The Bitter Stems
1.
The Bitter Stems is a 1956 Argentinian film noir. The movie was released only a few months after General Juan Peron, the caudillo, was deposed. Inflected by post-war trauma, the film also may comment on the era of Peron’s first military dictatorship (June 1946 to September 1955).
But first: what is film noir? And does The Bitter Stems qualify as part of that genre.
2.
The canonical description of American film noir is contained in Paul Schrader’s highly influential essay “Notes on Film Noir”, published in 1972 in Film Comment. (Schrader, of course, was a film critic who went on to become a noteworthy screenwriter and director in his own right – he is still active; his movie The Gardener will premiere at the New York Film Festival this Fall.)
According to Schrader, film noir had the following diagnostic characteristics:
These pictures are generally crime films, fatalistic in tone;
Film noir feature flawed male protagonists seduced into criminal activity;
Narrative structures are complex and labyrinthine; plots are pre-determined mazes entrapping the protagonist; because of the complicated plot, these films often use voice-over to explain what the audience is seeing;
Film noir camera work features low-key lighting, prominent shadows and chiaroscuro with angular and startling camera placement;
Film noir is an American phenomenon, although first identified as “a certain trend in American pictures’ by French critics.
Schrader’s last assertion that only American studios produced film noir is demonstrably false. To the contrary, there are now known to be many archetypical noir produced around the world. For instance, Japan had a robust film noir industry that Schrader simply didn’t know about. (Although he should have: several of Akira Kurosawa’s crime pictures are obviously closely related to film noir particularly The Bad Sleep Well released in 1960 and his kidnaping movie The High and the Low from 1963 – both pictures released in Art-Houses in the U.S.) Similarly, Mexico produced a cycle of excellent film noir in the fifties, some of them directed by the great Roberto Gavaldon. There are estimable noir made in Korea as well as even Iran.
Film scholars now believe film noir, although, perhaps, originating in the United States was a world-wide phenomenon. And why should this not have been the case? These films involve crime, always a popular subject, often induced by sexually voracious female characters; they are contemporary and can be shot anywhere that has an alleyway and a puddle reflecting neon. Furthermore, these pictures can be quickly and cheaply made.
Most of what has been written about noir is unpersuasive. The French thought that the genre was delayed reaction to the trauma experienced by soldiers exposed to horrific levels of violence in World War Two. According to this theory, returning GI’s had seen so much killing that they came to believe that life was cheap and meaningless and that the impulsive pursuit of pleasure was the only rational response to an absurd and cruel world. But it would be equally likely that traumatized veterans would, in fact, endorse notions of an orderly and just world as recompense for what they had experienced, cling to conventional morality, and, indeed, there are many post-war “feel-good” movies. Furthermore, dark American noir pictures pre-date America’s involvement in World War Two – for instance, John Huston’s famous proto-noir, The Maltese Falcon, surely one of the most cynical movies ever made, was shot in 1940, before the U.S. was involved in the War.
Some feminist critics argue that the massive deployment of female workers in formerly male-dominated business and industry, required by the wholesale conscription of men for the war effort, triggered anxieties in the fragile male ego and led to the characteristic seductresses and femme fatale inhabiting these pictures. But this also seems unpersuasive. Hollywood has always trafficked in vamps and notorious women. Furthermore, it might be equally plausible to claim that many of the women portrayed in classic noir are liberated and independent, even shown in a positive light – consider, for instance, Mildred Pierce in the film bearing that name.
The etiology of film noir is contested and, probably, imponderable and, indeed, it can be effectively argued that the genre itself is fictional, a catch-all category for a certain kind of urban crime picture that can’t be reductively defined. Schrader himself reached this conclusion, arguing ultimately that film noir was not a genre, but more a set of stylistic features that could be deployed in service of different sorts of narratives. Other critics following Schrader’s lead have identified noir Westerns, noir-styled Science Fiction, and, as with Mildred Pierce, noir melodrama.
That said: it can’t be doubted that there are certain pictures that so completely inhabit a morally ambiguous, shadowy, and nihilistic world that the category seems to exist, if only, perhaps, as a platonic ideal or family resemblance between a variety of disparate movies: Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil seems an obvious example as does Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum, and Howard Hawk’s baroque and impenetrable The Big Sleep. And, there seems no doubt that it may be useful to characterize The Bitter Stems in this category as well.
3.
