaps keep him from making his plane.  (We have seen him with his therapist and it is clear that he dreads this trip.)  When he calls  his mother to apologize for being late, a UPS worker informs him that he's in Mona Wasserman's house and that the woman is dead and headless to boot -- a chandelier has fallen on her and caused her "head to evaporate."  The rest of the movie chronicles Beau's attempts to get to his mother's house said to be six hours away from the hellish city in which the hero lives.  Here are some spoilers, but frankly I don't give a damn -- you aren't likely to watch this movie in the first place.  As it turns out, Beau's mother has faked her own death (a twist always signaled by headless corpses or bodies burned beyond recognition).  In fact, she has beheaded her longtime housekeeper in exchange for paying the woman's family a king's ransom in cash.  This scheme is devised to test Beau's loyalty and as a punishment for his failure to visit her in a timely fashion.  At the bizarre mansion where Mona lives, Beau encounters a girl that he desired in his childhood -- she's now middle-aged.  Beau has sex with the woman whom his orgasm kills.  All the while, Mom has been lurking in the wings watching the proceedings.  She harangues Beau in a lengthy speech ranting about what a bad son he has been.  She also introduces Beau to his father who is a penis-monster with spider legs and fangs concealed in his mother's attic.  (Beau has long expected that there is some sort of horror in the attic but it turns out to be worse than he thought.)  After the penis-monster is slain in a gory battle with a traumatized war veteran, a berserker driven mad by the Battle of Caracas, Beau confronts mom.  It turns out that his therapist is working for Mona and he has recorded all of their sessions in which Beau is said to "have scapegoated his mother" for her inspection.  Some choice examples of these sessions are played to Beau's horror.  He, then, tries to strangle his mother (at long last) -- but this fails and he ends up on the slow boat to mom's vagina and uterus where the picture ends.

There's much, much more in the movie, some of it very brilliantly done, other parts vapid to the point of being unwatchable.  Aster is a horror director by trade and the movie is chockful of ghastly stabbings, semi-eviscerations, and all sorts of gore.  In summary, the movie is designed in five acts:  the first act takes place in and around Beau's nightmarish apartment; the second act involves Beau's convalescence after he is repeatedly stabbed and hit by a motor vehicle, he's in captivity in the leafy enclave of the suburb where the negligent driver who almost killed him (the wife of a surgeon) lives.  The third act, which is endless and completely obscure, involves a theater company that puts on subliterate plays in the woods -- the play performed here turns out to be the story of Beau's life and his pursuit of his missing father (who seems to show up in a form more benign than the penis-monster avatar in the audience at the sylvan theater.)  In the fourth act, Beau finally has sex and confronts his mother.  The fifth act is the trial in the watery amphitheater of Mona's womb.  Much of this material is overtly ridiculous but the film is shot with such virtuosic expertise that it's hard to laugh at the idiotically melodramatic stuff on the screen.  By far, the best part of the movie is its' first hour.  Beau lives in a ramshackle tenement in a hellish city where everyone on the street is always raping and murdering everyone else.  His therapist has given him an anti-anxiety pill that he must always take with water or run the risk of dying.  His apartment building is infested with brown recluse spiders according to posters all over the walls.  The streets are perilous -- crowded with prostitutes and horrible-looking beggars (one of them is bent double and flops his arms around like pendulums) and people are either bleeding out or having sex on the asphalt.  The apartment is not any better.  After Beau dines on a micro-wave dinner (a combination of flavors from Hawaii and Ireland it says on the box), he goes to bed.  But every hour, Beau receives notes thrust under his door telling him to be quiet -- although he hasn't said a word and has made no noise at all.  Around three a.m., the neighbor retaliating for Beau's alleged noise-making puts on some kind of awful techno-rock so loud that it knocks things off the hero's walls.  As a result Beau oversleeps and misses his flight to see his mother, necessitating a painful call to her -- she viciously denounces him.  When he calls back, he finds that mom is dead, sans head.  Beau is frantic and takes his anti-anxiety pill, but finds that none of the water spigots in the ramshackle apartment are working.  When he leaves the apartment to get water, his keys get stuck in his door and are stolen.  So he's locked out of this apartment with the sinister pill corroding his innards.  Beau takes a phone book and uses it to prop open the door to the nightmare apartment.  He dashes through the chaos on the streets to a bodega next to a hideous sex shop.  But he doesn't have the correct change to buy the $1.79 bottle of water and is detained.  While arguing with the clerk in the store, the entire mob on the street find the door open to the apartment and stream into the place.  But Beau is locked-out.  He climbs a scaffolding to look into his apartment and sees the miscreants from the street partying hearty with his stuff -- some of the freaks seem to be preparing one of their fellows for supper (they are seasoning him); but others are politely doing the dishes.  Beau spends the night on the scaffolding outside his apartment.  The next day, he fights his way back to his rooms and finds that one of the street people, a man who is grotesquely tattooed  lying dead in the hallway.   Beau steps over the bloody corpse and draws a bath.  While bathing, he sees to his horror that one of the bums from the street is hanging from the ceiling over the tub.  A brown recluse is skittering over the bum's face.  The man shrieks and falls on top of the naked Beau.  After a wrestling match in the bathtub, Beau runs naked out into the street where a cop aims his service firearm at him and tells him that he will shoot unless he drops the weapon.  What weapon?  Beau is buck-naked.  Just as the cop is about to shoot him, Beau flees into traffic gets hit by a car and, then, repeatedly knifed by another naked street bum called the "Birthday Boy."  This frenzied, nightmare slapstick is the best part of the movie and once you have enjoyed this mayhem, it's best to tune out of the movie for the next ninety minutes or so.  You will miss the scenes with Beau's benefactors, an insane suburban couple whose son died in the aforementioned Battle of Caracas.  (The family has a jigsaw puzzle made from a picture of the dead Marine that they assiduously piece together; Jeeves, the dead Marine's combat buddy is living in an Airstream trailer a few yards away and periodically runs amuck.)  Beau's surgeon wants to correct his "distended testicles", a result it seems of Beau's fear that if he ever ejaculates, he will die -- this intelligence is one of her mother's kind gifts to her son.  The scenes involving the arboreal theater company develop another plot -- Beau's search for his father; in the play, Beau is shown to be a father himself and has three sons.  The play features a live-action Beau strolling about in a cartoon, a bit like an infernal Disney picture in which flesh-and-blood characters interact with perky animated birds in a colorful painted landscape -- this part of the movie probably makes sense in some way, but I wasn't able to decipher the animated thirty minutes in the middle of the picture.  After these adventures, Beau finally makes it to his mother's house and the film's grim denouement.  

Joaquin Phoenix is very good, but mostly has to stand motionless, his eyes dilated in rapt horror.  This shot is Aster's trademark, a character looking at the camera in speechless ecstatic terror -- but a little bit of this goes a long way.  There's an extraordinary scene in which Beau embraces his lost three sons (fictional apparitions from the play within the movie); he gropes at them and everyone sheds hot tears and it's weirdly affecting.  Scenes on a cruise ship, a flashback to when Beau was about 13, establish the movie's love interest, the woman with whom he has fatal sex in his mother's house near the end of the movie.  These scenes are also very good with a dense tincture of foreboding and dread. (Aster can stage horror effectively in bright daylight.)  Indeed, the whole movie is a symphony of dread and foreboding.  But it's also a comically self-indulgent mess.   

They Cloned Tyrone

 They Cloned Tyrone (2023) is a new Netflix movie that tap-dances on the edge of the volcano of race-war.  It's  intended as violent action-comedy, along the lines of Ghostbusters, The dialogue is razor-sharp and extremely funny -- everyone talks in a caricatured ghetto-argot that is fantastically elaborate and dense with contemporary allusions.  Of course, no one could speak with this fluidity and eloquence in real life, but the stylized dialogue is the best thing in the movie, a picture that is otherwise a confused and botched mess.  Indeed, the way the characters interact and speak is so fascinating that the viewer will likely overlook the film's feeble plot and narrative problems.  That said, the movie's grasp exceeds its reach in all measures and the picture is not nearly as good as it is proclaimed by many critics to be.  Furthermore, the picture isn't particularly original -- it's main plot points derive from Jordan Peele's much better Us, a movie with an almost identical premise:  beneath our workaday world, there is a subterranean kingdom that forms the secret basis for what happens around us.  (The theme goes back to Lang's 1926 Metropolis with worker barracks in caves underneath the gleaming city on the surface.)  Peele's Us also anticipates the cloning theme in They Cloned Tyrone -- viewers will recall the huge wall covered in cages each holding an identical rabbit.  Us didn't exactly make sense except as a fever-dream; They Cloned Tyrone doesn't make any sense at all.

