Argentine Noir: The restoration of Carlos Hugo Christensen’s "No abras nunca esa puerta" / "Never Open that Door" (1952)

The Noir City: Hollywood festival and the UCLA Festival of Preservation are premiering a terrific noir film No abras nunca esa puerta / Never Open that Door (1952), directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen, a key director of Argentina’s golden age of the studio. This policial - as crime films are known in Spanish, from the French policier - was preserved in 2013 by the Film Noir Foundation, on the recommendation of Argentine film historian and archivist Fernando Martín Peña. It has now been completely restored by the FNF through the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with a generous grant from the Golden Globe Foundation

 The case for homegrown forms of film noir in Latin America was strengthened in the Anglo-speaking world by two series at the Museum of Modern Art about Mexican and Argentine policiales of the 1940s and 50s. These two exhibits showed that these films were a native species of noir that warranted their inclusion in a canon. (1)

 The Film Noir Foundation, founded and headed by film critic and historian Eddie Muller, has been working on making available some of these Argentine films in BluRay and DVD editions, in collaboration with LA-based Flicker Alley. (2) 

These policiales have found a new life since their theatrical distribution in the 1950s in Argentina and Latin America. Their relative inaccessibility - except special screenings, occasional TV broadcasts and poor copies on the internet – made them ripe for discovery by modern audiences.  They were instances of purloined letters, although their value has been noted in Spanish-language histories of Argentine and Latin American cinema.  Los tallos salvajes (1956, directed by Fernando Ayala), La bestia debe morir and El vampiro negro, released in 2021, are now joined by the forthcoming No abras nunca esa puerta, an excellent addition. 
 
What follows are the notes I prepared for a documentary short to be included as one of the bonus materials for its Flicker Alley release. They are relevant to put this policial in a historical and cultural context.  

 Director Carlos Hugo Christensen traveled to New York in 1951 to meet Cornell Woolrich and secure the rights to three stories, “Somebody on the Phone”, “Hummingbird Comes Home” and “If I die before I awake”, all of 1937. In an interview with biographer Mario Gallina, the director recalled the meeting: “We met at the Hotel Normandie, where Woolrich was living. I knew beforehand that he had sold the rights to one of his novels, Phantom Lady, to Universal Studios, for $60,000. You can imagine this was a strike against me because what I was going to offer him was way below that sum.  Before talking about money, we discussed his literary work. He was pleasantly impressed when he realized that I was very familiar with all of it. At some point, he asked me, ‘How much are you thinking of paying me for these three stories?’. With trepidation, I answered, ‘3,000 dollars each’. He looked at me smiling and said: ‘They are worth four times more. But this time, I’m going to make an exception. The stories are yours’. I think that the enthusiasm he perceived in me for his work, must have influenced his decision. A little time later, when we finished the film, we sent him a copy. He was very happy with the results.” (3) 

 No abras nunca esa puerta adapted the first two stories, “Somebody on the Phone”, “Hummingbird Comes Home”, and runs for 85 minutes. The third one became a standalone film of 73 minutes.  They were released less than a month from one another, If I Die … on April 29 and No abras nunca esa puerta on May 25, in the Ambassador and Ocean theaters on Lavalle Street, the movie house district of downtown Buenos Aires. (4)
 

Both films were produced by San Miguel studios, founded in 1937 by Spanish businessman Miguel Machinandiarena. San Miguel was patterned d on the Hollywood model of various producers under one roof, managing a variety of projects. The business model ultimately did not prosper, since distribution and exhibition in Argentina and Latin America did not generate earnings to offset production costs. The studio’s last releases were the Christensen films.  

It should be noted that the Argentine studio system spanned since the coming of sound in the early 1930s to its decline by the mid-1950s due to several factors, among which the Peronist government control of the media – radio, film and print - by the mid-1950s. (5) 
 

Christensen discussed with film historian and Stanford professor Jorge Ruffinelli the ideological constraints of working in the national-populist Peronist era (1946-1955), that ultimately led to his leaving Argentina in 1954. In two conversations held in Christensen’s home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from where he worked for the rest of his career, the filmmaker recalled the stifling of the studios – with one exception, Argentina Sono Film – by the double-edge sword of political censorship, the threat of exile, and protectionism for the friends of Perón and his former actress wife Eva Duarte.  Some historians of the era have viewed the Argentine noirs – silent about the specifics of the era – as indirect revelations of an oppressive political climate. (6) 

Regarding Cornell Woolrich stories and novels as the source of Latin American films, here are the five Argentine and Mexican films, made between 1951 and 1956. They are all interesting cases of transformative adaptations, and the subject of further comparative study.

