The Black Vampire (El vampiro negro) (1953), dir. Román Viñoly Barreto. Blu-ray at Tom’s, Monday, November 21.

Note: The Heights Theater and Trylon Cinema will be screening this movie as part of their 14th Film Noir Festival: Argentine Noir, at the Heights, on February 16.

Has there ever been a movie as successfully remade as Fritz Lang’s M? Who would’ve thought this disturbing movie about a serial killer who preys on children would find itself remade twice, and each film is brilliant, and each one brings new insight and critiques to the story. The American remake, from 1951, hews much more closely to the original. But the Argentine version, The Black Vampire, is very different. In the other two versions, the killer is at large and the police decide to raid the underworld in an effort to shake the killer out into the open. This disrupts the money flow for the many organized crime syndicates, who decide to unite in order to find the killer themselves and get back to their shenanigans. Lang’s film was more critical of the police, suggesting that there’s little difference between them and the gangsters; in the American remake, this idea is not really underlined, and part of the point is that we need to be more aware of mental illness, which was swept under the rug in postwar America. Here, hwoever, the police are draconian, but the underworld is powerless, doing nothing wrong other than peddling, living on the street or combing the sewers for junk they can use or sell. But the cops want order, and punish everyone who gets in their way in pursuit of the murderer, even the poor souls who come to them with new information. In fact, here the police, especially the chief prosecutor, are horrible and creepy, upending the lives of quite a few totally innocent people. I don’t know if this is the film’s subtle critique of Juan Perón’s commitment to law and order, but it sure seems that way.

The other ways in which this film differs is that it gives the women a strong voice, most notably in the character of Amalia (Olga Zubarry, fantastic), a nightclub singer who, while walking to her basement dressing room, witnesses the killer deposit a child’s body into the sewers. She also has a daughter who is in a private school and who is later abducted by the madman. Amalia is a rich character, who has to protect her daughter, not only from the killer but from the state taking her child from her(in this Argentina, a nightclub singer shouldn’t raise a child, the state will do it better). She fights her bosses, society, the creepy prosecutor (who tries to use her child as leverage to get her to sleep with him), and, of course, the killer himself. And by having the murderer abduct her daughter, the child victim now has a face and a personality, which makes the stakes even higher. This doesn’t happen in the other two versions–the children are abstractions.

Oh, the details! I love great camerawork and that chiaroscuro lighting, but outside of our heroine, all faces here are battered and scarred and worn and just a tad ugly, like all of us. The nightclub scenes drag us into this seedy, smoky bar, where people cling to one another and whisper their most wretched desires to their partner. One woman even hisses, “I like to be hurt, but I won’t scream.” She’s not even part of the plot, and this actress, probably lost to time, makes the most of her little scene, as does everyone. A stunning movie that shouldn’t be missed.