A Besta Deve Morrer

Narciso Ibáñez Menta is the widowed father of a son. Although a mathematician, since the death of his wife, he has made his living by writing pulpy mysteries under a pseudonym. When the boy is killed in a traffic accident, he plots the driver's death.... and the driver dies by poison. Menta has a perfect alibi.

The first adaptation of Cecil Day Lewis' novel shows some interesting parallels to Day Lewis' life, although he was not, so far as I can tell, implicated in a murder. The distinguished poet, who became the Laureate in 1968 wrote mysteries under the pseudonym of 'Nicholas Blake. The movie is a clear film noir, with lots of foggy night scenes and a major flashback, visually interesting and with a nice degree of sexual heat running through it, that Chabrol's later version muted.

Thanks to Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation, TCM viewers were treated this fall to a restoration of The Beast Must Die (aka. La Bestia Debe Morir).

This is a cleverly constructed murder mystery with a bevy of suspects, all with sufficient motive. But you could say that about a lot of movies.

Refreshingly, motivations in this one are clear and the movie is devoid of implausible coincidences or ''dumb people making dumb decisions." I was so absorbed that after a while I forgot I was watching a Spanish-language film with English subtitles.

The cast are uniformly excellent. Narciso Ibáñez Menta doesn't strike a single false note as the writer bent on revenge. I hope to see more of his work on TCM. As for Laura Hidalgo, her career was short, but you're not likely to forget her after seeing this movie. She is the very definition of smouldering.

I've said it before and I will say it again: Eddie Muller and TCM are worth the price of my cable subscription.

Don't get me wrong, I love classic cinema. Hawks, Ford, Wilder, Hitchcock, you name it.

But the fact that a film is old, in black and white and with good photography doesn't mean that it's good. The way this film is put together is representative of a very naive and simple-minded way of storytelling.

The main culprit (though not the only one), is the script. Characters are not believably defined, it's all broad strokes. The main concern is the plot, instead of the humans that make it move. And the structure, while risky, has its problems too.

I can offer some examples of this:

1) When the hero woos Linda, there is nothing playful about the way he does it. Instead, he merely overflatters her. He makes himself look silly, in no way charming. This man is supposed to be intelligent.

2) Later in the film, when Rattery mistreats Linda, who is supposed to be the hero's girlfirend, he witnesses it and does nothing about it. And Linda basically accepts it.

3) At the beggining of the movie, we have a scene between a lawyer, called Nigel, and his girlfriend. It's a very long scene whose only purpose is to give us plot information. The girlfriend is never seen again, and the Nigel character is almost irrelevant to the plot.

There's good cinematography here and there, but the technique at times is also quite clumsy. There is a scene where a woman is shaking up a child, and the way it's shot and edited, it feels completely awkward. In some shots the child doesn't move but shouts off-camera, and the scene feels unreal.

Most of the performances are very broad, a lot of the times the plot moves via uninteresting and unsubtle dialogue, and the characters are simply not clearly defined. Rattery is simply a very bad person, there's very little that we can say about him, aside from that. And the hero is, well, a perfect guy: smart, elegant, well-natured... There are no nuances, no moral ambiguites, nothing. So it all plays like an old fashioned mystery stage play, where everything is naive, dumb and phony.

Ibáñez Menta, of course, was a great actor, but he didn't have a clear charater to play here, and as a leading man he's terribly unattractive.

A quality noir drama out of Argentina from director Román Viñoly Barreto, but beware going into it that the titular beast (Guillermo Battaglia) is a real jerk. This is a guy who openly carries on an affair with his business partner's wife, can't keep his hands off his sister-in-law, beats his wife and stepson, and kills a boy in a hit and run. There are many who would love to see him dead (including the viewer!), but none more so than a murder mystery author (Narciso Ibáñez Menta) who wheedles his way closer to him by romancing the sister-in-law (Laura Hidalgo).

The story was adapted from the novel of the same name by Cecil Day-Lewis (Daniel's father), and as Eddie Muller from TCM explains, told out of order to heighten the drama, a technique that worked. Barreto moves the film along well, and the fine cinematography helps create an atmosphere of menace, one felt more acutely because children are involved. Menta's reserved character (and performance) are a great contrast to Battaglia's, and Hidalgo adds sizzle. Overall, quite entertaining, and it was very refreshing that its ending was unencumbered by the American Production Code.

I knew Flicker Alley had restored this, so I was anxious to see it. It's an Argentine film based on a novel about a crime novelist widower whose young son is the center of his world. When the boy is killed by a hit and run driver - and worse he could have been saved if the driver had stopped and gotten help - he goes on his own search to find the killer and kill him himself. But all of his trails go cold. And then, in a really fantastic and unbelievable turn, he gets a lead. And I'll just leave specifics of the plot at that.

The original novel, according to Eddie Muller on TCM's Noir Alley, had the diary of the avenging father first, and what turns into a murder mystery later. How do you adapt that to film? I think it was done quite artfully. The acting, especially of the two child actors, was well done and the production values are quite high. There were a few things that were surprises to me. Apparently in 1952 Argentina it was considered an intrusion to stop a man from beating his wife? And there was some Christian symbolism, especially at the end, that seemed rather odd.

I will say one bad thing about the restoration. The picture and sound are wonderful, but the English subtitles are white. Thus there are lots of times, when they are superimposed on a light image, that they are difficult or impossible to read. And dialogue is a big part of this film. Still I'd recommend it as something you'd never see coming out of the American studio system of the same year.