Among the collection of Argentine Noir movies now streaming on the Criterion Channel is one that pays homage to the first master of noir, and one of his foundational works. Román Viñoly Barreto’s 1953 film The Black Vampire is indebted to Fritz Lang’s classic M, and it’s no small praise to say that it stands up to comparison with its inspiration.
The film takes place in a city, never named, where a man’s on trial for murder. Then we step back to see what led to the trial: how mild English teacher Teodoro Ulber (Nathán Pinzón) is a pedophile and serial killer of young girls; how, as panic grips the city following his murders, a prosecutor named Doctor Bernard (Roberto Escalada) tries to track down the killer; how a witness, a nightclub singer named Amalia (Olga Zubarry), is caught between coming forward to the law and the law’s interest in the club where she sings, a front for the drug trade. Bernard, whose gentle wife is crippled, lusts after Amalia; meanwhile Ulber’s in a masochistic relationship with Cora (Nelly Panizza), who works at Amalia’s club. Things draw together ever more tightly, as Amalia’s young daughter catches the attention of Ulber.
The Black Vampire, written by Barreto with Alberto Etchebehere, has nothing supernatural in it but is still a weird tale. It’s a story on the edge of horror, a story about madness and obsession and extreme states of mind. It makes no bones about deriving from M—like Peter Lorre’s killer in that film, Ulber is prone to whistling Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King,” and as in Lang’s movie, the tune’s recognized by a blind ma—but is a free reworking, not a remake. Very different in its plot, the underworld in this movie doesn’t stage a parallel search for the murderer, and there’s less of a focus on the procedural aspects of the police investigation.
The movie shares themes with M as well as story elements, though: justice, what’s right, and what punishment is appropriate for what kind of evil. Dr. Bernard, much more ethically compromised than Inspector Lohmann in Lang’s movie, points up the omnipresence of sin and the weaknesses in every human being. The first and last images of justice are a massive courthouse with a forbidding classical facade, but the reality of justice is that it’s the product of flawed human beings.
Theme and image have a complex relationship here; this is a city with no fixed location, perhaps Argentinian or European, but has a strong visual identity and sense of place. It’s full of shadows, like any noir, but one comes away less struck by chiaroscuro patterns of dark and light than by an overwhelming sense of gloom. This movie goes beyond most noirs in its darkness, moral and tonal as well as visual. Its shadowplay is often spectacular, but it’s a spectacle of real life, of sewers and small apartments and club basements.
The nameless city’s built out of real places. The seedy apartments of Ulber and Amalia are convincing locations that confine the people that live in them, while Bernard’s upper-class home is spacious and elegant. Amalia’s club has a glamorous main stage, but dingy cramped dressing rooms.
But there’s a balance of the everyday and the mythic. The city’s sewers are a major location, so we see its shadowy underside. The sewers, and the basement from which Amalia sees the killer, are a reflection of the above-ground world. The city’s built on a nightmare, and so the story’s a parable of rationality struggling with shadows and semi-conscious urges.
There’s a symbolic element to everything we see, always there though always understated. This is primarily a tense noir story, with crime and moral corruption and ever-tightening dramatic screws. But there’s also always something more going on. The title’s a clue. The serial killer’s a symbolic monster, an “abnormal being with evil intelligence.” The metaphor’s important, shifting the noir a step closer to horror.
That step out of reality leaves the narrative frame of the movie, which opens and closes with the trial of the villain, feeling like a desperate attempt to contain the madness of the main story. There’s a happy ending, there’s something that looks like justice, surely that wraps everything up neatly. But it doesn’t. We’re invited to think about the imperfections of justice and the fallibility of humans, and the frame that gives a ceremonial kind of closure to events is deliberately inadequate. More powerful is a moment at the end in the sewers, another kind of ending, in which Ulber faces another kind of justice, and breaks down in manic self-justification.
It clearly reflects the ending of M, but the movie also echoes The Third Man visually—its use of the sewers of a major city as a location, with some similar sewer architecture—and thematically. The Third Man’s a noir about what goes on in a city that the authorities can’t keep a lid on; that’s exactly what we get here.
The Black Vampire may not be The Third Man or M, but it’s got an excellence of its own. The feel of the horror is very different, the sense of sin more thorough. It handles sex knowledgeably, but with an awareness of what desire drives people. It’s a powerful film, an excellent idiosyncratic film noir.