Fragile Egos, Violent Men: Two Rare Argentinian Noirs on Flicker Alley Blu-ray

Death and its inevitability loom large over Román Viñoly Barreto’s The Beast Must Die and Fernando Ayala’s The Bitter Stems. The former, from 1952, kicks into motion after the medicine of the titular “beast” has been poisoned, while the latter, from 1956, opens at the stroke of midnight just prior to a train ride that takes a man to the setting of a perfect murder. With equal aplomb, these intricately plotted, deeply cynical, and occasionally macabre Argentinian noirs descend into the abyss of their protagonists’ psyches to explore what drives their twisted quests for revenge in the wake of adversity and personal tragedy.

Frank (Narciso Ibáñez Menta) in The Beast Must Die and Alfredo (Carlos Cores) in The Bitter Stems are both possessed of a firm sense of intellectual and moral superiority, inviting comparisons to Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In their own minds, though, these men have their legitimate reasons for vengeance, and directors Barreto and Ayala remain firmly attuned to the psychological motivations of their every move.

In the case of Barreto’s film, the principal Übermensch is presented in a more compassionate light, as Frank is a widower and his young son was recently killed in a hit-and-run accident. Frank, who also writes detective novels under the pen name of Felix Lane, already has a built-in fractured identity that comes into play even more explicitly as he enacts his duplicitous plan to ingratiate himself to those involved with his son’s death: the innocent Linda (Laura Hidalgo) and her abhorrent brother-in-law, Jorge (Guillermo Battaglia).

The Beast Must Die initially plays as a fairly straightforward whodunnit—not unlike the ones that Felix Lane himself writes—only to become an increasingly knotty, psychologically complex, and feverishly melodramatic character piece. The vengeful Frank works his way into the good graces of Jorge, a cruel, calculating brute who’s despised by virtually everyone except for his equally callous mother (Milagros de la Vega). Jorge’s appalling sexism and violent temper ensures that everyone in his orbit is a potential suspect.

But it’s Barreto’s clever and engrossing portrait of Frank’s duality that remains The Beast Must Die’s most compelling aspect, involving both Jorge’s son, Ronnie (Humberto Balado), who’s eerily reminiscent of Frank’s own child, and a diary where Frank meticulously writes out his murderous scheme, and which ultimately reads like one of his fictional novels. This friction between Frank’s two worlds and identities inevitably reaches its breaking point in a sensational climax that beautifully ties together several of the film’s motifs.

Where The Beast Must Die sees the psychic split of its protagonist intensify throughout the film, The Bitter Stems relies on the narrative rupture of a mid-film twist to completely recalibrate the audience’s understanding of Alfredo and, indeed, everything we’ve seen until this point. The first half of the film surreptitiously takes on Alfredo’s paranoid perspective, painting the Hungarian refugee, Paar Liudas (Vassili Lambrinos), with whom he hatches a fraudulent mail-order journalism scheme, in a distinctly ambiguous light. But following a ghastly twist of fate—a sharp turn that’s mirrored in another great Argentinian noir from two years later, Mario Soffici’s Rosaura at 10 O’Clock—we’re thrust into a fever dream as Alfredo is forced to confront and deal with the consequences of his drastic act.

In one of the film’s most remarkable sequences, Alfredo follows Liudas into a jazz joint and overhears a conversation, intermittently broken up by the horns on stage, that leads him to believe that Paar, his partner in crime, has been fleecing him. This moment, which leads to the inevitable death foreshadowed in The Bitter Stems’s opening scene, is cleverly reframed in the film’s latter half, revealing how much of what we’ve been told was the result of delusions brought on by a man’s profound arrogance and remarkably fragile ego.

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, The Bitter Stems tempts, even encourages, us to identify with a murderer even after it’s revealed that the act of violence was completely senseless. The final act, which sees Liudas’s son (Pablo Moret) and Alfredo’s daughter (Gilda Lousek) figure more importantly into the narrative, envisions a potential restoration of morality and empathy in the upcoming generation. But the finale, whose ostensibly happy ending is tinged with a morbid sense of irony and accompanied by another shocking act of violence, suggests an uncertain future where the youth will be left to contend with the sins of the past.

The Beast Must Die and The Bitter Stems are now available on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley.