Stray Dogs

Tsai Ming Liang's Stray Dogs nimbly balances upon the fine line between cinematic sublimity and art film monotony. I'm still kind of on the fence about this film myself. This 2013 film ostensibly follows the travails of homeless Taiwanese family of four struggling to survive. Dad is a sign waver at a busy intersection, Mom has a McJob at a Costco type emporium. They live in an abandoned apartment building. They scrounge what they can: the kids scarf up free samples at the super mart while Mom stocks up on toilet paper in the public facilities. Somehow they barely uphold their dignity within a bustling and unyielding capitalistic market place.

Yet, this film is not as cut and dried as a plot summary would make it appear. The takes are almost all long and fixed, sometimes lasting five minutes or so. Continuity is eschewed to the extent that three different actresses portray "Mom". The film is truly defined not by its fleeting narrative but by the director's utilization of space. The shots of the sign holders emphasize how little territory they are allotted in the sprawling metropolis. Every man is left to himself to burrow their own warren. Yet, Tsai Ming-liang also shows us beauty within negative space. The camera pans along a pock marked concrete wall as a fairy tale is read or focuses on the rustling river instead of a child. It all adds up, at least, to one distancing technique too many. 

As John Berryman in Dream Song #14 put it, "Life, friends, is boring." and modern art cinema has often explored boredom. Warhol looms large in this, of course, but Stray Dogs' sequence with Mom #2 scrubbing the tub reminded me of the numerous chores Delphine Seyrig plods through in Chantal Ackerman's Jeanne Dielman.... I'm sure most viewers will want to check out of Stray Dogs after the first hour and I will admit that I didn't get much out of the film conceptually after the first sixty minutes or so. Some surreal beauty emerges, though. Because the director shoots in real time with an objective, even dull gaze, the dream sequences are especially unsettling in their realness and tactility. Stray Dogs is an unsparing film the viewer must meet halfway, as if at an art installation. 

Quick Takes, March 2025

Mikey Madison

Enough bouquets have been bestowed upon Sean Baker's Anora that I am not going to belabor the point. The players are uniformly superb. As with the ignored and equally gripping Red Rocket, Anora points towards the growth of Baker as a visual artist. However, it is Mr. Baker's editing that gives the right amount of propulsion to what is essentially a tale concerning transactional relationships and romantic disillusion. It is not a romantic comedy, it upends romantic comedy.

Cody Calahan's Vicious Fun, from 2020, is a Canadian comedy horror film that aims for yuks rather than chills. A nerdy horror scribe (oxymoronic?) stumbles upon a serial killer support group in 1983 with fatal results. Calahan lovingly apes the tone and look of 80s horror in this slight, but winning film. The ensemble work is first class, particularly Evan Marsh, a master of spit takes, Amber Goldfarb, Ari Millen, and David Koechner.

Gints Zilbalodis' Flow, the Latvian film which recently won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, follows the adventures of a cat a in flood filled world devoid of humans. The film meanders pleasantly. The lack of a strong narrative lets the viewer be immersed in Zilbalodis' 360 degree world building which is similar to that of a video game.

Scott Derrickson's The Gorge, currently streaming on Apple+, is mindless, yet enjoyable sci-fi pulp. The film stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Taylor as professional assassins tasked with culling mutants which were the result of a chemical weapons mishap. Thanks to the chemistry of the two leads, the film succeeds as a romance even though its premise is thoroughly idiotic. Ms. Taylor-Joy, in particular, has never been as playful and frisky. Sigourney Weaver is in support in a paycheck role.

Errol Morris' Chaos: The Manson Murders is a succinct summation of the notorious cases. Youngsters with little knowledge of these examples of grisly true crime and 60s paranoia will be the most edified. Morris is still a nervy director and he gives the film the tabloid style the subject demands: the viewer is treated to shots of glass eyes and maggots. The primary talking head (Tom O'Neill), a co-writer of the book which is the basis of the film, attempts to link Manson with the CIA's MKUltra program. The direct link between the two, even Mr. O'Neill admits, has not emerged.

