Román Viñoly Barreto

(On Cable TV, November 2022) Now here’s a curiosity: El vampiro negro is a remake of the classic M in a 1950s Argentinian setting, expanding the cast to include female characters and adopting the fully formed film noir aesthetics of the time. While this interpretation doesn’t have the historical impact of the German original, it’s better-crafted in many, many ways, keeping some of the most striking material such as the musical leitmotif. Many of the more disquieting elements of the original are sanded in more familiar mainstream elements, providing some empathy with the serial killer and pitting a traditional pair of protagonists (one of them a nightclub singer, so that we can have a musical number) rather than digging into the grey underworld of shaded characters like Fritz Lang did. Visually, at least, writer-director Román Viñoly Barreto’s film clearly bridges the expressionism of the original with the film noir style in vogue in the US and in Argentina at the time—for a very satisfying result that reflects the darkness at the heart of the story. The conclusion works rather well in its own way. While it’s not to El vampiro negro’s advantage to be compared to M, it’s well worth some respect of its own as a strong straight-ahead thriller.

(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.