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.
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