Zach Vasquez
The theme for this year’s Noir City—the annual traveling film festival put on by The Film Noir Foundation, founded, produced, and hosted by TCM’s Eddie Muller—is “Darkness without Borders,” a response to the recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment designed to showcase noir films from outside the U.S. The centerpiece for the 2024 fest is a newly discovered and restored 1952 work from Argentina: Never Open that Door, directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen and adapted from two short stories by Cornell Woolrich, long regarded as the greatest “idea man” in pulp fiction.
Muller found his way to Never Open That Door via Argentinian historian and TV host Fernando Martín Peña, and knew the Woolrich connection (”from the writer of Rear Window and The Phantom Lady”) would prove an easy sell to noir lovers. A rare example of a noir anthology film—the only other one that springs to mind, per Muller, is l 1943’s Flesh and Fantasy (although unlike Never Open That Door, that one has a supernatural bent)—the picture is a nasty little gem that captures the feel of those classic pulp fiction magazines where Woolrich and his peers (including Raymond Chandler and Dashielle Hammett) got their start.
The first story, Anguish (based on Woolrich’s “Somebody on the Phone”), is set among the idle rich of Buenos Aires and follows one man’s doomed quest for vengeance against a mysterious caller who drives his sister to suicide. The second and longer story, Pain (based on Wollrich’s “Hummingbird Comes Home”), sees an elderly blind woman pining for her estranged son, only to have him show up late one night alongside two accomplices after just murdering a man during a botched jewel-store robbery. Both segments are awash in the dread and fatalism that noir fans crave, while Christensen’s use of shadow and light—particularly in the bravura final act of Pain—showcases a talent on par with the best-known noir directors from America and Europe of the time.
(The low budget of the picture, most noticeable in the use of only a handful of single-set locations, not only adds to the sense of claustrophobia, it also, along with the wickedly ironic gutpunch endings to both stories, plays like a Spanish-language predecessor to The Twilight Zone.)
Originally, Never Open That Door was meant to have a three-story structure. However, the producers felt the original runtime of 2+ hours—unheard of for Argentine movies of the time—was too long, so the decision was made to cut the third story (If I Should Die Before I Wake), pad it out, and release it as a stand alone feature a few weeks after Never Open That Door, with a marketing campaign that helped audiences understand the two were connected.
If I Should Die—which had the larger impact in Argentina at the time and is better known there today—recently aired on Muller’s TCM series Noir Alley alongside Never Open That Door, and is included on the new Blu-Ray for the latter film.
Argentina’s film industry is intrinsically tied to noir, since it was greatly shaped by the Hungarian-American cinematographer John Alton (Raw Deal, The Big Combo, An American in Paris), whom Muller calls “the greatest noir cinematographer of all time” and who, during a period in the ‘30s when he lived in the country, helped found its first sound studio, Lumiton.
Watching Christensen’s work, the distinctiveness of Argentine noir is readily apparent. Whereas other Latin American noir—in particular Mexican noir—is drenched in Catholic imagery and themes, the Argentine style is noticeably more cosmopolitan, more European. This is due not only to the makeup of the country, which has always had a large European contingent, but also to the fact that, when establishing itself, the film industry reached out to exiled American directors who’d been working in Europe following the Hollywood Blacklist and brought them over to get in on the ground floor.
Of course, it should come as no surprise to anyone with any familiarity of Argentine history that so many of the films made during those years were lost or destroyed during the bloody period between the 1970s and ‘80s when a rightwing military junta ran the country and promulgated a horrific Dirty War, as well as the decades afterwards when the nation’s leadership was constantly changing, making any kind of proper film preservation all but impossible.This is all the more reason that Muller and company’s rediscovery and reissue of Never Open that Door is so miraculous, a testament to the fact that noir indeed has no borders.
“Never Open That Door” is now available on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley.
