La bestia debe morir [The Beast Must Die] (1952)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) While I’ll argue that film noir is an essentially American genre forged in the distinctive cauldron of post-WW2 Los Angeles, it’s useless to deny the influence it had outside America, or the successful examples of the genre in languages other than English. The French school is obvious, but Argentine also had a vigorous film noir movement and writer-director Román Viñoly Barreto’s The Beast Must Die is one such example of the form. This story of a father seeking revenge on the unknown driver who fatally hit his son starts with a portentous narration (“I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name. I don’t know where he lives. I have no idea what he looks like, but I will find him and I will kill him.”) and keeps going, often with pleasantly melodramatic acting that never relies on subtlety. The cinematography is pure noir delight, and the plot cleanly plays with big genre tropes. The Argentinian setting adds some flavour to a familiar story, and the ending satisfies. All in all, a good discovery – The Beast Must Die was restored from obscurity by the specialist Film Noir Foundation, and it’s a public service to make it widely available once more.