Nonetheless, the movie has a good, practically appealing, premise.  Set in an ugly suburban ghetto, three paradigms of the place's dysfunction league together to unravel a mystery -- the trio consist of a penny-ante drug dealer named Fontaine, a whore (YoYo) and her cowardly, but fantastically eloquent pimp, Slick Charles -- Slick Charles' career is in decline and he sadly observes that he was awarded the International Pimp of the Year award way back in 1995 but now he can scarcely get his girls to obey him at all.  These characters, symbols of the marginal demimonde that hamstrings the ghetto, a place called "the Glen", are unlikely heroes and so the movie scores initially by putting them at the forefront of the plot.  The first half of the movie, a perverse variant on a Nancy Drew mystery or Scooby Doo, is much better than the film's second half where the plot deteriorates into nonsense.  YoYo, the whore, grew up in her grandma's house reading Nancy Drew mysteries and, when Fontaine, who was shot to death in a motel parking lot, mysteriously comes back to life, she is convinced that she can solve this enigma -- she says:  "everything will turn out to be regular-degular vanilla missionary-position bullshit."  (In other words, the apparent occult activity will turn out to be just a criminal scheme perpetrated by villains.)  Fontaine has been in fight with another drug dealer in which he drives his car into the man and breaks his leg.  That night, when Fontaine comes to collect a debt from Slick Charles, he gets gunned down in the parking lot, but mysteriously is back on the streets the next day.  With Yoyo and Slick Charles, Fontaine uncovers a plot to control the people living in the ghetto by poisoning them with laughing powder (put in their fried chicken at the local Got Damn Chicken franchise), putting happiness meds in their hair straightener products ("straighter is greater") and infusing their communion grape juice with mind-altering agents.  Entering a so-called "trap house" -- apparently, a house set up and under surveillance by the cops to entrap burglars -- they find a hidden elevator that transports them into a sinister laboratory a hundred feet underground.  As it turns out, the laboratory is part of a vast subterranean complex where White scientists -- and they are all White or Asian -- are influencing the ghetto by pouring psychogenic agents into it.  (The film suggests an allegory about the use of heroin or crack cocaine to control Black people in the slums.)  One of the nodes for contaminating the ghetto is a strip club.  When our heroes enter the strip club to investigate how that place enforces discipline on the ghetto and its denizens, the hypnotized bargoers swarm onto the street to pursue YoYo, Fontaine, and Slick Charles.  Just before they are torn to pieces, the White villain appears on the scene, although he proclaims that he is merely someone who reports to another boss who himself has a boss and so on.  This man, played by Kiefer Sutherland, drawling a sort of "cracker" Oklahoma accent, says that the powers-that-be are using various means to keep the ghetto under control.  He gives a speech in which he declares that the United States was founded "by idealogues living in mansions built by slaves" and that the country has always been deeply divided -- the project of the subterranean technocrats is abolish this division.  (So the film reveals itself, for better or worse, as a movie version of the 1619 Project.)  Sutherland's villain, who like all movie bad guys has a tendency to harangue, says that the pimp, the "ho", and the drug dealer are just agents of control in the ghetto -- they are part of the project of keeping things orderly in the slum -- and, so, he contemptuously releases them.  Our heroes, however, aren't willing to be coopted in this way.  Fontaine enlists an enemy, now working to defeat the Man, to shoot  him in shoulder -- he ends up in a body-bag in the underground laboratory from which he escapes.  The prostitutes all pretend to be servicing their clients in cars, as per ordinary practice, but, in fact, they are recruiting folks to join the "slave" rebellion.  Of course, the White technocrats who have everything under surveillance think that the ghetto-dwellers are just going about their ordinary pathologies of existence -- dealing drugs, diverting themselves with illicit sex, attending evangelical church meetings, and the like.  But, in fact, our trio of heroes are fomenting a rebellion.  In a parade of pimp-mobiles, the gangsters attack a local convenience store, find an elevator concealed behind the cooler stocking 40 ounce malt-liquors, and descend into the underworld where they are met by Fontaine.  All hell breaks loose.  This is the point at which the film ventures into the imagery of a race war -- but, as if conscious of the dangers implicit in this imagery, the film softens the violence.  The Black rebels simply chase around the white-coated scientists in their laboratories and don't seem to harm any of them -- remarkable restraint, it seems, in the light of the fact that the White technocrats are experimenting on, and, even, torturing, Black victims.  (For instance, the technocrats are engineering ways to increase "Black on Black crime" by having hapless African-Americans beat each other to pulp.)  YoYo has been captured and is the victim of an experiment in hair-straightening intended to dose her brain with mind-control chemicals -- but the scientists fail to influence her since she is wearing an elaborate wig on which they are spraying the psychogenic agents.  As it happens, the big Boss is Black himself, a man who has bought into the notion that "assimilation is better than annihilation" and seems to be a genetic engineer -- he's trying to manipulate genes to turn African-Americans into White people.  Kiefer Sutherland's malign White supremacist gets his brains blown out -- the only white villain who gets his comeuppance.  The army of naked clones (whose role in the scheme is unclear) emerge blinking and confused into the light of day, apparently, liberated.  (As I write this note, a naked African American woman, much visible on footage salaciously shown on cable news shows, appeared suddenly on the freeway in LA where she took potshots at passing cars with her 45.  So maybe there's something to this movie.)  The film ends enigmatically with clones emerging from underground in Los Angeles -- we see palm trees above the mean streets of the ghetto.  A thug called Tyrone is watching TV and sees himself emerging naked into the light of day -- hence, the film's title, which has been hitherto unexplained.  

The movie is stylish and the Elizabethan-tinged ghetto jargon expertly spoken.  The movie is brilliantly shot showing the ghetto at night as a maze of alleys, lurid motels and vacant warehouse districts infested with whores -- everything is greenish with purple highlights.  (The Glen, as it is called, is supposed to be West Memphis, I think -- YoYo keeps talking about escaping the place for Memphis.)  And the film's fundamental allegorical elements seem sound -- but the several objectives of the bad guys don't mesh into any coherent plot:  are they trying to abolish Blackness by genetic interventions (suggesting that the pathologies of the Ghetto are the product of nature, a racist proposition) or are the villains merely seeking to control a potentially insurgent population by encouraging vice?   (This latter theme reminds me of the opening act of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in which Levee bemoans the fact that Black folk have been amusing themselves to death for generations.) The film is overtly racist and if made by a White director would induce cataclysmic backlash -- see, for instance, the scenes in the fried chicken emporium, the parody of the Black church and the continuous use of what is euphemistically called "the N- word"; the film's subtitles portray the word as "Nigga" but it's pretty obvious what is being said here.  There's half of a good movie here.  But the Netflix executives, I think, were concerned about the inflammatory nature of the imagery and soften the picture's political agenda -- they play things for comedy that aren't comic at all.  

Film Study Guide -- El Vampiro Negro

 El Vampiro Negro

1.

The story of El Vampiro Negro is framed by a courtroom scene.  The proceedings in court take place in a room without windows, a sepulchral space lit by lamps on the wall.  In this room, it is always night. We are seeing the death penalty phase of the Vampire’s trial.  The Judge grandiloquently instructs the jury, ending with this declaration:  “Justice is the hope of mankind.”  

What is justice?  Does such a thing even exist?

2.

The Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood, is supposed to have said: “The greatest fear of men is that women are laughing at them.  The greatest fear of women is that men will kill them.”

In fact, this aphorism derives from words spoken by Atwood in a lecture delivered at the University of Waterloo (“Writing the male character”) in 1982 – the form of the quotation in that lecture is more diffuse and less declarative.  

This quotation shows up in Season Two of the TV series The Handmaiden’s Tale, unattributed, and is recited, memorably, by Gillian Anderson in The Fall, a British series about a serial murderer made in 2007.

3.

El Vampiro Negro is a 1953 film noir directed by Roman Vinoly Barreto and produced by Argentine Sono films.  The movie is a noteworthy example of the pictures made during the so-called Argentine “Golden Age” of cinema, a period generally considered to begin in the mid-1930's and continuing until the Military Junta seized power in 1956.  During this era, coinciding with a similar efflorescence in Mexican filmmaking, studios in Buenos Aires made hundreds of pictures for distribution in Spanish-speaking Latin America (particularly Cuba which had many theaters) and also for overseas consumption in Spain. Mexico and Argentina were concerned that Hollywood films would strangle their film industries and, so, to some extent, production was government-subsidized. Vinoly was born in Uruguay and studied theology – he was a “Biblical Scholar” at least according to the noir critic Eddie Mueller.  (Mueller thinks he attended college, but, his son, Daniel Vinoly, asserts that his father was wholly self-educated).  In Montevideo, Roman Vinoly was a sort of child prodigy – by the time he was 18, he was directing productions at the National Theater and working in collaboration with leading Italian and French stage directors; Vinoly’s first passion was for the theater.  (In some ways, Roman Vinoly’s early career resembles that of Orson Welles.)  Early in his Uruguayan career, he was recruited to work in the movie industry across the river in Buenos Aires – however, he remained in Uruguay to care for his mother until he was 33 and, then, accepted an invitation to work for Argentine Sono; immediately, upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, he was assigned the direction of a film and worked on movies one after another for many years. (Again, there are contradictions in available sources; Rafael Vinoly, the director’s eldest son, said that he father first came to Buenos Aires to direct an opera, a production of Richard Wagner’s Die Valkyrie.)  Vinoly made 26 feature films between 1947 and 1965 - Vampiro is his eighth picture, made immediately after he directed The Beast Must Die, another highly regarded crime picture.  

Roman Vinoly was multi-talented.  He was a voracious reader and could speak a number of languages.  (He also professionally translated from the Latin and French.) He was musically accomplished and worked with famous conductors such as Carlos Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini.  His son describes him as a “florid personality” who “exaggerated everything”.  Not only productive in the cinema, he was also active in directing stage productions and many TV shows in the sixties.  He died suddenly in his sleep in 1970.  Vinoly’s demise occurred while taking a siesta after receiving the exciting news that he had been appointed to manage one of Argentina’s three TV networks.

