El Vampiro Negro (The Black Vampire) (Argentina Sono Film S.A.C.I., 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had relatively good bus luck leaving the Organ Pavilion on Saturday night and as a result I was able to get home in time to see a fascinating and surprising film on Turner Classic Movies, El Vampiro Negro (1953). I had assumed from the title – Spanish for “The Black Vampire” – that it would be one of these cheap horror movies churned out by the yard by Mexican studios in the 1950’s and 1950’s. Wrong on all three counts: it had quite impressive production values, was made with a sense of genuine artistry, and it’s from Argentina, not Mexico. It was written and directed by Ramón Viñoly Barreto, though he put someone else’s name on the credits as co-writer (the someone was his former camera operator, Alberto Etchebehere, just to make the film seem less like a one-man operation). He derived the story largely from Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M. about a psychopathic murderer of children, whcih when El Vamprio Negro was made had just been remade in the U.S. ini 1952 with Joseph Losey as director and David Wayne replacing Peter Lorre as the villain. Both the Lang and Losey films center around two groups of people wh o are out to catch the child-murderer, the police who want to bring him to justice and a loosely organized syndicate of gangsters who want to capture him themselves and summarily execute him because the cops’ searches for him are disrupting the gangsters’ illegal but lucrative businesses. Director Barreto decided to give the tale a feminist spin, emphasizing the women who either have already lost their children to the murderer or are afraid of that happening. His central character is Amalia, stage name “Rita” (OIlga Dubarry, who had appeared semi-nude in a previous Argentinian film and by 1953 had acquired the reputation as “Argentina’s Marilyn Monroe,” though she’s actually a far more capable, determined and authoritative actress, albeit without Marilyn’s obvious vulnerability on screen).

She’s a singer in a seedy second-rate cabaret owned by Gastón (Pascual Pelliciota), who was recently released from prison on charges of trafficking drugs. He insists that he’s learned his lesson and is running a legitimate business, but the police, led by prosecutor Dr. Bernar (Roberto Escalada) – some sources, including the film’s Wikipedia page, have a “d” at the end of his last name, but imdb.com doesn’t – are convinced he’s still dealing and trafficking in drugs using his cabaret as a cover. Dr. Bernar(d) is also in charge of investigating the child murders, and in one scene he leads a raid on the cabaret where Alicia and her best friend Cora (Nelly Panizza) work. Alicia actually saw the killer dump a body in a nearby sewer (this is a city that still has open-air sewers) but she refuses to tell Bernar that because she’s afraid that if the people running the private school where her daughter Gogó (credited only as “Gogo” on the cast list but actually played by the director’s own eight-year-old daughter) attends find out that she’s a cabaret entertainer, they’ll expel the girl. Along the way Barreto copies quite closely some of the famous scenes from M, including the piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt which the killer whistles when he’s on the prowl, and the blind man who recognizes the song and gives the police the clue they need to find the killer.

The killer turns out to be someone nicknamed “The Professor” (Nathán Pinzón), whose real name is Teodoro Ulber. He makes his living teaching English as a second language to Argentinian kids – the one bit of English we hear in this otherwise all-Spanish film is him leading one of his lessons – and though he’s closer as a “type” to David Wayne than Peter Lorre, he does an excellent job with the character. Barreto didn’t even try to do the “court of the underworld” that’s so much a part of Lang’s film (and which Joseph Losey was forced to retain in the American remake even though he didn’t think it worked in the U.S. c. 1952; the original producer, Seymour Nebenzal, had made a deal with the U.S. Production Code Administration to be allowed to remake M as a new version of an acknowledged classic, but the permission would be withdrawn if he made any but the most minor changes in the story). Instead he ripped off another classic, The Third Man, and had the cornered Teodoro try to escape through the city’s underground sewers – where he’s confronted by a group of homeless people who live there and make it clear that he disgusts them. Barreto staged this scene with actual homeless denizens of the Buenos Aires sewers, and he immediately preceded it with a scene he ripped off from the first (1934) version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much – the mother confronts the killer who’s holding her daughter hostage (though I found myself wishing she’d been established as a crack shot, the way Edna Best’s character was in Hitchcock’s film, where she was able to pick off the person holding her daughter hostage without harming the daughter). It’s a matter of Barreto’s artistry that these borrowings from other movies don’t seem forced – instead they form a seamless artistic whole.

Also, El Vampiro Negro is stunning visually, thanks to Barreto and his cinematographer, Anibal González Paz, who create stunning black-and-white images and do some radical superimpositions most American or European filmmakers either wouldn’t or couldn’t have dared. The title refers to the killer’s love of blood – I remember once watching a really tacky videotape of a movie about real-life vampires, not (of course) undead people who keep themselves alive through drinking the blood of normal humans but people who get a sexual kink out of drinking their own or other people’s blood, and El Vampiro Negro includes a psychiatrist character whoi explains that Teodoro is irrational in that he craves the sight of human blood, but once he sees it, his desire is sated and he can go about the business of disposing of the body rationally. And as if that weren’t enough, prosecutor Bernar has a disabled wife (Gloria Castilla), and at one point ini the film he complains to Amelia that he’s lonely – and makes an out-front pass at her, to which she reacts basically by saying, “You men are all alike.” There’s also an undercurrent of social criticism in the way the police arrest people willy-nilly if they have even a remote connection to the crimes, despite one of the cops commenting that if we arrest everyone who provides them information, they’re not going to get much help from the community. About the only jarring note is the framing sequence – the film begins with Teodoro’s trial and the prosecutor and his attorney (Alberto Barcel) are arguing over whether Teodoro should be sentenced to death or confined in a mental hospital. Ultimately the jury votes to give him a death sentence – something that would probably have ticked off Fritz Lang, who said he made M at least in part as a message film against capital punishment.