Ken Loach's The Old Oak, like all the British veteran's films, teeters on a tightrope between warm humanism and sententious socialist solidarity. A northern English community welcomes Syrian refugees, some warmly, like the owner of a titular pub, and some not so warmly. Loach types his nationalistic villains so broadly that they resemble cartoons. The acting varies wildly. I did like the Durham Cathedral sequence and the concluding glimpse of that town's Miners Gala. The latter would prove to be a fitting cap to his career if this should prove to be his swan song. I will give Loach credit for staying true to his Marxist principles even to the point of getting tossed out of the UK Labour party.

Dominque Abel and Fiona Martin's The Falling Star is a lame Belgian comedy, seemingly a mixture of Tati, Kaurismäki, and Quaaludes. The cinematography and production design are assuredly smart, yet the picture is thoroughly unenjoyable. The spirited cast is up for anything, especially dance numbers, but the plot wouldn't pass muster for a Monogram Pictures musical. A film that strains for humor. 

Edward Berger's Conclave is a thriller that doesn't thrill. Full of middlebrow musings on impotent issues, it is the most boring commercial film to feature the Sistine Chapel since Carol Reed's The Agony and the Ecstasy. The elderly actors make this static spectacle watchable, particularly Stanley Tucci, but Berger's direction is as anodyne as it was in his version of All Quiet on the Western Front. The film's moral stands, against religious fundamentalism and gender rigidity, are feeble rather than febrile. Ultimately, an underwhelming filmic experience.

Aram Avakian's 11 Harrowhouse, from 1974, is a British based heist film that lands with a resounding thud. Part of a brace of films from that era that attempted to rethink noir conventions (including but not limited to Play It Again, Sam, Chinatown, Gumshoe, Pulp, The Sting, and The Long Goodbye), the film's attempts at humor and suspense are woeful. Leads Charles Grodin and Candace Bergen have only a negative chemistry. Trevor Howard overacts as if he was in a hurry to leave the set. Grace notes are provided by James Mason and John Gielgud, but this disaster finished Avakian's career as a commercial director. He was a very good editor. A flick to avoid.

Best Performances of 2024

Ilinca Manolache

Actress

      Ilinca Manolache     Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World 

      Carol Duarte                 La Chimera

      Léa Seydoux               La Bête 

      Mikey Madison           Anora

     Margaret Qualley        The Substance

Actor

      Raphaël Quenard      Yannick

      Sebastian Stan           The Apprentice

      David Dastmalchian  Late Night With The Devil

      Josh O'Connor           La Chimera, Challengers

      Deniz Celiloğlu         About Dry Grasses

Supporting Actress

      Maja Ostaszewska    Green Border

      Iazua Larios              Tótem

      Niecy Nash               Origin

      Guslagie Malanda     La Bête

      Isabella Rossellini     La Chimera, Conclave

Supporting Actor

      Jeremy Strong           The Apprentice

      Jack Gleeson          In the Land of Saints and Sinners

      Louis Koo            Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

      Elias Koteas               Janet Planet

      David Costabile         Snack Shack

                                       

Raphaël Quenard

      

              

Pursued

Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, and Judith Anderson

The Freudian Western par excellence, Raoul Walsh's Pursued, from 1947, features Robert Mitchum as a man with hellhounds on his trail as a result of boyhood trauma. Walsh fashions this moody piece as a deterministic nightmare where the characters are dwarfed, in James Wong Howe's wonderous cinematography, by monumental rock formations and thunderous skies. Niven Busch's script baldly trumpets its morbid psychology whilst copping out with its ending. This is mitigated by Walsh's handling of his players. Mitchum was rarely better and the supporting players are all perfectly cast: including Teresa Wright (Mrs. Busch at the time). Judith Anderson, Alan Hale Sr., Dean Jagger, and Harry Carey Jr.        

