Flicker Alley continues their series of Argentinian film noir with NEVER OPEN THAT DOOR, a 1952 film of two stories based on works by Cornell Woolrich, the Arthur Conan Doyle of Noir, under his pen name of William Irish. The two stories 1) SOMEBODY’S ON THE PHONE and 2) THE HUMMINGBIRD COMES HOME were written in the late 1940s. The “door” referenced in the title is a metaphor for separating “good” from “evil”. One must never open this “door” without suffering serious “anguish” and “pain”
The first story (“anguish”) concerns a well-to-do man and his younger sister. The sister is involved with an individual who treats her very badly. When the brother tries to help her, she commits suicide leaving him bereft and angry. He becomes obsessed with avenging her death. The only clue he has to that person’s identity is a signal determined by how many times a telephone rings along with briefly sighting her in a night club accompanied by an older man. He slowly gathers more details then sets out for revenge.
The second story (“pain”) involves an impoverished blind mother devoted to a son she hasn’t been in contact with in years. She always thinks the best of him without knowing that he’s turned to a life of crime. When her son returns home with friends, she’s overjoyed until she discovers they’re planning a bank heist. She must then find a way to prevent the heist and save her son. How she goes about it makes for a tense unfolding which leads to a final confrontation and truly bittersweet ending.
The movie was originally intended to have a third story, IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE which is about a young schoolboy who feels compelled to keep a classmate’s secret even though it resulted in the classmate’s brutal death. Making it worse is that his father is a police inspector who is considering resigning because he can’t solve the murder. Time passes and another classmate seems headed for the identical fate. Can the boy prevent her from being killed without breaking his vow of silence?
However, the third story would have put the movie at over two hours which was considered too long for an Argentinian feature of the day and so WAKE, being the longest of the three stories, was released as a separate short film, and is included as one of the special features on this Blu-ray release. All three stories have the look of classic film noir with lots of dark lighting, restless camerawork, and crisp editing. NEVER OPEN THAT DOOR has been fully restored while WAKE is taken from the best surviving material.
This is the fourth in Flicker Alley’s ongoing series of Argentinian film noir following THE BEAST MUST DIE, THE BITTER STEMS, and THE BLACK VAMPIRE. All have been restored with the help of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Film Noir Foundation. Not being subject to the American Production Code, the movies are darker in tone and in their subject material. They aptly show that the look and feel of film noir wasn’t just confined to the United States. While all are worth seeing, DOOR is the finest of the bunch so far.
The Capsule Critic 