War trauma is evident in The Bitter Stems. With his girlfriend, the anti-hero attends an absurdly phallic war movie (a veritable forest of howitzers becoming erect) – this seems like an improbable date movie but has thematic significance. The hero is the son of a German war hero who fought with distinction in World War One before emigrating to Buenos Aires. In the elaborate and surreal dream sequence, we discover that the hero’s father has encouraged the little boy to think of himself as a warrior, although the neurotic Alfredo Gaspar has avoided combat. Sequences invoking Gaspar’s father are also significant in light of Argentina’s status during the Second World War.
Many people living in Argentina had come from German-speaking countries and had families in the old country. The Argentine public was conflicted about the War in Europe and avoided taking sides. Argentina, like Mexico for that matter, waited on the side-lines until the outcome of the fighting in Europe was clear. Argentina joined the Allied war effort in 1945 when the war against Germany was effectively over. Of course, after the War, Germans flocked to Argentina, some of them with suspect pasts – the idea that many Nazis fled to that country is well-known and, probably, warranted. The hero’s relationship to his father and World War Two implies Argentine anxiety about the role that the country played (or didn’t play) in the European conflict. In the source novel for the movie, it’s strongly inferred that Gaspar desired to fight in World War Two, but would have joined the German army and fought for the Nazis. This inference is also an implied commentary on the militaristic fascism of the Peron years. Recall the odd dialogue early in the film in which one of Gaspar’s editors observes that the hero is an obedient man, someone searching for a strong man to which he can swear fealty. This is a peculiar aspect to the movie – the protagonist is not so much a hero as a man desperately in search of a hero whom he can obey.
4.
Argentina’s relationship with the American film industry was also problematic during the War years. Beginning in 1940, the US embargoed shipments of film stock to Argentina – this was part of an American pressure campaign designed to force Argentina into the war effort on the side of the Allies. (In light of the pro-German sentiment in Argentina, there was some concern as to what sort of use would be made of the film stock.) During the War, the US accordingly strangled the Argentine film industry. But, after WWII, Argentina’s film industry revived and, indeed, became significant part of the economy – in 1950, Argentina, a nation of 17 million people, produced 57 films a year through about a dozen film studios; across the country, there were more than 2190 cinemas. Most people in Argentina reported that they went to the movies twice a week. (Hollywood, eager to exploit this market, even produced a series of Gaucho Westerns primarily for export to Argentina – a noteworthy example is Jacques Tourneur’s 1952 Way of a Gaucho shot with American stars, Gene Tierney and Richard Boone, in the Argentine pampas.)
Argentina also had a thriving literary scene much of it focused on crime fiction. In 1945, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares founded Emece, a publishing house that specialized in producing translations of American and British detective and crime novels. Emece sponsored annual competitions encouraging previously unpublished writers to submit crime novels. And, in fact, Adolfo Jasca’s 1954 novel, The Bitter Stems, won the Emece prize for best new crime fiction, before being adapted into the 1956 film directed by Ferdinand Ayala. (Ayala had a long career in Argentine cinema and is regarded as a vital link between the old studio system and the new auteurs that developed in the country in the early sixties – The Bitter Stems was Ayala’s second feature film made when the director was 36.)
5.
A notable box-office success, The Bitter Stems won two major Argentine awards – Best Picture and Best Cinematography in 1957. The movie was widely praised and, then, more or less, forgotten. It was thought that the film had been lost when Fernando Martin Pena, an important cinephile in Argentina, discovered a 35 millimeter negative in the possession of a private collector, an elderly film distributor, in 2012. (Pena is also famous for discovering the most complete print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a Buenos Aires warehouse in 2010.) The negative for Bitter Stems was in danger of decomposing and was discovered just in time to save the picture from vanishing forever. Before that time, the movie was known only from several badly damaged 16 millimeter prints. The 35 mm film elements had no soundtrack. Accordingly, 16 mm prints were used to provide sound for the restored film. Argentina has no state-sponsored cinematheque and no systematic program for conservation of the products of its film-industry. Most of the movies made in Argentina are, therefore, regarded as lost films. The Bitter Stems was restored by the UCLA Film Institute with funds supplied by Eddie Mueller’s Film Noir Foundation. The completed restoration was premiered in San Francisco and, then, traveled to the Museum of Modern Art where the picture was screened as part of a series of noir films produced in Argentina, “Dance with Death” – these movies were shown in the Autumn of 2017. Eddie Mueller screened the picture in 2021 on his Noir Alley, a Turner Classic Movies program that he hosts (well worth watching for Mueller’s stylish introductions and film commentary). An important participant in the Noir Foundation is best-selling crime author James Ellroy who has worked with Mueller on various projects involving movies of this kind.
