The plan was for Argentinian director Carlos Hugo Christensen and scripter Alejandro Casona to make a movie, for release in Argentina in 1952, that would be an anthology based on three stories from Cornell Woolrich’s collection If I Should Die Before I Wake. As it turned out, the filmed version of the title story was long enough to be released as a feature on its own. The other two adaptations were put together as Never Open That Door and released in May of 1952; If I Should Die Before I Wake was released a month earlier.
If I Should Die is slightly the stronger of the films, both of which are part of the Argentine Noir collection now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Never Open That Door tells two fun and feverish genre stories, but If I Should Die goes beyond that to become a self-aware modern-day fairy tale. It shows adult monsters from a child’s perspective, and if it shares a sense of dreamlike power with Never Open That Door, it also has a sense of character and a playfulness of form that raise it above the other movie.
The story follows a little boy, Luis (Néstor Zavarce), whose father is a police officer. We see him at school, meet his friend Alicia (Marta Quintela), and then Alicia becomes the victim of a serial killer. Luis had promised Alicia not to tell anyone about the man who made friends with her by giving her candy, and the conflict between his desire to keep his promise and his guilt for not talking drive him into delirium for a short while. He gets better; but then, a couple of years later, another girl he knows also meets a man who makes friends by giving her the same kind of candy.
There’s an inexorable build of tension as Luis sees history repeating itself. The story takes its time to develop, but there’s a sense of inevitability always present. At the same time, the story stretches out in unexpected ways; for example, a subplot about Luis’ father, a police inspector who feels like a failure at work in part because he hasn’t caught the same predator who kills Alicia. That plot’s woven neatly into the overall story, deepening Luis’ home life and heightening the stakes.
At first viewing the ending’s so pat as to be unbelievable. But the movie declares itself, in an opening voice-over, to be a fairy tale. And it sustains that metaphor nicely. The voice-over’s given above a shot of a spinning carousel, and that image recurs in various ways through the film; the killer, seen only in glimpses or at a distance through much of the movie, is described as a monster; Luis’ friends are seen walking with the monster through a maze in a park; the monster’s house is in the deep woods.
And so the happy ending fits, because it’s the ending of a fairy tale, and reminds us that’s what we’ve watched for the past hour and a half. Noir and fairy tale are an unusual mix of genres, but blend so neatly and powerfully here as to suggest they’re natural allies. Both are often concerned with transgression, and temptation, and adventures in a heightened emotional reality.
Much of the film’s effectiveness is the way it builds to that heightened state, slowly but relentlessly. The dream sequence helps. But the visual symbolism here is very strong, and there’s a feeling of Grimm’s Fairy Tales translated to a modern Argentinian setting: the candy, the monster in the forest, the repetition of events.
It’s a real credit to this film that, from a perspective some decades on, it’s reminiscent of Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955). Both films center boys, trying to save themselves and a girl; both films pull no punches in presenting a disturbing adult villain. Both films involve a quiet yet nightmarish journey through the wilderness at night. Both films live on a dreamlike plane, building worlds for themselves out of memorable visuals and a sense of narrative rightness that’s slightly different from a well-built plot.
If I Should Die doesn’t have Robert Mitchum, but it does have some remarkably strong craftsmanship. The camerawork in particular is excellent, with some unobtrusively long takes and a strong sense of rhythm and pacing. Child’s-eye views create a subliminally threatening world in which everything and everyone looms over the camera. And the lighting grows more expressionistic over the course of the movie; the classrooms and Luis’ house start as credible physical places, with views of a mazelike park interrupting with moments of strangeness, and as the film goes on that strangeness builds until we’re following Luis through the backlit forest to the monster’s decaying house.
And the dream sequence, with its expressionistic sets, and child’s idea of a lunatic, and hands rising out of garbage. It’s a necessary break in the waking world. Narratively it sets up a jump across years; tonally it’s a burst of strangeness that emphasizes the symbolic aspect of the film. And it looks sharp.
Terrible things happen in this film, seen at a distance and through a child’s eyes. There’s a strange power that emerges from Luis encountering monsters that he can barely understand. It’s a movie about childhood for adults, and one that tells the truth about the horror of being a child in a world made by and for grown-ups.