Vinoly’s children are well-known figures in Argentina.  Anna Maria (nicknamed Goga) performed the part of the Amalia’s endangered daughter in El Vampiro Negro.  She was a natural screen actor, but Vinoly didn’t want his children to go into film production.  (This was probably due to his affection for opera and the conventional theater.)  Anna Maria became a professor of psychiatry an well-known clinician and teacher in Buenos Aires.  The eldest son, Rafael Vinoly, is much more famous than his father; Rafael Vinoly was a leading architect, headquartered in New York City, and the designer of a number of very well-known and much-lauded buildings – he died in March 2023.  Daniel Vinoly is an established graphic artist in Buenos Aires and was an executive with IBM. 

4.

El Vampiro Negro is a free adaptation of Fritz Lang’s classic M released in 1933.  Vinoly appropriates the premise of M – that is, a child murderer stalking a city – and, also, reprises some of its elements: the killer whistles “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg, a blind man hears this aural cue and pursues the murderer, and a tribunal of underworld characters ultimately captures the killer.  Vampiro’s narrative combines police procedural elements with Vinoly’s principal innovation – that is, a focus on women that Lang treated as merely incidental to hs grim plot.  Vinoly originally worked in the world of classical music and his approach to Lang’s masterpiece seems musical to me – he implements a series of variations on a theme.  

(M was remade by Lang’s original producer who had fled from Germany to Hollywood and directed by Joseph Losey in 1951.  That film is set in Los Angeles and follows Lang’s model much more closely than El Vampiro.  Both Losey’s version and Lang’s original equate the police with the criminals in the underworld.  This theme derives from the fact that the criminal underworld in Dusseldorf and Berlin publicly offered to assist the cops in tracking down and capturing the “Dusseldorf Vampire”, the child murderer Peter Kuertin, events on which M is based.  In Vinoly’s version, the dregs of society, literally underground because they are sewer dwellers, prove to be more just and merciful than the criminal court in which the child murderer, Dr. Teodoro Ulber is tried.)   

The less you know about Peter Kuerten, the actual vampire of Duesseldorf, the better off you will be.  It’s probably best for you not to taint your imagination with any account of Kuerten’s life and deeds.  It suffices to say that he probably killed more than nine victims, two of them children but mostly adult women – one of the people he murdered was a man.  He seems to have attacked about 35 people mostly adult women.  Because Kurten killed with a hammer or a scissors, many of his attempted murders failed and, although often horribly wounded, his victims survived.  He was the product of hideous abuse as a child and claimed to have killed several playmates by the time he was nine.  He committed a variety of petty crimes in addition to his murders, mostly burglaries, armed robberies, and arson.  He taunted the police by sending them letters confessing to crimes and identifying the location of bodies that he had buried.  On occasion, he would lurk around the murder scenes to enjoy the response of people coming upon his mutilated victims and, when a body of one of the women that he killed, was exhumed, he made sure he was in the crowd to participate in the gruesome event.  He was caught by the police by an accident.  One of his last victims, a woman that he raped, was afraid to report the event – she was complicit in making a rendezvous with him – but she sent a letter to her best friend detailing the ordeal.  The woman misaddressed the letter and it was opened by postal authorities when it couldn’t be delivered.  The letter contained information as to the apartment building where the woman had met Kuertin and the police went to that place where they arrested the killer.  You can read much more about Kuertin, whom the examining forensic psychologist dubbed, “the king of sexual perverts,” but you will do so at your own hazard.  Before Kuerten was executed by beheading, he asked if he would be conscious, at least, momentarily after the guillotine blade had severed his head.  The doctor said that he thought this was possible.  Kuerten said that he would be able to hear the blood gushing from the arteries in his throat after he had been killed and this would afford him “the pleasure of all pleasures.”  His last meal was Wiener Schnitzel, a bottle of white wine, and fried potatoes.  Apparently unconcerned about his impending execution, he asked for, and was given, seconds on each dish.  

Pictures show Kuertin to be the very model of a petite bourgeois German Buerger.  (In his mug shots, he is wearing a suit coat and tie.)  He was married and outwardly respectable.  After his execution, his head was preserved and carefully dissected.  No abnormalities of any kind were detected in the structure of Kuertin’s brain.  Somehow, his mummified head found it’s way to the Wisconsin Dells where it is said to occupy a place of honor in the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum (the place is at 105 Broadway, Wisconsin Dells – it will cost you $20 to visit.)

5.  

M in its two versions inaugurates the theme of the serial murderer that is now a mainstay of television entertainment.  Every time you watch a presentation about a serial murderer, for instance, the British show The Fall, Netflix Mindhunter, HBO’s program about Jeffrey Dahmer or The Silence of the Lambs, you are participating in a genre that was, more or less, invented by Fritz Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, in Weimar Germany in the early thirties.  Lang and von Harbou created M as a sort of thought experiment – their enterprise was to determine whether the viewer’s empathy could be stirred by the suffering of the most detestable sort of villain, a sex murderer who preys on children.  

Losey’s version of M was a box-office failure, but the movie spawned a series of film noir pictures with serial killer themes, creating a lineage of works in this vein that continues to flourish today.

6.

El Vampiro Negro was almost lost.  Although the movie was a popular success in Argentina, and the leading lady Olga Zubarry (Rita/Amalia) was awarded the Silver Condor, the Argentine equivalent of the Oscar, the picture was infrequently screened after its brief revival in 1957.  Argentina has no system for preserving and restoring classic films – in this regard, it lags far beyond Mexico and Brazil who both have national Cinemateques.   Films from the classic era in Argentine cinema were preserved in poor 16 mm. prints for broadcast on TV.  Because of its subject matter, El Vampiro was never shown on TV and, so, was not even conserved in a degraded form.  The 35 mm print was allowed to deteriorate until it was nearly illegible.  In 2010, Eddie Mueller, the host of TCM’s Noir Alley, was in Buenos Aires showing some recently conserved crime pictures to cinephiles in that place.  A noted historian of Argentine films, Federico Pena, screened several noirs for Mueller – the pictures were on 16 mm and, of course, didn’t have subtitles.  One of the pictures at Pena showed Mueller was El Vampiro Negro.  Mueller immediately recognized the film’s quality, it’s excellent acting, and high production values.  Through his Film Noir Foundation, Mueller located several 35 mm. prints, most of them incomplete and badly dilapidated.  Working with the UCLA Film Restoration labs, the movie was  restored and premiered in San Francisco a couple years ago.  Part of digital restoration was financed by Flicker Alley who has produced an exemplary DVD with much supplemental material making El Vampiro Negro more generally available.  Even in Argentina, the movie had been largely forgotten.  Mueller says that the restoration of El Vampiro Negro is one of the greatest achievements of his film noir foundation and he argues that Vinoly’s version of M is the best of the three pictures on the subject.  

7.

The African-American novelist, Richard Wright (author of Native Son) was blacklisted in the United States for his association with the Communist Party.  He moved to Paris in the late forties and met Pierre Chenal, a French film-maker.  Chenal suggested making a film version of Native Son and the picture was actually shot and produced in Buenos Aires in 1951.  Richard Wright, who was then 45, played the part of Bigger Thomas, a character imagined as 20 in the novel.

The Argentine film industry was parsimonious and footage from Native Son is interspersed throughout El Vampiro Negro.  Many of the night scenes showing the city streets were extracted from Native Son.  Most notably, there is a scene after Prosecutor Bernard orders the cops to “pick up the usual suspects” in which Black people at a house party are rousted by the cops who bust into their apartment – we see the assault through the lit windows of the apartment building.  This clip of film was shot for Native Son and simply interpolated into El Vampiro – the viewer justifiably wonders: who are these Black people and why aren’t they shown anywhere else in the film?    

8.

At the time of El Vampiro’s production, Argentina had neither jury trial nor the death penalty.  The film’s frame story, involving the murderer’s trial, accordingly, may be construed as taking place somewhere other than Argentina.  In fact, an introductory title indicates that the film is based upon crimes that occurred in several “European cities” and not Buenos Aires.  (Indeed, anxiety about the audience locating the action in Buenos Aires results in some conspicuous oddities in the movie – none of the main characters have Spanish last names: Ulber refers to Edgar Ulmer, a German director who ended up making low-budget pictures for poverty-row studios in Hollywood; Lange, of course, invokes Fritz Lang; Bernard refers to a silent era German director, Curtis Bernhardt who spent the second half of his career in Hollywood.)  Notice that signs legible in street scenes are written either in German or French.  The bus that picks up the Vampire has no destination displayed on its front and, strangely, bears the emblem “MAN” on its grill.

Vinoly’s objective, Mueller argues, is to contrast the law of man with the law of God.  The sewer dwellers display Christian forbearance that is conspicuously absent from the formal courtroom.

9.

El Vampiro’s cynical and jaundiced perspective on criminal jurisprudence is evident in the film’s introductory courtroom scene.  Prosecutor Bernard makes a pettifogging argument splitting hairs on the subject of criminal intent.  Bernard says that it is conceded that Ulber acted under an irresistible compulsion – he was unable to repress his urge to murder.  But, after committing his murders, Bernard says that the Vampire acted with cunning and intelligence to conceal his crimes.  Therefore, Bernard assets that the criminal should be condemned to death, not for the murders themselves, but for his  premeditated acts in hiding what he has done.  This seems a rather frail distinction but is the basis for Bernard’s argument in favor of the death penalty.  Probably, the nature of the argument is immaterial – the Vampire’s behavior, acting under psychic compulsion, was so horrible that the jury will necessarily impose capital punishment in this case.  