6.
Although the plot of Bitter Stems is not complex in outline, the script brilliantly embroiders the story with intricate complications and rhyming motifs. At its heart, the story involves two conspirators in a criminal enterprise. One of the conspirators is paranoid, projecting onto this partner his own anxieties and suspicions. Alfredo Gasper murders Liudis, his collaborator in crime. Relieved of his burden of suspicion, the sociopathic Gasper thinks that he has committed the perfect crime. But, then, swiftly and surely, retribution ensues. The story is fairly simple when stripped to its elements but it is the details that make Bitter Stems compelling and, indeed, a masterpiece of its kind.
The commentator on the DVD observes that the screenplay replies upon a device that Joseph Mankiewicz, himself a great scenarist, calls: “What they didn’t know was...” In other words, the protagonist acts on incomplete information. What he doesn’t know is that Jarvis Liudis, his partner’s beloved son, isn’t a figment of the con-man’s imagination but a real flesh-and-blood young man. Gasper doesn’t know how Elena, the dance-hall hostess, is really related to Liudis. Gasper kills Liudis on the basis of his misunderstanding as to what is really going on. Later, Gasper commits suicide also impelled by inaccurate or incomplete information. Of course, “What they didn’t know was...” plots abound in films and literature – Othello to cite one famous example relies on this narrative device. But The Bitter Stems exploits this narrative structure in a particularly expert way.
Gasper’s fantasies as to journalism – that the profession unlocks riches and adventure – are apparently ubiquitous. In effect, he and Liudis, with their correspondence school, contrive to sell this very fantasy to the unwitting dupes who send them money. Gasper’s war-neurosis urges him to contribute the lion’s share of the two men’s ill-gotten gains to Liudis – somehow Gasper perceives himself as a valiant soldier in Liudis struggle to bring his family to Buenos Aires, a family that Gasper, however, comes to believe is fictional. After he has murdered Liudis, the film takes on some of the aspects of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a new, improved Liudis appears in the form of Jarvis and this young man seems poised to begin a love affair with his father’s mistress. The events that we see in the first half of the film are mirrored and echoed, although with variations, in the movie’s second act and the picture divides neatly into two parts punctuated by the sequence in which Gasper burns Liudis’ suitcase and clothes.
The screenwriter contrives scenes that not only advance the action but also tie together different plot points. A good example is a scene in which we see Gasper’s mother and sister getting ready to depart the family home in Ituzaingo while the protagonist is tinkering with an electric tea-pot. Through this scene, we understand that Gasper will have the house to himself when it comes time to bludgeon Liudis to death. The curious detail of Gasper’s toying with the tea-pot later bears fruit when the villain uses the little appliance to short out the fuses in the house, plunging the rooms into darkness made spectacular with lightning strikes – exactly, why turning the house into a black labyrinth is conducive to Gasper’s murderous plot is unclear, but the blown fuse certainly renders the killing pictorially dramatic. The train ride to Ituzaingo which initiates the film does triple duty, establishing the relationship between the two men, bringing them to the place where the murder will be committed by way of the ominous one-way ticket, and providing for the series of flashbacks that establish the plot. And, all of these factors play out against a supremely evocative film noir motif – the midnight journey by train. Later, we will see the Ituzaingo train transformed into an instrument of doom with respect to Gaspar. The fact that Jarvis Liudis is studying agronomy motivates the film’s ironic climax and further casts an intriguing light on the two trees grafted together that mark the murdered man’s grave. The trees sutured together in an eerie embrace reflect the partnership between Liudis and Gasper that can’t be severed, even, by death. The movie’s director Alejandro Ayala was homosexual and there is a slight flavor of erotic attraction between the sweaty ineffectual Gasper and the charismatic, blonde, and capable Liudis. The post-war milieu is effectively realized: everyone is a displaced person to some extent; European refugees clog Buenos Aires, and this is the sort of world in which we see impoverished families raiding trains to nowhere in the middle of the night. Liudis has fled Hungary, presumably to escape the Communists. In the year, the film was released Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to crush the rebellion there. After murdering his father, Gasper stands in loco parentis to the fresh-faced optimistic Jarvis – he takes him around town to a soccer stadium, horse-races, a boxing match and, even, squires him into that rite of Argentinian passage, the tango dance-hall decorated with aggressive-looking parrot (a bit like the Maltese falcon with wings outspread). Like his father, Jarvis has the habit of winding a chain around his finger – a tic that seems to have irritated Gasper to homicide when performed by Liudis. Images replicate and repeat: there are several showy shots of Gasper opening a safe, the camera-angle a literal impossibility. Elena holds the toy-bear that Liudis bought for her at the zoo during the confession scene with Gaspar – you can see the little toy next to her body after she has killed herself.
