El Vampiro Negro (1953)
Not a vampire film as the title insists, El Vampiro Negro (The Black Vampire) is instead an Argentinian remake of Fritz Lang's M (1931) that features an ersatz Peter Lorre in the form of Nathán Pinzón as "The Professor," a compulsive killer of children. It also showcases eye-catching sets inspired by German expressionism, noir-ish lighting, and an unsettling subtext about the powers of a corrupt police state. Though not on a par with its inspiration, El Vampiro Negro nevertheless fascinates through its thematic variances from Lang's film, which was itself inspired by a newspaper article about true-life mass murderer Peter Kuerten.
Made two years after Joseph Losey's Americanized remake of M with David Wayne as the murderer, the Buenos Aires-filmed El Vampiro Negro takes liberties with Lang and Thea von Harbou's original script. One evening, Amalia (Olga Zuberry), the star vocalist at a seedy nightclub, watches in horror through a street-level window in the club's basement as the raincoat-clad killer stuffs his latest victim down a sewer. Fearful of the impact her involvement in a murder case might bear on her young daughter, Amalia heeds the advice of her boss (who is, unknown to her, a narcotics peddler) and withholds her story from the cops. But for reasons other than her reticence to speak, Amalia attracts the interest of suave investigating detective Dr. Bernar (Roberto Escalada), a police psychiatrist. He hopes to score with the shapely songbird, invalid wife be damned.
This synopsis reveals the film's greatest divergence from its model. Whereas Lang's classic employs a documentary-like, almost Brechtian remove to examine how the murderer's spree results in competition between two "organizations" (law enforcement and the criminal underworld) to track him down, El Vampiro Negro would rather observe human dynamics up close and melodramatic. Director/co-writer Román Viñoly Barreto contrasts his pathological killer with a vainglorious cop who is revealed to be a hypocritical slave to his dick. They're countered by a desperate dame driven to compromise her own integrity for the promise of a better future for her child. There's also a blind beggar and whistled bars of Grieg, but they're almost an afterthought.
This synopsis reveals the film's greatest divergence from its model. Whereas Lang's classic employs a documentary-like, almost Brechtian remove to examine how the murderer's spree results in competition between two "organizations" (law enforcement and the criminal underworld) to track him down, El Vampiro Negro would rather observe human dynamics up close and melodramatic. Director/co-writer Román Viñoly Barreto contrasts his pathological killer with a vainglorious cop who is revealed to be a hypocritical slave to his dick. They're countered by a desperate dame driven to compromise her own integrity for the promise of a better future for her child. There's also a blind beggar and whistled bars of Grieg, but they're almost an afterthought.
Director/co-writer Román Viñoly Barreto's decision to change the focus of the narrative to a woman's perspective provides an intriguing twist to the original, and so also does the pervasive presence of disenfranchisement and despair. The dourly moralistic, patriarchal authoritarianism that enshrouds the characters of El Vampiro Negro would have been acknowledged by its original audience as reflexive invocations of Peronism. The film's fatalistic mood culminates in the pitiless nature of the denouement as compared to its pre-war predecessor.
Román Viñoly Barreto (1914-1970) was a stage director, playwright, and translator. His 28 feature films are not widely known outside of Latin America, though he was nominated for a Golden Bear for his 1958 Los dioses ajenos ("Strange Gods"), also with Zubarry. Well-known in her native Argentina, the prolific Olga Zubarry (1929-2012), "the Argentine Marilyn Monroe," is, like Baretto, mostly unknown to non-Spanish audiences. Among the later films in which she starred was the award-winning Invasión (1969), a banned-in-Argentina sci-fi parable based on a script co-written by Jorge Luis Borges. Like his predecessor Lorre, bug-eyed character actor Nathán Pinzón's career was mostly relegated to horror films and comedies. He can be seen in León Klimovsky's reefer madness potboiler The Marihuana Story (1950) and in the Euro-pudding production Carnival Of Crime (1962) a staple of budget DVD box sets.
Never before distributed in the United States, El Vampiro Negro was recently re-released through the efforts of the Film Noir Foundation and archivist Fernando Martin Peña. In 2014, the San Francisco-based Foundation toured their newly-struck 35mm print of the film for fortunate filmgoers in Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Portland, Washington D.C., and Kansas City in a program intended to demonstrate global evidence of film noir's stylistic signifiers. Now what's needed is for El Vampiro Negro to find its way to home video so more may discover it. The subtitle-free version on YouTube, in two parts, is in poor condition, its image darker and fuzzier than the Film Noir Foundation's crisp new print.