Posted by Solomon on 11/11/2020, 6:25 pm
Watched this again. It's an Argentina noir, a female in distress story. Cloistered woman answers an ad and soon marries a smooth and handsome fortune hunter. This is not the best of noirs nor the worst. It has its moments. The two leads do a wonderful job carrying the story along. The story is not well edited, leaving us to wonder at times who the characters are that suddenly appear and how they behave. The sole user review on IMDb notes this.
A good thing for me were the excellent English subtitles that I must have gotten somewhere and attached to the film some time ago. One of the plusses of the film is its ambiguity about certain plot points; this keeps us guessing a bit. In the Gaslight vein, there is a bit of turning of the tables, but without the external assistance of a Joseph Cotten character. In a good print, the gloomy river house would show up more to advantage. One can only imagine. The score is adequate only, although fairly abstract and modern in places, not rising to the imaginative level of "El Pendiente".
Actress Zully Moreno transforms from dowdy into a bombshell once she marries, but she's vulnerable while developing or locating her inner feminine wiles and self.
George Rigaud appears in "I Walk Alone" (1947) as "Maurice". He's in "Caídos en el infierno" too. He had a long career with 206 credits, and one can see why in this film. He was able to exude charm and even a degree of compassion and innocence while also conveying something sinister underneath, and he could use his good looks or play them down.
Re: La Trampa (1949)
Posted by Don Malcolm on 11/12/2020, 3:17 pm, in reply to "La Trampa (1949)"
Zully Moreno was the "classy" blonde of Argentine cinema, on the highest rung, though Olga Zubarry (whom Eddie likes to call the "Monroe of Argentina" due to a slight facial resemblance--their careers could not be more different from one another) and Mirtha Legrand were "bigger" divas. Laura Hidalgo was her dark-haired counterpart. (Riding over all of these ladies was Libertad Lamarque, who dominated screens in Argentina in the 30s until a run-in with Juan Peron's actress wife Eva--you may recall her as "Evita"--forced her into exile in Mexico. A similar fate befell another major leading lady of the 30s and 40s, Pepita Serrador.)
Flamboyant stars like Tita Merello (drama queen) and Nini Marshall (comic superstar) were much more accessible than Moreno (the "ice princess"). She married a prominent director, Luis Cesar Amadori, but their careers were always on the edge in Argentina and they wound up making several films elsewhere, including a couple of semi-noirish titles in Mexico, PECADO and MARIA MONTECRISTO. She also made a noirish triangle film with noir-leaning Mexican director Tito Davison, TIERRA BAJA. Both it and Davison are awaiting rediscovery, but his films may be considered too "low-rent" for the folks at Morelia.
George/Georges/Jorge Rigaud was a native Argentinian but his career began in France--he's the Joel McCrea-esque lead in QUATORZE JUILLET (1933) and worked steadily in France until the war, when he returned to Argentina. I WALK ALONE was part of a brief period in the USA when he was associated with Hal Wallis, which came to an abrupt end after that film and Rigaud returned to Argentina, where he continued with a multi-national career that continued into the early 1980s. He even returned to France several times, and gives a winning performance as the crafty millionaire who is besotted with grifter Dany Saval in one of the subplots in Michele Morgan's 60s thriller CONSTANCE AUX ENFERS, which was a big hit at FRENCH 6 a year ago.
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