The film’s camerawork and staging suggest an inexorable web of fate. The camera knows what is going to happen and so the viewer feels that all conclusions in The Bitter Stems are foregone, already destined. A good example is the unusual scene in which Gasper confesses that he has murdered Liudis to Elena. Gasper, in true film noir style, is peering out of a window flickering with neon light in the darkness. His face contorts as he admits the killing and, then, drenched in sweat turns to see how Elena has reacted. But she is sprawled on the couch dead. What has happened here? Has Gasper killed her in some kind of delirium? A low angle shot picks out some objects on a table, among them a cup and a vial of medicine, apparently, used to effect the suicide. The camera knows where the fatal instrumentality is located before Gasper sees it. Gradually, he becomes aware of the poison. But the sequence is structured to provide information that the omniscient camera already understands by its positioning in advance of the character’s discovery of the poison.. We don’t explore the room from Gasper’s point of view to discover what has happened to Elena. Rather, the camera simply enacts the doom provided by the plot, positioning itself so as to reveal the next stage in the narration. Of course, everything has been scripted in advance. But most films conceal this fact. In noir, the inescapable pattern of destiny precedes everything – it’s already there and the characters are without free will. Gasper has to act as he does for a host of reasons: his unusual subservient psychology, his war anxiety, his economic plight and social status and, further, the moment in Argentinian history and, indeed, the history of Europe. Everything conspires to destroy him. But it’s all fortuitous as well – what would have happened if Gasper hadn’t been intrigued by the sign advertising the Hungarian singer (who doesn’t appear in the film except as a dream vision) and hadn’t entered the Magyar night club where Liudis is working as a bartender? The mise-en-scene matches Fritz Lang’s staging in The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street – an image of a seductive woman entices a man into a shadowy saloon and this is where his fate is sealed. Even when the Argentinians are most free – that is, when dancing their beloved tango – the Parrot Night Club is a sinister cavern full of bamboo cages in which the patrons are all confined.
7.
Film noir reminds us that life is inherently disappointing. Human desire far exceeds the capacity of the world to satisfy that desire. (In the dream, Gasper sees Liudis as a bartender pouring golden coins from a goblet while a veiled woman dances seductively; in the end, Gasper will be doomed by a handful of nasty-looking grey seeds, nothing like the bounty of coins that he has imagined.) Our desire creates in us urges that can turn us into criminals in a heart beat. Gasper kills Liudas for nothing; then, he kills himself, also for nothing.
8.
The Bitter Stems was listed among the top fifty best-filmed movies ever made by American Cinematographer, a trade journal. This was in 1990, when, in fact, almost no one had seen the movie in the United States and, indeed, it was thought to be forever lost.
There is legend that the cameraman, Ricardo Younis studied with Gregg Toland, Orson Welles’ director of photography on Citizen Kane. It’s also thought that Ricardo Younis learned his trade by apprenticing with the Hungarian born, John Alton, when that cameraman worked in the Buenos Aires film industry between 1932 and 1938 – Alton born Johann Jacob Altmann has become famous for his evocative work shooting American film noir; he worked for Argentine Sono (Argentine Sound Pictures) on many movies and, in fact, won the equivalent of an Academy Award for his efforts in Buenos Aires in 1937.
Before he died, Younis gave an interview to Fernando Pena about his work on The Bitter Stems. Younis never met Toland when he was in Hollywood and, similarly, never crossed paths with John Alton when that cameraman was employed in Argentina.
9.
Astor Piazzolla wrote the score to The Bitter Stems. During his career, he scored 45 movies, many of them prestigious – he composed music for Excellent Cadavers, an important Italian crime TV series, did the music for Enrico IV (Marco Bellochio) based on the Pirandello play, and wrote scores for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys and Wong Kar Wei’s Happy Together.
Piazzolla is synonymous with tango, specifically the Nuevo Tango that redefined the Argentinian musical form beginning in the mid-fifties. To some Piazzolla is the “assassin of the tango,” the man who destroyed this form of dance-music. To most critics, however, Piazzolla is regarded as tango’s greatest, most influential, and brilliant innovator.
