Eddie Muller and his Film Noir foundation have restored several films produced during the so-called Golden Age of Argentine Cinema. These pictures are all excellent and demonstrate Noir's penetration into world-wide cinema. A genre of films invented in America and, then, influential in France spawned similar movies made in many places including Japan, Germany, Mexico, and Argentina. In the latter country, American crime fiction was published extensively in translations underwritten by Borges and Adolfo Bios Casares. One of the most prominent Argentine directors, Carlos Hugo Christiansen, took notice and, in fact, traveled to New York City where he met with the famous crime writer Cornell Woolrich and acquired the rights to three short stories that the author had published under one of his pen-names, William Irish. Back in Argentina, those short stories, apparently purchased for next-to-nothing, were made into a film anthology under the title Don't Ever Open that Door (1952). The material was so rich and, in the hands of Christiansen, developed with such intricacy, that the omnibus film became too long -- it seems that with each adaptation, Christiansen became more effusive and ambitious with the material. Ultimately, the last story in the group, a serial murderer tale, was released as a separate 73 minute picture (If I die before I wake) just a few weeks after the first two-story omnibus, Don't Ever Open that Door. Both movies were successful at the box-office. People who saw If I die before I wake were terrified by the film and have remembered it with some trepidation all their lives. However, until recently, the movie was unavailable and thought lost. Muller located a badly damaged negative of the picture, basically illegible, and his foundation paid for the picture's restoration by specialists at UCLA -- the digital and print restoration of this horror film is somewhat problematic (the negative is now also deteriorated beyond repair), but enough of the movie is visible to justify the picture's reputation as a harrowing movie experience. Don't ever open that Door was premiered in North America at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016 -- that film is much better preserved and, also, memorable. Muller hoste these pictures on TCM, their television premiere, on June 7, 2024 and both movies are very good and well worth watching.
Christiansen imparts odd and sinister subtexts to stories that are already a bit macabre. Don't Ever open that Door involves strange inflections suggesting incest, sexual perversion, and morbid violence -- a brother and sister pair of siblings in the first story "Someone on the Phone" seem a little bit too intimate for the viewer's comfort and in the second tale, "The Return of the Hummingbird" a fierce and righteous blind woman kills her own son. Both pictures involve weird and exotically decorated locations shot through a chiaroscuro of dense shadow with scintillating highlights. "Someone on the Phone" begins in Congo Club, a bar featuring a band of Black musicians playing shrill mambo jazz against a backdrop of menacing masks and paintings of half-naked native girls. A wealthy socialite is with several floozies who plan to drink and party all night long -- there's some odd byplay suggesting that Raul, the socialite, is inadequate as far as the sexual demands of the women. He sees his blonde sister Luisa at a table alone in the bar. (Christiansen highlights her literally by suddenly flaring the dim lighting in the bar so we can see her statuesque and morose in the club.) She meets with a nasty-looking thug at a nearby table and gives him her mother's diamond ring that she is wearing -- it's supposed to be collateral. Later, Raul confronts his sister and learns that she has incurred gambling debts. They live together in an eccentrically decorated apartment and seem to be extremely close -- Luisa calls Raul her "captain". and mock-salutes him. Someone is calling Luisa to harass her about her unpaid debts -- the phone rings five times, then, there is a pause and, at the next ring, when the number is dialed again, Luisa picks up. After one of these calls, Luisa hurls herself from the skyscraper window and dies on the pavement below. In a frenzy, Raul hunts down the man to whom she gave the diamond ring at the Congo Club and mercilessly shoots him five times, once for every ring used in the coded phone calls. As he perishes, the thug mutters: Por que? Raul goes back to the apartment. His parents are arriving from Europe. There is a large painted portrait of Luisa on display -- she looks worried and haggard in the picture. (It's like the image of Laura in the Hollywood movie of that name.) Woolrich and Christiansen have a final twist, ab an alarming surprise ending to this little parable of immoderate sibling affection and revenge.
In "The Return of the Hummngbird", a three crooks rob a antique dealer. There's a shoot-out and one of the bad guys is mortally wounded. The criminals flee to the provincial village where the crime boss' mother, Mama Rosa, lives with Maria, the crook's niece. Mama Rosa is blind, but very much the mistress of her own house. The wounded man dies in agony and the other crook threatens to rape Maria. Mama Rosa is appalled by her son's villainy -- it seems he is following the example of his father who was also a vicious, drunken ne'er-do-well. When the mother overhears that her son and his henchman are going to rob the local bank, thereby stealing from the poor folks in the rural community, she disarms the two criminals by snatching their guns while they are asleep, sends Maria to get the cops, after first pulling out the electrical fuses to even the playing field -- she's blind and now the bad guys can't see either. There's a battle between the villains when the boss's sidekick tries to shoot the mother. Again, the episode has a savage twist for an ending. The picture is brilliantly shot and features a lengthy suspense set-piece that is like something that might have been staged by Hitchcock, except, perhaps, more heartfelt and frightening. The tale turns on the fact that Mama Rosa's criminal son whistles tunelessly a popular tango melody -- this is the "hummingbird's" trademark. Mama Rosa is a frightening figure; you can see where the crook gets his ruthlessness and images of her as a black silhouette at the top of the stairs, only very faintly rim-lit, wielding a gun are indelible and scary. She's like Norman Bates' mother in Psycho, a picture that Christiansen's film vaguely resembles, brought to life and armed with a six-shooter.
