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.