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The Black Vampire! The most impressive Spanish-language noir restoration yet, Román Viñoly Barreto’s superior serial murder thriller hails from 1953 Argentina. It re-interprets Fritz Lang’s “M” from a different, more emotionally engaging perspective: star Olga Zubarry’s nightclub singer hesitates to tell what she knows about a child-killer, because she might lose custody of her own young daughter. The expressionist noir owes little to Hollywood. Some find it more satisfying than Lang’s classic version. The Film Noir Foundation’s extras are excellent.

El vampiro negro

Blu-ray + DVD

Flicker Alley

1953 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 90 min. / Street Date November 18, 2022 / Available from Flicker Alley / 39.95

Starring: Olga Zubarry, Nathan Pinzón, Roberto Escalada, Nelly Panizza, Pascual Pelliciota, Georges Rivière, Mariano Vidal Molina, Gloria Castilla, Emma Bernal, Lucía Besse.

Cinematography: Anibal González Paz

Production Designer: Jorge Beghé

Film Editors: Jorge Gárate, Higinio Vecchione

Original Music: Juan Ehlert

Written by Román Viñoly Barreto, Alberto Etchebehere

Produced...

Dazzling urbanites of the New York persuasion will no doubt wend their way to MoMA's season of Argentinian noirs in February, seeking the familiar, morally-compromised pleasures of noir in an exotic new form. They will enjoy Carlos Hugo Christensen's Cornell Woolrich adaptations, subject of a previous Forgotten, the great, underrated French filmmaker Pierre Chenal's version of Native Son, and early work by Hugo Fregonese, later a decent Hollywood journeyman who made one classic for Val Lewton (eerie siege western Apache Drums).But they'll also get the chance to see a stylish remake of Fritz Lang's M, which is as free with its source material as Joseph Losey's recently reappraised 1951 version, and which might almost have cut its ties to its German role model to make its own way as an original work. It's faintly disappointing whenever its plot reconnects with Thea Von Harbou's masterly 1931 scenario,...