The third Woolrich story, "If I die before I Wake" is a full-throated horror film, released separately as a 73 minute feature. (The two story anthology was 83 minutes long, most of it devoted to the second tale, "The Return of the Hummingbird.") A third grade boy, Luis, struggles with school. He draws pictures when he should be listening and can't get himself to class on time. A schoolgirl seated seated in front of him is a better student. She tells Luis that a man had been giving her candy near the school yard. Luis' playmate demands that he swear an oath to her that he will never betray her secret so long as he lives. That evening, the girl disappears and Luis' father, a 2nd class police inspector finds her mutilated corpse in a vacant field. Although Luis suspects that the man, a cadaverous figure who haunts the edges of the playground, is the murderer, his oath prevents him from telling anything about the girl's fatal encounter with the predator. Luis draws a picture of the little girl, hangs it on his wall, and tries not to think about her death. Later, when he has entered sixth grade, he learns that another girl, Julia (also seated in front of him in the same classroom) has the habit of dreamily wandering the streets, dragging a piece of colored chalk along the walls and doors of the places that she passes. When Luis asks her where she gets the expensive colored chalk, she tells him that a man has approached her and, after winning her confidence, supplies her with chalk. She tells Luis that she plans to meet the man after school. Of course, Julia also vanishes, Luis has been locked in his room after a quarrel with his frustrated and professionally thwarted father. Nonetheless, he figures out how to escape from his room and his house and tracks the girl by following the chalk marks on the walls along the path where she walked. The trail leads to misty, shadowy forest, the sort of sinister landscape that we might imagine in a Grimm's fairy tale. In the depths of the woods, Luis comes upon a ruinous, abandoned house. Julia is tied-up on a bed on the second floor of the house -- the killer has left his straight razor somewhere and has gone to retrieve it. The moon illumines the desolate, ghostly house. And, then, the child-murderer appears, thrilled that he can kill two children instead of merely one. A desperate struggle between Luis and the murderer ensues. The killer is not merely a child-molester and murderer, but an atheist for a good measure as well. As the children begin to say their prayers, expecting to be slashed to pieces at any moment, the killer ask them where their God has gone: "Why doesn't he save you?" he taunts them. We know the outcome from the first titles in the film: in fairy tales, the titles says, a brave child must fight against a monster for survival. In the end, at least in fairy tales, the child is victorious.
This climax is unsparing and harrowing. Christiansen's imagery is nightmarish. The murderer leads his prey down a steep hill along a stairway enclosed by high sinuous walls. At the bottom of this sinister, twisting chute, there is a carousel spinning aimlessly, a turnstile that the killer enters to have access to the playing children, and a blind man turning the crank on a hurdy-gurdy. At school, the circular motion of the carousel is mimicked by girls all in virginal white who run in circles with their hands linked. The teachers are indifferent, mocking, prone to bully the children. This is a world in which the small and the weak are always oppressed and threatened with deadly peril. Luis' father, who has been denied promotion, is angry and imagines himself a failure -- he has written a letter of resignation but been dissuaded from delivering it by his wife. (In a way, he's small himself, half withered away, a defeated man who is oppressed as well and who takes out his anger on his son. There's palpable unremitting tension between father and son. As Luis chases after Julia, he tears buttons from his tunic and drops them like crumbs, leaving a trail for others to follow. The forest and the ruined house are threatening, oozing pale mist and ominous with dark contorted shadows. Half-heard whimpering, like a injured dog, draws the boy forward. The film is, indeed, very frightening and the confrontation between the child-murderer and his victims is extremely disturbing, As the moon bursts from behind a cloud, illumining the ghastly scene, the murderer with his blade approaches; Luis is trying to carry Julia down the steps in the derelict house but her legs are numb and won't work -- no matter how hard he struggles, they can't escape. Fleeing back up the steps, the children drag furniture across the floor to bar the door but the murderer seems to have superhuman strength and slowly, but, surely, he pushes his way into the room where they have taken refuge. The monster is too powerful and the children too weak. The ravaged surface of the images, their dimness and distressed texture, celluloid as wrecked as the monster's chamber of horrors, adds to the terror. For some reason, the edges of all of the shots are rounded in darkness, as if pictures, dim kodaks, posted in a hellish antique album.
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