Argentine audience’s would have recognized the grandiose classical temple shown under the film’s opening titles: this is the facade of the Law School in Buenos Aires.  The Vampire appears as a hunched black figure, ascending unsteadily the steps to the Temple of Justice, crossing a system of illuminated bands that appear like the bars of a prison or cage under the oblique raking light flaring across the pediment to the structure.  In one shot, the figure of the Vampire appears as a black wounded crow.  Although, the grotesque black figure seems a petitioner or supplicant at the Temple of Justice, we see that he is repelled and not afforded access to the structure.  

10.

The cabaret qua brothel where we see Amalia first performing is full of grotesque lovers, some of them bored or drugged or drunk or half-asleep.  The denizens of this establishment seem to rhyme visually with the people in the courtroom – once again, some are avidly interested in the proceedings while others are obviously bored.  The courtroom and the cabaret brothel are linked, fused together, by the film’s imagery of performance (the rhetoric of lawyer and cabaret singer) and the varied responses of those in audience.  

Significantly, the cabaret/brothel is half-underground.  Amalia’s dressing room is subterranean, below the grade of the peculiarly dank and gloomy alley, a spectacular expressionist set with stoop and curbs worn smooth and caryatids supporting a masonry gable – the exterior to the cabaret is, in fact, underground as well, a sort of a cave next to the building.  (The alley set looks like images from the German horror film, Der Golem, representing the crooked, narrow alleys in Prague.) When Gaston, the owner of the cabaret, is shot through the eye, the camera perspective looms over him, showing that his establishment exists in a sort of subterranean crater hollowed out in the city.

Below the buried cabaret are sewers.  The sewers are simultaneously grandiose with noble colonnades and disgusting – there is excrement underfoot that makes the corridors slippery and filth fills troughs in which the denizens of this underworld are prospecting for valuables that have flushed down the toilet.  A stygian river gushes down into a huge, cloacal culvert.  Vinoly filmed in Buenos Aires’ actual sewers and his son recalls that, on the days when his father worked underground, he came home bearing the sewer stench in his clothing and hair.  Production stills show Vinoly wearing hip waders with his crew as he directs the camera (the D. P. is also dressed as if for trout fishing) and actors in the sewer.  The sewer embodies the film’s peculiar esthetic – it is beautifully lit with halos of radiance around the columns and remote walls bright against the underground darkness; the streams of water shiver with reflected light, but it is also dark, obviously malodorous, with filth on the pavement.  When the sewer dwellers appear in the movie’s penultimate scene, we see their enormous shadows cast on the reeking masonry walls as they march in procession to surround the terrified Vampire.  During location filming, Vinoly discovered that there were people actually living in the sewers and he cast them as the people who pursue and capture the vampire underground.  The imagery is grotesquely beautiful, like a Universal horror film from the ‘thirties or a paragraph from a novella by E.T.A. Hoffmann.  

By contrast, the prostitutes (including Amalia) live in lavish apartments filled with plush furniture and ornate window-casings, floors covered in heavy carpet with lush velvet drapes around entries and openings and weird ornamental bronzes and statues scattered around these sets.  Vinoly has learned composition from Orson Welles and his cameraman, Gregg Toland – many shots are low-angle, showing coffered ceilings bearing down with immense weight on the rooms.  Prosecutor Bernard’s home, tastefully decorated, is also sepulchral, a kind of mausoleum.  Bernard’s paralyzed wife is always shown from the same camera angle, seated and inert among the voluptuous floral appointments of her room.  She explicitly tells Bernard to put four drops of sleeping medicine in her goblet each night – it’s as if she is daring him to poison her.  And we expect the solicitous, if perverse, Bernard, trapped like all the characters in this film, to, perhaps, administer an overdose to the poor woman.  Although wan and beautiful, she is sexually inert and her condition afflicts her husband – like the child-murderer, he is in the grip of sexual compulsion:  can he help himself when he tries to rape Amalia?

11.

The poem that Amalia reads is contemporary.  The verse is by Langston Hughes, the African-American poet active during the Harlem renaissance.  Hughes’ poems had just been translated in South American Spanish in the year preceding the production of the film.  There is a curious subtext that links the fragments of Native Son to the Hughes’ poem.  Native Son is a document of oppression and racism.  Hughes writes from the viewpoint of the racially oppressed.  Very delicately, I think, Vinoly suggests that, although Justice is the Hope of Mankind, the prospects for justice being achieved in our world are bleak.

12.

What does Justice authorize when a child murderer is abroad?  What means are justified in the pursuit of this sort of criminal? The film asks this question.  Bernard’s goons are perfectly willing to beat a confession out of suspects.  Torture is not out of the question.  Erotically thwarted himself, Bernard has appointed himself the censorious judge of the sexual morality of others caught up in his dragnet – he is quite willing to coerce and blackmail Amalia into cooperation.  (It must be conceded that she isn’t hesitant to use her sexual wiles on him either – we see her half-naked in her dressing room flirting with the prosecutor and putting herself on display ala Basic Instinct to distract him.)  Bernard pointlessly ruins the reputation of the married woman whose lover is falsely accused of murder.  He tells Amalia that he will have her child taken from her custody on moral grounds unless she assists him in the manhunt.  Most alarming, Bernard uses a child accomplice, posing alone on the streets, as human bait to entice the Vampire.  Bernard’s wife says that he must act to go to the scene where the Vampire has been cornered because “You are Bernard the Prosecutor.”  His identity is subsumed and contorted by his pursuit of the child murderer.  But, in the end, all of Bernard’s machine guns and rifles are helpless against the murderer.  Ultimately, it is Amalia’s maternal love that subdues the Vampire and puts him to flight. 

13.

No se (“I don’t know”), Ulber says, with respect to the Rorschach images.  His bulging eyes fill the screen evoking memories of Peter Lorre’s appearance in the original M.  And, despite his protestations, the Rorschach figures do summon associations in his mind – we see a woman laughing at him (the trigger for his murders) a little girl, and the confining elevator in the stairwell in which Ulber has committed a crime.  Ulber’s no se is disingenuous – the ink blots, in fact, do have associations for him which we see.  But the no se applies to the viewer, we don’t know what the pictures superimposed on the Rorschach blots mean.  And, perhaps, this opening sequence confirms Prosecutor Bernard’s initial speech – Ulber may be morally insane, but he is not so irrational as to blurt out the associations that he makes to the ink blots.  He may not be able to control his compulsion to kill, but he consciously, it seems, obscures clues to his mental processes.  The expression no se returns several more times in the film, embodying the picture’s theme that no one can really know the heart of another.  

14.

Vinoly’s artistry is apparent in the small details with which he adorns the film.  When the cops shoot it out with Gaston in the cabaret, there’s a foreground close-up of glass shattering.  This image rhymes with a foreground close-up of milk bottles breaking as the married woman’s lover flees down the elevator stairway winding around the elevator in the ornate apartment building.  Broken glass figures as well in the scene in which Ulber squeezes a cognac glass until it is crushed and has lacerated his hand.  (The vertical shots of the stairwell in the apartment, a real location in Buenos Aires, “La Casa Colorado” – the “Red House” – invoke the eerie shots into the Treppenhaus or stairwell in the tenement in M.  There is something intrinsically disquieting about vertical shots analytically showing an empty stair.)  When the cops fire into the sewer at the climax of the film, Vinoly causes the sound of gunfire to reverberate in the cavernous underground space.   The sewer dwellers, cast-offs from society, laugh ominously at Ulber as he scurries about in their domain attempting to escape – their laughter correlates to Cora’s derisive laugh when Ulber suggests that they go out to tea together, hilarity that triggers a murder by Ulber.  Bernard’s paralyzed wife insists on exactly four drops of sleep medication; the strange bucket in which Ulber and Amalia’s daughter ride at the amusement park bears number 4.  In the scene by the docks, where Ulber cuts his hand with his switchblade, the long dark arcade of warehouse buildings is highlighted by peculiar, unmotivated radiance and, in the background, a scaffolding rises, its iron skeleton irradiated with light like an instrument of execution.   

The Prestige

I haven't really followed Christopher Nolan's career.  As I write, he is currently acclaimed for Oppenheimer, alleged by no less than Paul Schrader to be the best film made post-2000.  Some critics speak highly of The Prestige, a labyrinthine 2006 movie chronicling a rivalry between two magicians.  The movie is impressively cast:  Christian Bale (Borden) and Hugh Jackman (Angier) play the two rivals and Michael Caine, Andy Serkis, and Scarlett Johansson are along for the ride.  I thought the picture was over-elaborate and, somehow, managed to leach the drama out of a series of events that should have been highly engrossing.  Parts of the film felt perfunctory to me and the movie is spoiled, I think, by fantastic elements that detract from picture's effect.  Some of The Prestige is about magician's effects, the psychology of indirection, and aspects of the subculture of prestidigitation -- this material is interesting but, somehow, lacks conviction and the writing is lackluster; the material, except for its ludicrous sci-fi elements, would seem to be within the terrain explored by David Mamet, but, of course, the playwright's dialogue is much much effective and pointed.  

