Good is your enlightened home. Evil is your dark jungle. Only one door separates them; if you cross it, two hands will imprison you in anguish and pain. Never open that door!
So ominously declares the text that opens the 1952 noir thriller “Never Open That Door,” which screens at Woodmere on Tuesday, Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. The foreboding judgment of the title card sets the tone for all that follows. An anthology, this recently restored Argentinian classic spins two crime stories that deliver on the bombastic fatalism of the title card. Shot in stunning, shadow-drenched black and white, and featuring taut, twisting storytelling, “Never Open That Door” is every bit as potent and enthralling as its American noir contemporaries.
Like so many of the great Hollywood noir films, “Never Open That Door” (“No Abras Nunca Esa Puerta” in its original Spanish) has its roots in American hard-boiled crime fiction of the pulps. The film’s two segments are adapted from the short stories of writer Cornell Woolrich (credited in the film under his pseudonym William Irish), perhaps best known for his story “It Had to Be Murder,” which served as the basis for Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” Like the Hitchcock classic, both stories are tense enough to make the stoutest viewer squirm in their seats. “Anguish,” the first of the two stories, concerns the attempts of a wealthy man (Angel Magaña) to disentangle his sister (Renée Dumas) from her gambling debts, only to find that taking justice into his own hands gets them dirtier than he imagined. In the second, “Pain,” a lonely blind woman (Ilde Pirovano) pines for her estranged son Daniel (Roberto Escalada) to return home after years away. So, when Daniel returns to her doorstep with a dying man on his shoulder and a connection to a series of high-profile robberies and murders, her joy is short-lived, and she must find a way to protect herself and her niece (Norma Giménez).
The strength of “Never Open That Door” lies in its economy of storytelling. The first segment clocks in at just 35 minutes while the second is a comparatively expansive 50. Each segment uses that time to efficiently introduce you to its characters and their lives before revealing the stakes they face and closing the walls in around them. That’s not to say these characters are lacking for depth. Pirovano in particular brings heartbreaking fragility and deep wells of strength to Rosa, the blind mother she portrays in the second segment. The film provides its characters with just enough color and detail to invest the viewer in their well-being. And then, it springs its trap. “Never Open That Door” trades in twist endings, and if savvy viewers can see where the story is headed before the characters can, well, that just makes the conclusion all the more dreadful. Rather than a long unraveling like “The Maltese Falcon” or “The Long Goodbye,” the short, punchy stories of “Never Open That Door” play more like an episode of “The Twilight Zone” or the gruesome crime comics of the 1950s that took their inspiration from Woolrich’s writing.
With inky black cinematography that at times recalls classic horror cinema more than noir, and its fatalistic crime-does-not-pay morality, “Never Open That Door” feels more akin to a dark fairy tale or Charles Laughton’s seminal 1955 classic “The Night of the Hunter” than it does to the flinty detective stories film noir usually conjures — yet it richly deserves the designation. “Never Open That Door” holds a mirror up to mid-century American crime fiction and reflects a vision as potent as any of the best Humphrey Bogart films. It’s a film that proved in 1952 what the French critics who coined the name of the genre would come to know a few years later: Good film noir transcends language and nationality.
“Never Open that Door” screens at Woodmere, 9201 Germantown Ave. in Chestnut Hill, on Tuesday, Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. as part of the Chestnut Hill Film Group’s Tuesday Night at the Movies series. The film is presented in Spanish with English subtitles. Light refreshments will be provided. Tuesday Night at the Movie screenings are free to attend, but donations are greatly appreciated.