Tango is the jazz of Argentina and defines that country’s culture. Like jazz, tango originated in water-front whorehouses and was regarded as disreputable. Until the 1920's, no Argentine woman from the middle class or above dared to dance to this music – reputable people in Buenos Aires danced to Strauss waltzes. But, gradually, more and more of the gentry ventured into the dangerous slums of Buenos Aires to hear tangos and learn the elaborate erotic dances that accompanied them. The generation of Jorge Luis Borges brought the form to the forefront of Argentine culture. Indeed, Borges wrote a number of tango-influenced stories, most notably “Street Corner Man” and “The Intruder” (which adapts a tango lyric about a rivalry between two best friends that develops over a woman). Borges wrote a number of tango poems and milongas, a Rio de la Plata variation on the tango and, in 1965, collaborated on an album with Astor Piazzolla.
Piazzolla was born in 1921 to Italian emigrant parents in Mar del Plata. His father was a fisherman. When he was four, the family moved to New York City and lived in Greenwich Village. It was in New York that Piazzolla first learned to play the Bandoneon. (The Bandoneon is a push-pull concertina that looks like an accordion but has a different tone, register, and keyboard. These instruments were invented by Heinrich Band around 1855 and manufactured in Germany.) Piazzolla’s family moved back to Argentina in the mid-thirties. Already a virtuoso on the Bandoneon, the 13-year-old Piazzolla was asked to join the famous Carlos Gardel as a member of his tango orchestra. At that time, Piazzolla’s family had returned to New York City and were living in the Little Italy neighborhood. Piazzolla’s father, Nonino, thought that his son was too young to join the touring orchestra and prevented him from becoming a Bandoneon player in Gardel’s ensemble. (Later, Piazzolla said that his father’s decision prevented him from “playing the harp instead of the Bandoneon” – with this jest, he alludes to the melancholy fact that the Carlos Gardel orchestra was wholly exterminated by a plane crash in 1935.) By this time, Piazzolla was playing at weddings and local parties but studying classical music. He became an accomplished pianist, learning that instrument from a Hungarian emigrant to New York who had been a student of Rachmaninoff.
Piazzolla composed a number of classical works, some of them in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone style. He also admired American jazz and worked in that form as well. His break-through came when listening to the Gerry Mulligan octet. Piazzolla decided he would form an octet of his own and perform futuristic tango music. This was the origin of Piazzolla’s Nuevo Tango movement in 1955. At first, Piazzolla was reviled in Argentina for what was deemed vandalism with respect to a musical form that had come to characterize musical culture in that country. (It’s daunting to dance to Piazzolla’s tangos.) Piazzolla continued his studies in music and, ultimately, spent several years in Paris polishing his skills in counterpoint and harmony with the famous Nadia Boulanger. (Boulanger was a close friend of Igor Stravinsky and seems to given lessons to just about everyone involved in mid-twentieth century music – she taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, and, even, Philip Glass.) A lifelong admirer of Bela Bartok and Stravinsky, Piazzolla incorporated many classical elements in his Nuevo Tango. He also employed elements of American jazz in his compositions and worked with Gerry Mulligan in the sixties.
Piazzolla became increasingly famous throughout his lifetime – there is an airport Mar del Plata named after him and he appears on Argentine postage stamps. During the period of the military junta, Piazzolla lived in Italy, where he performed and worked in the film industry. Later, he divided his time between New York City, Buenos Aires, and Rome. He suffered a stroke in 1990 while in Paris. Piazzolla was flown back to Buenos Aires where he lingered in a coma for two years before his death on July 4, 1992.
Piazolla wrote one operetta Maria de Buenos Aires. The operetta, called a “Tango Opera,” is rarely performed but, by description, apparently remarkable. (The piece requires a large orchestra including a virtuoso Bandoneon player, an part that is hard to cast.) Maria is born on a day when “God was drunk” and works as a prostitute in the brothels of Buenos Aires. At a Black Mass, she’s murdered. When she dies, she ends up in Hell, a place indistinguishable from Buenos Aires. In Hell, Maria is a virgin. But she is raped by a goblin poet and gives birth on the streets of Hell attended by three construction workers, the Magi, and the Woman who Kneads Bread. A noteworthy production of this operetta was staged by the Theater de Jeune Lune in Minneapolis in 2006.
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