El pendiente (1951) – based on the novelette The Death Stone/ The Earring (1943)  (as William Irish). Argentina. Dir. León Klimovsky. Written Samuel Eichelbaum, Ulises Petit de Murat.  With Mirtha Legrand, José Cibrián, Francisco de Paula.

La huella de unos labios (1952) – story “El cuello de la camisa” / “Collared” (as William Irish). Mexico. Dir. Juan Bustillo Oro. Written Juan Bustillo Oro, Cornell Woolrich. With Rosario Granados, Carlos López Moctezuma, Rubén Rojo.

Si muero antes de despertar / If I Shoud Die Before I Wake (1952) – based on the novelette If I Should Die Before I Wake (1937) (as William Irish). Argentina. Dir. Carlos Hugo Christensen. Written Alejandro Casona, Cornell Woolrich. With Néstor Zavarce, Blanca del Prado, Floren Delbene, Homero Cárpena.

No abras nunca esa puerta (1952) – stories “Somebody on the Phone” and “Hummingbird Comes Home”, both of 1937 (as William Irish). Argentina. Dir. Carlos Hugo Christensen. Written Alejandro Casona, Cornell Woolrich. With Ángel Magaña, Renée Dumas, Nicolás Fregues, Roberto Escalada, Ilde Pirovano.

El ojo de cristal (1956) – based on story “Through a Dead Man’s Eye”. Mexico. Dir. Antonio Santillán. Written Cornell Woolrich, Ignacio F. Iquino, José Antonio de la Loma. With Carlos López Moctezuma, Armando Moreno, Beatriz Aguirre.   (7)

                  

 The three Woolrich stories were adapted by Alejandro Casona, the Spanish playwright who lived in Buenos Aires between 1939 and 1962, as a result of the Spanish War. Belonging to the Generation of 1927, together with Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, Casona wrote plays in a style of poetic theater. His collaboration with Christensen is a subject to further explore: the meshing of two very different sensibilities, one poetic, the other melodramatic.
 

The recent restoration of No abras esa puerta opens a door (pun intended) to enjoy a topnotch example during the heyday of Argentine policiales spanning from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. The noir vitality – however complicated its classification - can be traced through the following decades. There should be a film series connecting the landmark Hugo Fregonese’s Apenas un delincuente (1949) with modern neo-noirs like Fabián Bielinksy’s Nueve Reinas (2000) and Damián Szifron’s Relatos salvajes (2014) and To Catch a Thriller (2023, a US production). Along the way, the policialesof Adolfo Aristarian – La parte del león (1978), Tiempo de revancha (1981) and Últimos días de la víctima (1982) would substantiate the case.  For a larger selection of Argentine crime thrillers in general, De La Fuga a La Fuga (2004) by Roberto Blanco Pazos y Raúl Clemente is a very complete source.
 

            

 Notes
(1)  The two series organized by the Museum of Modern Art were “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina. Feb 10–16, 2016” (https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1616); and “Mexico at Midnight: Film Noir from Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age. Jul 23–29, 2015” (https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1533).

(2)  https://flickeralley.com/products/never-open-that-door-no-abras-nunca-esa-puerta
 
(3)  Mario Gallina, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Historia de una pasión cinematográfica (1997). My translation.
 
(4)  Un diccionario de films argentinos, edited by Raúl Manrupe and María Alejandra Portela (1995). A subject of further study is the fact that the films were released three and two months before the death at age 33 of Eva Perón, an indispensable political figure to understand the second part of 20^th century Argentina. Christensen left Argentina with his family two years later, as a result of political pressure, settling in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, until his death in 1999.
 
(5)  For a succinct account in English of the film industry in Argentina during Christensen’s film career at Lumiton and San Miguel studios, see David George and Gizella Meneses, Argentina Cinema: From Noir to Neo-Noir (2017).
 
(6)  For Spanish-language source, see the Argentine film studies by Clara Kriger, Cine y Peronismo: El estado en escena (2009). Domingo Di Núbila, La época de oro. Historia del cine argentino (1998); Abel Posada, “La caída de lose studios, sólo el fin de una industria”, in La otra historia, ed. Sergio Wolff (1994); and César Maranghello, Breve historia del cine argentino (2004). Currie K. Thompson applies Roland Barthes’ analytical framework to study crime films during the Perón era, distinguishing between cine negro and policial documental: Picturing Argentina. Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision (2014).
 
(7)  Compiled from IMDb and Spanish-language sources, imdb.com