[EL VAMPIRO NEGRO]

Film Noir Foundation Restoration

In NOIR CITY's first festival of international noir in 2014, the Film Noir Foundation preserved and presented this virtually unknown third remake of M, Fritz Lang's seminal 1931 thriller. EL VAMPIRO NEGRO is a revisionist take on the tale, made in Buenos Aires in 1953. Argentine beauty Olga Zubarry stars as a cabaret performer trying to protect her young daughter (Gogó) from a mysterious murderer while parrying the advances of the prosecutor (Roberto Escalada) pursuing the killer. Popular comedic actor Nathán Pinzón gives an against-type performance as the disturbed pedophile hiding in plain sight. The moody cinematography of Anibal González Paz makes this film every bit as noir as the versions directed by Lang and Joseph Losey (1951). The script — co-written by THE BEAST MUST DIE's multi-talented cinematographer, Alberto Etchebehere — is a proto-feminist reimagining of the tale, focusing on the lives of female characters ignored in the earlier films. EL VAMPIRO NEGRO is a major cinema rediscovery and NOIR CITY is proud to now present a pristine digital restoration of this remarkable film, which should lead to a worldwide appraisal of the films of Uruguayan-Argentine writer-director Román Viñoly Barreto. (Note courtesy of Noir City.)

Digital restoration by UCLA Film & Television Archive, funded by the Film Noir Foundation. Special thanks to Fernando Martín Peña, Luis Scalella and Argentina Sono Film.