Seraphine

Yolande Moreau as Séraphine de Senlis

Martin Provost's Séraphine is an interesting biopic of the French painter Séraphine Louis better known as Séraphine de Senlis. The film pictures her life through her interactions with her primary patron, Wilhem Uhde, a noted German critic, collector, and art dealer who also championed the works of Braque, Picasso, and Henri Rousseau. Séraphine painted vivid, colorful images of flora and fauna, at one point in the film Uhde compares her work to that of van Gogh and that seems to be apt. Because of her lack of training and mental health issues, Séraphine is often pigeonholed as an outsider artist (aren't they all), a modern primitive, an example of Art Brut or a naive artist; the latter a term Uhde disliked.  

Séraphine was orphaned at seven and trained by the local Sisters of Providence for a life of servitude. This was how Uhde found her in the town of Senlis, just north of Paris in 1914. She was eking out a meagre living as a cleaner and washerwoman. Provost stresses the hardships of her life, but also her resourcefulness. We see her Séraphine wandering the countryside on her off hours, utilizing the local flowers and plants for her pigments. Séraphine is devout in her religious beliefs. Her paintings reflect the ecstasy she feels gazing upon God's creations. Uhde is the first to recognize the vitality and passion of her work. He is eager to bring her work to wider recognition, but the First World War intervenes.

                                            

The real Séraphine

The film jumps to 1927 by which time Uhde has resettled in France with his sister and the painter Helmut Kolle, Uhde's protege and lover. Fate reunites him with Séraphine who has continued to paint, but who is having increasing trouble making ends meet as she ages. Uhde's patronage buttresses Séraphine for awhile, but her behavior becomes more and more unhinged. Uhde is desolated by his lover's death from endocarditis and cannot protect Séraphine from her wilder impulses. She takes to the streets of Senlis in a wedding dress (shades of Miss Havisham) and proceeds to leave her silver on the doorsteps of her neighbors. This lands her in an asylum which Uhde visits, but she is lost to him forever.  

Séraphine falls just short of being a masterpiece because it lacks the audacity of its subject. However, Yolande Moreau's performance as Séraphine and Ulrich Tukur's as Uhde are two for the ages, a contrast between two very different creatures united by a love of art. Séraphine was warmly received by American critics and won the César award for best picture, but has been unjustly forgotten in the intervening years. It is a small treasure that I highly recommend.

King Lear

Jean-Luc Godard in King Lear

I enjoyed Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, but would hesitate to recommend the film to the neophyte Godard viewer. This 1987 film is truly an odd concoction, one of Cannon Films brief forays into art films during that era. The film uneasily alternates pretentious twaddle with sublime genius. Godard does not present us with an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, but a fragmented meditation upon it. The film has no straightforward narrative, but is an visual-audio collage that assays both the lowbrow and the high. The film is pitched as a dialectical exercise: Cordelia versus Lear, virtue versus power, youth versus age, feminine versus masculine, and, the ultimate struggle for a purveyor of images, light versus dark.

King Lear started out as a commercial seeming project, but the end product was so obtuse that it did not open in France until 2002. Norman Mailer, at one point, was collaborating on the script, but (quelle surprise) locked horns with Godard and vamoosed. He appears briefly in the film's prologue. Woody Allen was supposed to play the fool and shows up in the film's coda. There are remnants of a gangster script that Godard unsuccessfully peddled to Hollywood. Lear, played with gusto by Burgess Meredith, is dubbed Don Learo and recites from Albert Fried's The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. He and Molly Ringwald's Cordelia rehearse their lines at a lakeside resort in Switzerland. Godard's camera is usually fixed like the images we glimpse from Sargent, Fra Angelico, Goya, Doré, Fuseli, and scores more.

I can't tell you that it adds up because obfuscation is Godard's goal. As he put it, "the most important will be the most hidden." Not only is the array of images only semi-decipherable, so is the soundtrack. Recitations are garbled or tweaked electronically. Dialogue overlaps with vocal narration to the point of unintelligibility. Godard appears as "Professor Pluggy", an augury of the switched on era of the internet and an inscrutable mentor to the young. The Godard who loves Jerry Lewis is in full evidence here, but Godard's clown, Peter Sellars, doesn't have the comic chops necessary for his pratfalls. If the scene of Sellars slurping soup is the film's nadir, a scene of Julie Delpy ironing is worthy of either Renoir. Leos Carax, who appears here as "Edgar", is one of the few living French filmmakers able to conjure the playful mischief of Jean-Luc Godard. It is this spirit that I value in King Lear and one wholly appropriate for a film that is both a burlesque and an unfathomable critique of pure reason. The recently released Criterion Collection disc is immaculate.