To describe The Prestige's plot is to spoil the movie and so readers should beware of what follows.  None of the twists and turns are particularly ingenious although, sometimes, the movie is intentionally hard to follow.  The picture's story involves not one but three sets of doubles.  This oddity arises from the central feature of the plot:  Angier's attempt to discover how Borden performs a trick called "The Transported Man" -- this is a stunt where the magician enters a cabinet on one side of the stage and immediately, without lapse of time, appears from another cabinet forty feet away.  Everyone in the film thinks this stunt is marvelous, but, for some reason, the trick isn't involving at all -- just a guy going into one door and exiting another.  (In fact, one of Borden's assistants, the beautiful Olivia played by Scarlett Johannson remarks that the trick is strangely uninteresting and she suggests ways to ramp up the suspense.)  Obviously, the trick requires a double -- someone who looks the same as the guy who enters the first cabinet to come out of the other box.  As it turns out, Borden has a twin brother who performs with him.  (A gag that should have been obvious to everyone.)  The twin brother shares a maimed hand (missing two fingers) with Borden.  The film has a spurious motif about magicians having to suffer for their art and, as we learn, Borden chopped off the fingers of his twin to make the trick more impressive -- this was the unwitting result of Olivia's suggestion to make the effect more spectacular.  Note -- it's not Borden suffering for his art, but, rather, his hapless twin brother, something that makes hash out of this highly dubious conceit.  When Angier tries to duplicate the "Transported Man", he has to hire a replica, a man who looks just like him and who can, therefore, simulate his appearance from the second box.  But the replica is a drunk out-of-work actor who blackmails Angier and has to be eliminated when he proposes to reveal the secret -- again, a secret that should be pretty obvious to everyone.  The third set of doubles implicates the science fiction aspect of the plot and is best left unrevealed.  

The narrative is elaborately framed by a scene in which Borden seems to murder Angier when he falls through a trapdoor and is confined in a watery jug locked and sealed at the top.  Borden is accused of murder and imprisoned.  After a trial, he is condemned to death and the story unfolds as a series of flashbacks between Borden's conviction and his hanging at the end of the movie. (Witnesses to the alleged murder are few and far between -- all of Angier's stagehands are blind.)  Borden has a young daughter and he is importuned to sell his tricks to a certain Lord Caldwell (actually Angier in disguise).  Borden has written a diary, seized by Angier who pores over it to figure out how his rival contrived the illusion of "The Transported Man".  Thus, there are many scenes involving Angier trying to decipher Borden's diary written in cipher.  The hatred between Borden and Angier derives from a ghastly accident.  Borden apparently tied the wrong kind of knot on the wrists of Angier's wife and stage assistant -- this error resulting in her drowning in the vat of water used for an escape trick.  Angier lurks around Borden for the first (and better) half of the movie, intervening in his various tricks to cause him embarrassment and severe injury -- for instance, when Borden tries a "bullet catch" trick, Angier tampers with the gun and shoots off two of Borden's fingers.  Angier's ongoing vendetta against Borden seems petulant -- we don't really see much affection between Angier and his wife (he kisses her knee once) and both of these magicians are more concerned with thwarting one another than romance as poor Olivia discovers.  Furthermore, it's obvious that Borden's implication in the death of Angier's wife is based on a pure accident -- indeed, Borden can't even recall what kind of knot he tied before the woman's death.  Certainly, Angier has a right to feel bad about his wife's demise, but, the movie makes his protracted revenge seem unmotivated -- are you entitled to ruin someone's life and have him falsely accused of murder (and hanged) because of a bad mistake?  As with much in this movie, Angier's vengeance, which motivates two-thirds of the film, seems to be an arbitrary plot device.

The movie goes off the rails with its science fiction subplot involving Nikolai Tesla.  Borden goes to see Tesla in Colorado Springs, departing London where the movie is mostly set.  (The narrow-gage Durango to Silverton train with its old steaming locomotive gets yet another work-out in this picture.)  Tesla is transmitting energy from giant coils blasting out artificial lightning from his mountain-top eyrie and has powered up the whole frontier village of Colorado Springs with electric lights.  Tesla's domain is defended by the eerily jolly Andy Serkis behind an electric fence and the great scientist is played by no less than David Bowie in a severely underwritten role.  We aren't shown what Borden learns from Tesla, although it's implied that the scientist's coils are somehow involved in the "Transported Man" trick -- that is, Borden is really shot from place to place by Tesla's manmade lightning.  (This is, to use the language of magic, a misdirection.)  Later, Angier follows in Borden's footsteps and, ultimately, acquires a machine of some kind from the scientist.  Portentously, everyone whispers to Angier that he must destroy this wicked device.  (This motif seems potentially related to the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, Nolan's current film.)  Tesla vanishes from the movie when Edison's thugs burn down his laboratory, a typical mad scientist's lair.  Famously, Edison and his former employee Tesla clashed over whether AC (Tesla's method of delivering energy) was better than Edison's direct current transmission.  Angier returns to London and agrees to perform the "Transported Man" one-hundred times to high-paying audiences. This sets up the climax of the movie in which Borden seems to escape from jail -- it's really either him or his twin-brother (by this time we no longer care); Borden or his brother confronts Angier and kills him before learning the horrible truth about Angier's version of the "Transported Man."  (Parts of the second half of the movie seem to be channeling David Cronenberg's The Fly which involves a similar device.)  The Sci-Fi aspects of the plot are ridiculous with the result that you can't take the movie seriously and I concur with most critics remarking upon the film when it was first released -- it's a mess, very impressively designed and produced, but, nonetheless, a failure.  For some reason, the film is very hard to follow -- this is an aspect of Nolan's film practice that I find a little disconcerting; he complicates things to the point that you don't know what is happening, generally, to disguise the paucity of his materials; this tendency was already evident in his breakthrough movie, Memento and is very obvious in the way that he complicates (successfully, I thought) the plot (or lack of plot) in Dunkirk.  I liked Dunkirk but didn't love it.  I'm interested to see Oppenheimer.   

(Tesla was in Colorado Springs from 1898 to 1900.  He built a huge coil and was a nuisance to his neighbors, producing huge discharges of artificial lightning.  Butterflies were electrocuted by manmade St. Elmo's fire and water from nearby taps shot out sparks like roman candles.  The movie shows Tesla's coil powering light bulbs 15 miles away from his laboratory -- in fact, he was only able to power bulbs about sixty feet from his lab.  Edison didn't burn down the lab.  Tesla didn't pay his bills, had to flee debtors in Colorado, and his machinery was auctioned-off to his creditors.  Some of Tesla's artificial lightning bolts were sent into the universe to communicate with aliens and, supposedly, the aliens flashed messages back to Tesla on Earth.)

Foolish Wives

 Once upon a time, there was a print of Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives that was more than six hours long.  A few people are reputed to have seen the film in its extended version.  I extend my sympathies to those victims of von Stroheim's megalomania.  The 2020 restoration of Foolish Wives is two hours and  twenty-seven minutes and, I think any reasonable person would agree that this is more than enough.  Stroheim, who was both a great fraud and a great director, is indisputably some kind of cinema genius, but if perfection in art involves proportion and self-discipline, the man and his work are woefully inadequate.  Film flourishes on excess, however, and, in that context, anyone interested in cinema should endure his movies in as a long a version as presently exists -- the experience may not be particularly pleasant, but great art doesn't exist to be convenient or merely entertaining.  Wagner's operas, Hamlet, and any other number of examples that I could cite (and you could too) are examples of great works of art that are profoundly inconvenient and make disturbing claims on our time and attention.  Stroheim's insanely ambitious productions (Foolish Wives, Greed, and Queen Kelly) fall into this category and pose interesting questions about the importance (and limitations) of realism in movies.  I could sense that Foolish Wives is a great work within its first five minutes -- but it's very hard to explain in any coherent way why this is true.

