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.