Last Summer, Queen of Hearts

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker

I was about halfway through Catherine Breillat's Last Summer (L'Été dernier) when it finally dawned on me that it was a remake of a Danish film I saw a few years ago, May el-Touky's Queen of Hearts. In both films, the attorney wife of a successful, if somewhat boring business man has a fling with her teenaged step-son. Both films are well acted and appointed, but I thought Ms. el-Touky and her collaborators did a better job of coming to grips with the implications of the material than the makers of the French film.

Ms. Breillat quickly and forcefully establishes her female protagonist, Anne, played by Léa Drucker, as capable and compassionate in her profession. She has a warm relationship with her older husband and their two adorable adopted daughters. The only fly in the ointment is surly step-son, Theo, who is living with them after getting tossed out of his Geneva boarding school. However, after we see the perfunctory sex between Anne and her husband, the audience knows it is only a matter of time before Theo and Anne cross the Rubicon of transgressive love. 

As Theo, Samuel Kircher is appealing in his youthful cluelessness. Ms. Drucker is adept at showing both the steel and vulnerability of Anne. Ms. Breillat is successful at both evoking and sending up the French bourgeoise (or as Anne calls them normopaths) here, a scene with Anne and her charges riding through the French countryside in a Mercedes convertible while blasting Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots" is both sublime and ridiculous, but she skirts the issue of what results when society's spoken and unspoken laws are trangressed. Abuse is papered over in Last Summer and treated with silence. Perhaps this accurately reflects Ms. Breillat's feelings towards how French society deals with such issues, but, compared to how Queen of Hearts deals head on with damage done by social ruptures, it is a cop-out.

Two Claudette Colbert Features: Three-Cornered Moon and Maid of Salem

Claudette Colbert in Three Cornered Moon

Elliott Nugent's Three Cornered Hat, from 1933, is a successful opening up of Gertrude Friedberg's play, a good early example of screwball comedy. As in most screwball comedies, there is overlapping dialogue, physical schtick, and a wacky and wealthy family. Mary Boland plays the ditzy matriarch of an antic clan, three immature adult brothers and a sis played by Ms. Colbert, who live in a mansion in Brooklyn. The brothers roar around the house engaging in hijinks while Colbert ponders the romantic advances of a starving artist and a stable doctor. After the first reel, the family learns that they are destitute and must now labor for their bread and board like the rest of a US locked in the Depression.

Each of the three brothers struggles with employment while Colbert suffers from sexual harassment. Eventually barriers are overcome, inhibitions are discarded, and true love emerges triumphant. The male actors, including Richard Arlen and Wallace Ford, are forgettable, but the distaff half shines. Boland plays an idiot charmingly and Colbert really swims in this kind of fare. Nugent always displays a good sense of pacing and blocking with his players, but there is a rare friskiness to his direction here, particularly in his use of sight gags. The film's sexual politics and Polish jokes have dated, but I found the film to be a tonic. It unspools in 77 minutes.

             

Donald Meek and Colbert in Maid of Salem

Unlike the charming Three Cornered Hat, Frank Lloyd's Maid of Satan is dire. This 1937 version of the Salem witch trials changes the names of all involved (except Tituba) to protect the guilty, out of kindness I suppose. We know that Colbert's character will be fingered because she loves frippery, dancing, and Virginia cavalier Fred McMurray. As with the later Drums Along the Mohawk, Colbert is not entirely at ease in a period role. The only time she gets to show off her apple cheeked charm is a scene of her practicing the gavotte. McMurray is even more at sea in a role that seems more based on Errol Flynn than any historic character. Bonita Granville effectively reprises her These Three role as Maid in Salem's number one fink. The direction is leaden. One reason to see the film is a choice roster of supporting players: Sterling Holloway, Russell Simpson, Donald Meek, Gale Sondergaard, Beulah Bondi, J. Farrell MacDonald, William Farnum, Donald Meek (a perfectly cast Puritan), and, as Tituba, the legendary Madame Sul-Te-Wan. I also enjoyed Victor Young's score, but the verdict is... beware. 