In simplest terms, Foolish Wives involves the machinations of a fake Russian aristocrat (Wradislaus Sergius Karamzin -- played by Stroheim) and his two "cousins", apparently common criminals and most likely former prostitutes, as they scheme to defraud a wealthy American woman.  The story is set in Monte Carlo where the 21 year old woman is visiting with her older husband, a forty-one year old American ambassador.  Karamzin is a gambler and libertine, operating under false auspices, and running out of luck.  One of his mistresses, the two ostensible Russian princesses posing as his cousins, recommends to Karamzin that he seduce the wealthy American wife and separate her from her money.  Karamzin is an all-purpose villain and one supposes that the original cut of the movie featured him exercising his perfidy in every imaginable sphere of activity.  Here we see him passing counterfeit currency, lying to his much-abused maid (he has implausibly promised to marry her), plotting to seduce and steal from the American woman, and attempting to rape a mentally disabled young girl.  Who knows what kinds of other mischief he committed in the three hours of the movie that have now gone missing?  (Probably, he abused animals, kicked children, and peddled opium to school girls.)  The bulk of the narrative as the film now exists involves the plot to defraud the American woman, Mrs. Hughes, and cuckold her husband, the rather goofy, if endearing, ambassador.  This scheme involves an initial encounter with the woman on the terrace of a luxury hotel, a trip to what seems like the Tyrolean Alps involving a savage thunderstorm, and, then, an attempt to seduce or rape the woman in the villain's enormous chateau, the Villa Amorosa.  Karamzin is so nasty and depraved that he seems to commit bad acts for the sheer hell of it -- one of the "cousins" has to remind him that the objective is "not the woman but her money."  Mrs. Hughes is reading a novel written by one Erich von Stroheim called Foolish Wives, apparently an account of the narrative projected before us -- one wonders why the foolish wife doesn't skip to the end of the book to find out how things turn out.  Karamzin lures Mrs. Hughes to the Villa Amorosa, leads her into the place's fairy-tale tower, (Rapunzel,Rapunzel, let down your long hair) and is about to extract some sex and 90,000 francs from her, when Maruschka, his morose maid, locks the couple in the villain's bedroom and lights the place on fire.  (Here the restoration recreates spectacular color effects that were used in the original film -- the fire of the candles that are part of Karamzin's furniture for seduction and the blaze at the villa are all hand-colored a vibrant, flickering orange; some of the firetrucks are steam-powered and have boilers heated by ovens -- the fire in those ovens is also hand-colored.)  Karamzin escapes from the blaze although he is disgraced by leaping off the tower's lofty balcony before attempting to save Mrs. Hughes -- he blithely says that he jumped first to show Mrs. Hughes how it was to be done.  Mr. Hughes, the ambassador, finally figures out what's going on.  He confronts the skulking Karamzin and gives him a good hard punch in the nose -- after first gentlemanly asking him to remove his monocle.  Poor Maruschka goes to some nearby sea-cliffs and kills herself by diving off the ledge to her death, another spectacular scene tinted deep blue and featuring dramatic silhouettes of the doomed woman against coastal mountains and the sea.  Karamzin knows the jig is up and, so, thwarted in his schemes against Mrs. Hughes, he goes to the counterfeiter's garret in a disreputable and squalid part of town, climbs up the wall to enter the home through an upper window, and proceeds to rape (or attempt to rape) the forger's mentally challenged (as we say today) daughter.  For his pains, the counterfeiter kills Karamzin and dumps his corpse in a particularly noisome sewer nearby -- we've earlier seen Karmzin hustling past the open sewer shaft, covering his nose with a scented handkerchief; pigs and chickens are wandering about the sewer and, in a previous scene, we have been shown the denizens of the slum cleaning out the sewer by extracting buckets full of filth from the hole.  (In the original print, Karamzin was merely playing 'possum and, apparently, revived in the sewer only to be killed by some sort of monster mollusc -- it's probably fortunate that his sequence is lost, although one would desire to know what it looked like.)  Karamzin's "cousins", attempting to decamp from the half burned-out Villa Amorosa, are detained and have their glamorous blonde wigs torn off -- they are revealed to be wanted criminals on the lam.  The ambassador Hughes, at last gets in bed with his wife (she has rebuffed him before) and reads to her the closing paragraph of Foolish Wives, the novel -- a text that says "The Man for the American Woman is the American Man," presumably the moral of the work, something like saying that the theme of Citizen Kane is that little boys who lose their sleds when young will grow up to be great men and great criminals.)  

As should be apparent from the summary above, the story is not the aspect of the film that makes it astonishing and still compelling (if infuriating) watching 100 years after it was made.  Rather, it is the innumerable strange and startling details, the little "touches" with which Stroheim decorates his rather conventional and formulaic melodrama.  The picture is full of weird images and bizarre figures, often immensely elaborated.  Villa Amorosa is a huge hulk of chateau, full of peculiar smoking braziers leaking incense into the air corrupted by the villains -- Stroheim's movies are so vivid that you seem to be able to smell them:  we have no doubt what the sewer in the slums smells like.  Karamzin is first seen firing his pistol from atop some sea-cliffs, peppering a little target about six feet from under his nose with bullet holes.  We see him in profile, as a heroic if oddly shaped figure, against sky and sea.  And, he turns the gun on the camera and shoots us right in the face.  For breakfast, he has an "eye-opener" of "ox blood", a decoction so vile that even this villain can scarcely swallow it.  This is followed by heaping servings of "caviar for cereal" as a title informs us.  Like his hero, with whom he clearly identifies, Stroheim is incapable of any kind of economy --when the counterfeiter, Ventucci, warns Karamzin that his daughter is "everything to him" since her mother has died, he has to cut away to insert shot of the deceased mother in a portrait photo, an entirely gratuitous gesture.  Karamzin's initial encounter with the pathetic young woman (she is clutching a toy doll) involves him smirking as he eyes her from foot to toe in a repeated shots and, it seems, that, as implausible as it might seem, he is plotting to lure her into a side room at the Villa to rape her as his "cousins" entertain Ventucci.  These sequences go on and on pointlessly, although the sheer accumulation of detail creates a powerful sense that what we are seeing is somehow realistic, although actually merely plot contrivances in a melodramatic and implausible narrative.  A couple of examples of Stroheim's profligacy will suffice to suggest the tone of the picture.  In one scene, Maruschka, who Karamzin has apparently been sexually abusing since she was 12 -- she has been in the service of the fake Count for twenty years -- pleads with the villain to perform his promise and marry him.  Maruschka is homely, shapeless, and a wholly unattractive figure.  But she has saved up 3000 francs during her 20 years of abuse by Karamzin (and his "cousins") and the villain wants her money.  He feigns tears by dipping his fingers in bowl full of water and causing his eyes to drip onto the place setting at the table -- there are about 12 shots of this ruse.  Maruschka reacts (about ten shots) and, then, goes to get her pathetic life-savings.  The camera follows her in a couple of shots through the shadowy and baroque interior of the villa -- lots of odd niches and grotesque statues and smelly braziers.  She returns with the money that Karamzin, then, caresses, far more gently and with more love, than he ever used when touching the poor maid -- this comprises another half-dozen shots.  Stroheim is a master of composition and camera placement and makes every shot interesting with incidental detail poking out of corner -- for instance, there are Borzoi dogs, pigs, chickens, and poodles in some scenes or strange household artifacts (in the scene with Maruschka there's an ornate cut-glass vase on the table and a bizarre tall pewter vessel at the edge of the shot.)  In this scene in which Karamazin defrauds Maruschka several shots feature a vertical element, usually shadowy and hard to interpret, smack-dab in the middle of the frame.  At the end of the Maruschka sequence, Stroheim shows the villain enjoying the bright Mediterranean sun on the right side of the frame while the left part of the image where the maid is located is cloaked in gloom.  A scene in which Karamazin advances on the idiot daughter of the counterfeiter features beams of light with motes of dust dancing wildly in them, an amazing effect for a 1922 picture.  When Karamzin takes Mrs.Hughes to the Tyrolean Alps (it seems), there's a violent thunderstorm with lightning-strikes like a military bombardment -- trees dissolve into gouts of smoke and fire.  Karamazin tries to cross a river or lagoon (the bridge has been blown to pieces) but his boat sinks and he has to carry the inert Mrs. Hughes through a swamp to a hovel in the woods.  The hovel is inhabited by a disfigured old woman, apparently some kind of witch, with her familiar a pesky goat.  Karamzin has Mrs. Hughes disrobe to get into dry clothes (the witches' garments?) and salaciously watches her taking off her clothes using a pocket mirror.  The hideous witch falls asleep and, just as Karamzin is about to rape the unconscious Mrs. Hughes, a monk appears, also a monstrous figure with huge staring eyes -- he seems to be completely mad.  There follow about ten minutes of shots displaying Karamzin's frustration at being thwarted in his sexual schemes by the insane monk.  Stroheim is wildly narcissistic but also capable of playing for laughs -- Karamzin twiddles his thumbs, acts petulant like a school boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and his mouth twitches, sometimes, he licks his lips like a snake darting out its tongue.  For some inexplicable reason, Stroheim intercuts the scene with the unconscious Mrs. Hughes, the sleeping witch, and the grotesque monk with shots of a bedraggled owl outside in the storm (the hovel's windows are continuously flashing with lightning) and two frogs -- one presumes that Stroheim wanted to film the frogs copulating but either the amphibians were not in the mood or the censor removed this shot.  Most directors would spend about three minutes with a scene of this sort -- in Foolish Wives, the sequence goes on and on without respite for about ten minutes or more.  Another curious aspect of the movie is that Stroheim, anticipating sound films, often films entirely dialogues between characters in extended shots, but without any titles.  (The film's titles are like Emily Dickinson on dexadrine, all hyphenated effusions --- "The light of the sea -- cars honking -- blood red flowers -- the brutality of man -- and still the sea and sun" (I've improvised this example but it's true to the form of the titles.)  

When he wants to stage a complex action scene after the manner of D. W. Griffith, Stroheim can match his master.  (He worked as an extra in Birth of a Nation).  The fire scenes are cross-cut with the seduction efforts by Karamzin in the tower boudoir, and, also, interspersed with images of the husband about to be cuckolded back at the hotel, Maruschka dancing about wildly as she sets the fire and escapes, and the fire engines rushing to the scene of the blaze, shot like Griffith's Ku Klux Klansmen riding to the rescue in Birth of a Nation.  This is all thrilling and effectively presented.  The actors are brilliantly cast -- Mr. Hughes has an expressive mobile face, a bit like Fred Gwynne and an oddly androgynous aspect; he's not exactly manly and when doting on his young wife (who thwarts his advances by smearing her face with cold cream) he seems a bit like an ingenue batting his big eyes and with a little bee-sting mouth.  The counterfeiter is a filthy old man who lives like the wood carver Geppetto in a garret full of masks and strange figurines.  (He sleeps under a big picture of a Saint pointing into his heart in his open thorax.) Mrs. Andrews isn't attractive -- she has a strange squashed-looking face and, as per the fashion of the times, all of them women seem to have their breasts bound flat against their chests.  Stroheim populates the screen with cripples, horribly wounded and maimed soldiers, hunchbacks, and sinister beggars.  There is a sad-faced clownish army officer who seems to be mooning over Mrs. Andrews.  She cruelly mocks him when he doesn't pick up a shawl she has dropped -- but, of course, he can't pick anything up because he has no arms.  Stroheim's character is skinny and physically unprepossessing -- he seems a kind of malevolent runt or weasel. It's unclear why women desire him, although it seems to be his smirk and his self-confidence that they find attractive.  He looks like trouble and he is trouble.  The movie has completely absurd sets, constructed on a massive scale, apparently at Carmel-on-the Sea on the Monterrey peninsula.  For some reason, Stroheim felt in mandatory to create a full-scale mock-up of the casinos at Monte Carlo, places used primarily as background in only a couple of shots.  The huge Villa Amorosa seems to be also constructed as a fully functional chateau; it probably has toilets that really flush.  The expense is completely pointless although many shots are spectacular -- the screen is full of promenading tourists in elaborate costume, military officers, whole platoons of cavalry, crowds of cripples and beggars as if visualized in a Brueghel or Bosch painting.  In one lavish night scene, tinted deep indigo, the cousins inveigle Mr. Andrews on one gondola while Mrs. Andrews and Karamzin canoodle in another vessel of the same kind.  The gondolas are covered in vine and flowers and loll about a lagoon where there are another fifty of sixty similar boats in front of a lavish neo-classical facade lit from below -- fireworks burst from some of the gondolas creating fountains of sparks.  It's incredibly lavish and ridiculously opulent.  None of this is necessary for a nasty little domestic melodrama, more akin to something like The Grifters than to Gone with the Wind.  (This is same phenomenon visible in the lavish films made at UFA during the silent era in Germany.  I have remarked upon Joe May's Asphalt made in 1929 that features a full-scale mock-up of several blocks in downtown Berlin complete with a thousand extras and sixty vehicles -- a completely unnecessary extravagance in light of the rather humble subject matter of the film.)