Heretic

Hugh Grant

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' Heretic is a slightly above average horror flick. The film's initial premise is intriguing, but the film soon degenerates into more standard fare. Two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) are invited into the house of an older man who initially seems charming, but soon proves to be throughly sinister. This character, in an inspired bit of casting, is played by Hugh Grant who has always been a fount of surface charm. Grant's character has an axe to grind against organized religion and Mr. Woods and Mr. Beck's script provides him with witty rants that are one part pop culture and one part The Golden Bough. Mr. Grant is up to the challenge and eschews vanity to finally look his age, in stark contrast to the very young damsels in distress.     

Ms. East and Ms. Thatcher are also both quite effective. I rate Ms. Thatcher, so good in Yellowjackets, to be a real comer. Her fierceness reminds me of the young Nicola Pagett. Unfortunately, by the time the two young women discover the nastiness in Mr. Grant's basement, the film peters out into a routine thriller. It is too late to count them out, but it seems that Mr. Beck and Mr. Woods' talents lay more in script writing than direction. With a few exceptions, the images in Heretic tend to evaporate in one's mind's eye rather stick. The climax of Heretic, thus, seems more pro forma than terrifying.   

Yella

Nina Hass in transit

Christian Petzold's Yella, from 2007, is a knotty German thriller that established Petzold as one of the leading directors of this century. Nina Hass plays Yella, a young woman who we soon learn is attempting to leave her marriage. However, the husband, named Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann), refuses to accept this and spends the film stalking, badgering, and abusing Yella. He even drives his car off a bridge rather than drive Yella to the train station. Yella leaves her home town of Wittenberg to accept a job in Hanover, moving from the former East Germany to the more prosperous west. That job turns out to be a mirage, all her crooked boss wants is some slap and tickle. However, she runs into a cocksure business man named Phillip (Devid Striesow) at her hotel's restaurant. Phillip, who susses Yella's accounting skills, invites her to be his number cruncher at a business meeting the next day and a new stage in Yella's life has begun. 

It turns out Phillip is a liaison for a shady financier who loans out money, at exorbitant rates, to capitalists who cannot get bank loans. Yella takes to her new life well and even starts falling for Phillip. However, she eventually grasps that Phillip is stealing from his boss and is heading for a fall. The vision of capitalism is that of the art of the scam, everyone is on the make. Yella concludes with a fatalistic ending that has been previously foretold. Throughout the film, Petzold weaves themes (transit, surveillance) and imagery (especially that of water) that would recur throughout his later work. If you enjoy Yella, I strongly urge you to seek out Petzold's later masterpieces with Nina Hass, Barbara and Phoenix, both of which contain sublime acting and filmmaking.

Spoiler Alert

I cannot fully grapple with Yella without spilling the beans about the ending. Earlier in the film, when Ben drives the car containing he and Yella off a bridge and into a river, both passengers survive the plunge and collapse on the river bank. Somewhat improbably, Yella is able to retrieve her bags and make her train to Hanover. The film continues with her further misadventure until the accident is repeated at the end of the film. This time Yella and Ben are dead, their bodies covered by rescue workers. One interpretation I'll offer is that Petzold is offering us a variation of Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in which the narrator imagines an escape and homecoming in the few moments before he dies from a hanging. It would explain the weird migraines and or psychotic breaks Yella experiences, always accompanied by liquid imagery, where she hears a high pitched sound and water rushing.