The Flicker Alley DVD of Foolish Wives is beautifully realized, replete with extras, and the film is itself is splendidly reconstructed.  That said, there are obvious lacunae -- for instance, we see Karamzin climbing up to rape the counterfeiter's daughter; he clambers up some vines by a full-scale statue of a saint in a niche.  The next scene shows him apparently dead and being dragged out of the garret by his feet.  On the evidence of the rest of the film (and Stroheim's other movies), there must have been a horrific murder scene, probably about ten minutes long -- but it is nowhere to be seen.  A few shots are still frames, masked with a sort of grid, apparently a device to show us what is missing, but, like a professional piece of art restoration, made in such a way as to inform us that this image is not original to the film but has been spliced in to complete the sequence.  The film is a kind of self-portrait -- Stroheim pretended to be a Prussian military officer, but he was, in fact, a Viennese Jew who fled Austria to avoid the draft.  Biographers portray him as a narcissistic, misogynistic con-man.  So Karamzin is a thinly veiled representation of the director and the movie, on some level, is his confession.  

 

El Vampiro Negro (The Black Vampire)

 A flabby, hunched child murderer with sad, bulging eyes stalks a city.  The police put out a  drag-net and the denizens of the underworld (here, literally sewer dwellers) are inflamed -- the authorities are taking an too much interest in their activities.  The killer whistles Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" as he hunts his prey.  If this seems familiar, it's because the premise of Roman Vinoly Barreto's  1953 El Vampiro Negro is based on Fritz Lang's M, released in 1931.  Barreto, making his film for Argentino Sono, takes the story in a new and surprising direction, re-imagining the narrative and changing its thematic meaning.  

Vinoly Baretto is unknown outside of Argentina.  He seems to have been a hardworking director who made 28 movies between 1947 and 1968 (he died in 1970).  His 1952 film, The Beast Must Die, was released last year as a Flicker Alley DVD -- this was largely due to the efforts of Eddie Mueller, the host of Noir Alley on TCM, who seems to have discovered Argentine film noir around 2010 under the guidance of a Buenos Aire cinephile and critic, Federico Pena.  With Pena, Mueller's Noir Foundation has restored several hitherto unknown crime films made in Argentina in the fifties -- the digital restoration work, resulting in clear, pristine imagery with excellent sound, was accomplished at the UCLA Film Study laboratories.  

From its first shots in the title sequence, El Vampiro Negro announces its ambitions and thematic concerns.  We see a vast Greek temple with a majestic colonnade, but it is night and an unnatural oblique raking light turns the steps of the temple's pediment into eerie-looking parallel white ribbons.  A stooped black figure is limping up the steps of the otherwise vacant architectural landscape -- we see this from various angles, but at a distance that makes it unclear what the figure is doing.  (In one short insert, the figure has changed into a wounded crow, but, then, reverts to human form.) Something terrifies the figure and, upon reaching a point hear the temple's platform, the creature  throws up hands in fear and falls backward.  Argentine audiences would recognize the building as the law school at Buenos Aires.  Next we see bulging eyes intercut with Rorschach images -- the man looking at the images, the child murderer who is named Professor Teodoro Ulber, claims he can't recognize anything in the Rorschach figures (No Se! he says repeatedly) -- but, superimposed on the patterns, we see images of a laughing woman, then, a little girl, then, a man riding in the cage of a lift or elevator confined within baroque scrolls of cast iron.  Next, we are in an elaborate, if gloomy courtroom, at the end of the trial of the child murderer.  A defense attorney says the killer acted under irresistible compulsion and should be committed to an asylum.  A handsome prosecutor (Dr. Bernar, the killer's nemesis in the film) self-righteously demands the death-penalty.  The chief Judge instructs the jury, telling them that "Justice is the hope of mankind."  From these initial scenes, the film enters an extended flashback that comprises most of the picture's 93 minute run-time.  Argentina didn't impanel juries in criminal cases and, so, the introductory trial scene establishes that the story is set in some place that is not Buenos Aires -- indeed, a title tells us that the narrative is based on events that occurred in "European cities" (ignoring that the story is lifted from Fritz Lang's M, although in fairness Lang's movie derives from the case of the German child murderer, Peter Kuerten, the "Dusseldorf vampire").  There is some anxiety, it seems, about casting the Argentine criminal justice system (the cops are shown to be vicious thugs) into disrepute.  

Amalia sings in a dive; it's literally below-ground and full of the homeliest and most grotesque character actors in Buenos Aires.  (When Amalia screams at seeing Ulber dumping a child's body in the sewer -- she glimpses him through a basement window in the corridor outside her shabby dressing room -- one of the whores on the dance-floor says that she also "likes it rough, except I don't scream.")  Amalia is a girl from the provinces, a "mountain village" as she describes the place, who has a daughter and has fallen on hard times.  She seems to be a courtesan and, probably, is the girlfriend of Gaston, the proprietor of the seamy cabaret qua whorehouse where she works.  Amalia's best friend exploits the murderer Ulber -- he pays to come to her apartment and just stare at her and the killer, also, frequents the dive.  The body of a child is found in the sewer by a deformed gnome, a dwarf who uses a shovel and rake to comb through the excrement in the cloacal canals in search of things of value that may have been flushed down the toilet.  Of course, the cops try to beat a confession out of the dwarf but he stand firm and the prosecuting investigator, Dr. Bernar, concludes that the gnome is innocent and releases him.  The murderer follows a little girl into an apartment with an elaborate stair well(films of this sort, starting with M, feature spectacular and nightmarish Treppenhaeuser); the killer has stalled the elevator between floors, encounters the child on the steps and kills her.  A man slinking up the steps for an assignation with his married lover gets fingered for this crime and, again, the cops work assiduously to beat a confession out of him.  He begs the police to bring the married woman to the station so she can identify him as her lover.  She's dragged in, but denies knowing him, whereupon he leaps on her and tries to beat the truth out of her himself.  (Later, she admits that the suspect is her boyfriend -- she pleads with the detective to keep her out of the report since the information about her affair will be ruinous to her; but the self-righteous Bernar refuses her plea.)  Various complications ensue.  Bernar's beautiful, melancholy wife is paralyzed and, therefore, sexually inert.  Bernar, who pretends to virtue, attempts to sexually assault Amalia when he interviews her about seeing the "Black Vampire" and tries to coerce her into an affair with him -- he asserts that if she isn't compliant, she will lose custody of her child.  Meanwhile, the vampire stalks several little girls -- he buys a doll for one of his victims from a blind street vendor who is sitting next to a Norwegian bum.  The Norwegian recognizes the tune that the murderer  is whistling (from the Peer Gynt suite) and identifies it both to the police and the blind street vendor. Later, there is a chase through the subway when the blind man hears the tune whistled by the murderer when he walks past the corner where he's selling toys and candy.  The child-murderer tries to control his urges to kill by mutilating himself -- he crushes a cognac glass in his fist and lacerates his hand; later, he opens a switchblade and squeezes it in the palm of his hand to cut open his flesh.  There's a shoot-out in the cabaret (the proprietor is selling narcotics) and Gaston dies with his eye pierced by a bullet.  Of course, the Vampire ends up squiring Amalia's daughter around town -- they go to an amusement park where the two of them embrace while riding on some kind of infernal rollercoaster:  they sit in a bucket that slides down a series of curving metal chutes.  The murderer wants to kill the child but restrains himself by cutting open his hand.  Later that night, cornered, the Vampire threatens the child with his blade.  Amalia, who has come to where the killer is trapped, says that she will protect the murderer by throwing her own body between the trigger-happy cops and the killer.  The Vampire releases the child and flees into the sewers where he is surrounded by the poor folk, a literal underground demi-monde, who live in the enormous maze of subterranean torrents and columned arcades.  The murderer pleads for his life and, apparently, the sewer dwellers have mercy on him.  This brings the story back to the trial scene; bourgeois jurisprudence and its administrators are less merciful than the grotesques in the sewer and the murderer is condemned to death.  The movie ends with an enigmatic title citing a Biblical text on justice (Vinoly Barreto had studied theology at the University.)  