Symphonie pour un massacre

Jean Rochefort

Jacques Deray's Symphonie pour un massacre is a tightly constructed and cold eyed crime drama from 1963. Derived from Alain Reynaud-Fourton's novel, Les Mystifiés, the adaptation was written by Deray with help from Claude Sautet and one of the film's actors, José Giovanni. The flick centers on five gangsters who band together as partners in a narcotics deal. However, we are clued in from the start that there is no honor among these thieves. The nominal protagonist, Jabeke (Jean Rochefort), is revealed within the first reel to be having an affair with the wife of one of his criminal cohorts, Claude Dauphin's Valoti. Jabeke is also keen to rip off his brothers in crime. He stalks the gangster Moreau (Giovanni) who is taking a large satchel of cash to Marseilles in order to initiate the narcotics deal. Jabeke murders Moreau on the train to Marseilles and steals the cash. Needless to say, Jabeke's plan eventually goes awry and the film ends in a cascading wave of violence promised by its title.

The film is firmly entrenched in the shady milieu of bars and gambling clubs seen in the films of Jacques Becker who had adapted Giovanni's first novel, Le Trou, in 1960. Deray shoots his players from a low angle conveying the menace of an underworld in which no one can be trusted. Symphonie... is unhurried in showing us the machinations of its plot. The audience is fully clued in to the perfidy of the characters. Deray percolates his drama at a slow boil never resorting to jump scares or concocted suspense. The fact that we can see the dénouement of this film a mile away does not lessen its fascination, but works to tighten the snare Deray has fashioned for his characters. The tightness of the movie's construction, particularly its editing, results in marvelous moments of ironic counterpoint. 

Symphonie... is a feast of Gallic film acting. Rochefort, known primarily up to that point as a light comedian both on stage and in films like Cartouche, was given a career boost by showing he could be equally equally effective as a dramatic lead. His stoic mien is the focal point of the film. Claud Dauphin is affecting as the cuckolded Valoti and Charles Vanel, most famous for The Wages of Fear, is equally superb. Claude Renoir's vivid black and white cinematography of Paris, Lyon, and Brussels is reason enough to see the film. Léon Barsacq's art direction hips us the personality of the characters more, unfortunately, than some of the performers do. Deray's use of space is tightly controlled and largely static. When he does move his camera, whip pans and tightly coiled dollies, it is a cold smack to the viewer. 

I will conclude with a bit on José Giovanni because it will be the proper chilly end note for this short review. Giovanni wrote over twenty noir novels and many film scripts, including Melville's Le deuxième souffle. He had a real life appreciation for crime and moral depravity. Before assuming the pen name Giovanni, he was born Joseph Damiani, a French citizen of Corsican descent. The son of a gambler, Giovanni was twenty when he began collaborating with the Vichy government and its Gestapo henchmen. He belonged to the German Schutskorp which hunted camp escapees and dodgers. When not capturing Jews and other undesirables and pilfering their loot, Damiani would blackmail Jews in hiding. And there was more, including murder. After liberation, Damiani narrowly escaped the hangman's noose and ended up serving eleven and a half years in stir. He was unrepentant when he died a Swiss citizen in 1986.

The Devil and the Daylong Brothers

Three Brothers: Jordan Bolden, Brendan Bradley and Nican Robinson

I could pick nits with it from now till Doomsday, but Brandon Mccormick's The Devil and the Daylong Brothers is bold and inventive. A Southern Gothic musical set in the pre-cellphone era, the film function as an update of Supernatural  with the addition of an extra brother. The songs are serviceable country blues pastiches, but writer Nicholas Kirk, the co-auteur of this flick, imbues them with doom and propulsive energy appropriately leading us to the inexorable climax. Mccormick frames the pitiless violence and songs with handheld immediacy sometimes lapsing into hysterical overkill. On the whole, though, this approach bears fruit as Mccormick and Kirk have constructed a narrative of superior craft that all comes together like a fine timepiece

The mythology of The Devil and the Daylong Brothers is Satanic gobbledygook. Three brothers from different mothers are paying off their Dad's debt to his satanic majesty by dispatching those whose time it is to pay for their Faustian bargains. Last on their list is Dad who sold his soul to be the ultimate blues singer. Now that said father is played by a veteran actor/singer most famous for crooning the excruciating "I'm Easy" to various femmes in Nashville is problematic to say the least, but I'm not going to pick the nit of the white bluesman here and Keith Carradine acquits himself extremely well. Most of the acting is quite good for a B movie, though Jordon Bolden seems to be doing a bizarre Rami Malek impression. The best vocals are provided by Rainey Qualley, Margaret's sis and the sole femme (fatale) here, better known in music circles as Rainsford. The Devil and the Daylong Brother has opened to little fanfare by streaming on Apple TV, but it is vigorous cinema for those who don't mind an impaled eyeball or two.

La bestia debe morir

Narciso Ibáñez Menta and Laura Hidalgo

Román Viñoly Barreto's La bestia debe morir (The Beast Must Die), released in 1952, is a terrific melodramatic mystery from Argentina. The screenplay, by Barreto and leading man Narciso Ibáñez Menta, is adapted from Nicholas Blake's novel. Blake was the pen name of English poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis who concocted mysteries, usually following the exploits of detective Nigel Strangeways, in order to earn the income his poetry could not generate. The book was also adapted in 1969 by Claude Chabrol for his film This Man Must Die. The two films are an interesting contrast. The Chabrol film is shot in color in a realistic fashion with many outdoor sequences. Chabrol marshals his characters like chess pieces in an essay on determinism. La bestia debe morir is in black and white and shot on soundstages. Barreto stresses the traumas of the characters by expressionistically heightening the claustrophobia of the interiors, which contain a nest of vipers.

Barreto and Menta stress the inevitability of the film's tragic denouement by rejiggering the story's structure. The story is a revenge tale in which a bereaved father, author Felix Lane (Menta), vows to take retribution for those responsible for the demise of his son, who died in a hit and run accident. La bestia debe morir starts off by having the killer, a rich landowner named Jorge (Guillermo Battaglia), be poisoned in the first reel, though we do not know by whom. The main part of the narrative, Felix's search for his son's killer, is told in flashback, a device that helps the film's plot seem as foredoomed as its look. Lane finds his son's killer through Linda (Laura Hidalgo), Jorge's sister-in-law and a film actress, who was with Jorge when Felix's son was run over. Felix initially uses Linda to get at Jorge, but finds himself falling for the saucy, but troubled dish.

His relationship with Linda gains Felix an invitation to Jorge's estate, a sick house with secrets like in many works of horror, Poe's ...Usher for example. Jorge is a domineeringly sadistic host, truly a beast. He beats both his wife and her child from a previous union mercilessly with a belt. He openly pursues Linda and has installed a former, and perhaps current, mistress as the wife of his business partner. The manse is presided over by Jorge's aged mother, a tart tongued and self-righteous biddy played with sulphuric majesty by Milagros de la Vega. Barreto and cinematographer Alberto Etchebehere's camera usually regards these grotesques from a low angle, at knee level. The perfect angle to warily regard serpents.

                            

However, Barreto is up to more than prodding the snakes in his terrarium. In this film, Barreto shows and evokes how traumatic events smack into people and leave their mark. When Jorge's auto is about to smash into Felix's son, the camera does a quick dolly into the frightened lad from the car's point of view. At the moment of impact, Barreto cuts to a shot of waves crashing on the rock coast. The surreal charge of this carries over into the sequence recording Felix's memories of the aftermath of the accident: distorted images superimposed on one another as an expression of mental distress (see above). This is audacious cinema poised at the point of hysteria.

Hysteria is also what most of the acting skirts, but I find it appropriate to the melodramatic excesses of the scenario. The exception is Menta playing a character willing to watch and bide his time before striking. Menta deftly underplays his role, which is accentuated by all the eye rolling and lip quivering going on around him. Menta was a Spaniard who became the equivalent of Vincent Price to a generation of Latin American moviegoers. A devotee of Lon Chaney Sr., Menta would subsequently appear in scores of Latin horror films. I relished his performance here and will seek out both more of his and Barreto's work. La bestia debe morir and Barreto's El vampiro negro (a remake of M) are both available on spiffy Flicker Alley discs. I commend them to all.