This squalid story is exquisitely shot with vivid chiaroscuro effects.  The sewer is simultaneously majestic and disgusting, lit like an underground Parthenon.  The acting is superb -- the child murderer's performance, which imitates Peter Lorre's indelible character in M, is every bit as good as the original actor.  There's a superb scene in which Amalia, the whore, pleads with Bernal's paralyzed wife, suppressing, of course, the detail that the prosecutor has tried to rape her.  The crippled woman intercedes for Amalia, sensing her innate virtue.  The chases are beautifully staged and the scenes in the stairwell at the apartment with elaborately serpentine cast-iron hand rails and an imprisoning elevator cage are spectacular.  As in many film noir, the streets of the city, simultaneously shadowy and lit with unnaturally bright pools and pocket of radiance, are glamorous and impressive.  In one scene, the cops pursue the killer by chasing him with a searchlight -- this invokes the scene in Lang's Metropolis in which evil Rotwang chases Maria with a similar beam of light.  The film shows a world in which everyone is compromised -- Amalia may be mostly good, but she has her dark side.  The murderer seems to be killing little girls because adult women laugh at him, mocking his unprepossessing frog-like features.  Some critics think that El Vampiro Negro is better than M -- I haven't seen M for awhile and so can't reliably make the comparison (let alone compare Vinoly Barreto's picture to a version of M impressively directed by Joseph Losey in 1951).  Brecht wrote part of Lang's M and the picture has a acid political slant -- in Lang's film everyone is a criminal to one degree or another and the guild of crooks acts to pursue, capture, and prosecute the child-killer because his depredations have exposed those who make a living by crime to the undue attentions of the hypocritical authorities.  This political theme is absent from El Vampiro Negro, a picture that is more interested in the women affected by the murders and, of course, clear-sighted as to the distinction between law and justice.  As I tell my clients, if you want justice, you'll have to call upon God; as a mere mortal, all I can deliver is law.  Vinoly Barreto refers to other directors with some of the names in the movie -- one of the detectives is called Lange; Ulber refers to Edgar Ulmer, the man who made the Lugosi-Karloff vehicle The Black Cat. El Vampiro Negro is a fine picture and a great discovery by Mueller courtesy of Federico Pena.  The picture was also forgotten in Argentina.  Because of its disturbing subject matter, the movie was never shown on TV and was thought to be lost -- it was, however, a big box office success in its day both in Argentina and place like Mexico City.

Vinoly Barreto shot the sewer scenes in the actual depths of the Buenos Aires' sewer.  His son recalls the stench accompanying his father when he came home from work on days that he was filming in the sewer.   Production stills show Vinoly Barreto and his crew wearing hip-high wading boots of the kind used for fly-fishing as he directs the film underground.  Amalia's daughter is played by Vinoly Barreto's actual daughter.  

Asphalt

 Asphalt (1929) is the last silent picture made during the Weimar Republic and it's a pity that it isn't better.  The director, Joe May, is usually described as Fritz Lang's less capable competitor and, sometimes, collaborator.  (May directed the Thea von Harbou script of The Indian Tomb -- Frau Harbou was a Lang's wife and, later, an avid Nazi; Lang remade the movie in the early sixties in color as one of his last productions, a two-part picture beginning with The Tiger of Eschnapur; obviously, Lang's rivalry with the director outlived Joe May.)  On the evidence of Asphalt, the critique of May as a less inventive version of Lang seems, more or less, accurate.

Asphalt is poorly paced and feels longer than its 90 minute running time.  The acting is exaggerated -- silent film histrionics after that style of performance had been abandoned in most productions.  The plot is slender and improbable:  an officious traffic cop gets seduced by a vamp who is, also, the girlfriend of a gangster.  The cop kills the vamp's paramour in a brutal fight and, then, confesses to his crimes.  The vamp appears with the cop's mother and provides a statement that it's was all her fault, which is indubitably true, and she's hauled off to jail with the lovestruck cop vowing to wait for her.  This rather banal, and uninteresting narrative, is tricked out with wildly extravagant, even operatic, production values.  The city streets of Berlin, recreated as an enormous set 400 meters long, are packed with hundreds and hundreds of extras.  The city streets look real, but everything is staged in a Zeppelin hanger.  Some of the store-fronts have actual interiors where scenes are filmed and the appearance of the City, shown both by day and night, is like Metropolis -- thronged with crowds, trucks and buses and cars filling intersections, and skyways high overhead, also full of people.  I have no idea why it was thought necessary to spend what must have been millions on these extravagant sets peopled with hundreds of extras plodding this way and that, but the imagery is certainly impressive and the glittering black and white photography, sometimes with moving camera, is undeniably spectacular.  But this spectacle ill-suits what is essentially a rather squalid crime melodrama, a Kammer (or 'chamber') film.  The movie contains an impressive opening montage showing asphalt being poured on a street and another army of workers tamping the stuff down; then, there's an extended "city symphony" sequence, partly abstract with kaleidoscopic effects emphasizing the city's chaos and excitement -- a mob gathers in front of a store selling stockings to watch a siren languorously donning and doffing the things while two gentlemanly pickpockets work the crowd (one of them is an incredibly debonair-looking Hans Albers, rake-thin, wearing a monocle.)  A gorgeous girl, the vamp flirts with an old jeweler, knocks a diamond on the floor, and picks it up with some kind of gum on the tip of her umbrella.  The theft is discovered and the nearby traffic cop, Albert Holk, is summoned from his job directing traffic (a task he does like a symphony orchestra director) to solve the crime and haul the vamp to the station.  (The two gentleman pickpockets sardonically observe that the girl is merely a novice criminal compared to them.)  The vamp sheds copious crocodile tears and persuades the callow, chubby cop to take her to her apartment, ostensibly to get her identification papers.  But the vamp feigns illness, tries to get the cop to drink a cognac with her (ostensibly to calm her nerves) and, then, promptly hops in bed, dressed in a filmy negligee and claiming to be sick.  When the traffic cop tries to flee the vamp's lair, she chases him down and hops on his back like a monkey, pulling his head back by the hair so that she can kiss his lips -- his traffic cop hat, a quasi-military affair with a badge and tall pointed top, falls on the floor, conveniently symbolizing the hero's moral collapse.  After the blackout for the sex, Holk goes home to his father, a stern police sergeant (he peruses the Police Gazette for entertainment), and his doting, care-worn mother.  The cop is devastated by his malfeasance and throws himself in his bed to mourn his undoing.  Meanwhile, the vamp is incongruously mooning over the cop's identification card which she has purloined.  A quick camera pan shows, however, a picture of a sleek, menacing hoodlum, the vamp's boyfriend.  The film, then, embarks on a pointless digression, a scene set in Paris where the gangster boyfriend is supervising a gang of villains who have dug under the street (in the guise of a city maintenance crew), burrowed into a bank and are engaged in using acetylene torches to prize open safe-deposit boxes in the vault.  The sequence is devoid of suspense, and, like everything else in the movie, brilliantly shot, but it goes nowhere at all.  Meanwhile, the vamp decides to send the cop his ID with a box of expensive cigars and her compliments.  The gift is delivered by a courier while the cop's pious parents are at church.  Holk is outraged and goes to the vamp's apartment.  Meanwhile the gangster is on his way home and the audience is treated to aerial shots of Berlin from the thug's Paris to Berlin flight.  The gangster comes to the vamp's apartment as she and the cop are making up (more caresses and embraces) -- there's a big fight, very gruesome and effectively staged, and Holk kills the gangster.  He goes home with blood on his face, confesses to his parents, and his father, donning the rather comical police helmet (with badge and high top) takes his son into the station to be arrested.  But the vamp, who realizes that she loves Holk, goes to his house and, then, with his mother, hustles over to the station so that she can confess that it's all her fault.  The movie's final scenes involve many gloomy corridor shots with people advancing or retreating through these hallways with a dreamy, doomed gait -- Thomas Pynchon drew attention to these weird corridor scenes in one of his effusions in Gravity's Rainbow.  

The vamp is unbelievably gorgeous with hypnotic eyes and a bee-sting mouth; she slinks around like a serpent or chimpanzee in her silk lingerie.  Holk is played by Gustav Froehlich, a strange-looking actor most famous for his role as Freder in Metropolis made three years earlier.  In the interim, Froehlich has bulked up and he seems almost fat in Asphalt.  He has huge bovine eyes and a moon-face and seems a rather improbable leading man, but his cherubic features grow on you as the film gathers momentum.  But this is a misnomer, the movie has no momentum at all -- the mise-en-scene is clogged with huge luminous close-ups which are individually gorgeous but slow everything down as we are invited to gaze with rapture at the movie stars.  A long scene in the police paddy-wagon as the cop and vamp are driven to the station (it seems to be many miles away) stops the action completely -- the shots are bizarrely repetitive and the vamp simpers and the cop tries vainly to avert his eyes and we know what's going to happen without having to sit through ten-minutes of this sequence.  In general, May's pacing is poor and the movie, despite its fantastic photography, is dull.  (The Kino-Lorber DVD that I watched has a remarkably funny and helpful commentary by someone named Anthony Slide -- the DVD is worth acquiring for Slide's sardonic remarks on the film; unlike many commentators he doesn't succumb to the temptation of telling you that the movie is some kind of masterpiece -- in fact, to the contrary he's scathing about the film's defects.)  The vamp, played by Betty Amam, a former Mack Sennet "bathing beauty" is something to behold and she can (sort of) act.