Los Tallos amargos (The Bitter Stems, 1956) is a bleak and beautifully filmed Argentinian noir named by American Cinematographer in 1999 as one of the best shot movies from 1950-1997. Tracking the downward spiral of an insecure journalist trying to make a quick buck, it is full of murder, deceit and a wildly inventive score by the legendary Astor Piazzolla. It went unseen in the United States until a 2016 restoration initiated by Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation and TCM Noir Alley host, with the help of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Charitable Trust.
Los Tallos amargos originated as a 1954 novel by journalist Adolfo Jasca, which won the prestigious Emecé Literary Prize, before being adapted into an independent feature by screenwriter Sergio Leonardo and director Fernando Ayala in 1956. It was only Ayala’s second film, and he would go on to an influential career as a director and producer, founding the production and distribution company Aries Cinematográfica in 1956.
Carlos Cores plays Alfredo Gaspar, a frustrated Buenos Aires journalist who feels like he’s meant for more than covering the latest neighborhood fire. So when a talky Hungarian bartender named Liudas (Vassili Lambrinos) pitches Gaspar on a get-rich-quick scheme, he is all ears. The two strivers team up on a correspondence school scam, setting up a fake journalism school that is soon raking in money. Liudas claims he is setting up this con in order to raise cash to bring his family over from Europe, starting with his son Jarvis (Pablo Moret). Gaspar, in a fit of selflessness he will come to regret, offers to give Liudas two-thirds of the profits until he has enough. Soon Gaspar suspects that Liudas’ story is a lie to get a bigger split, and his insecurities and paranoia overwhelm him, bursting into his dreams. There is a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-inspired nightmare sequence of familial psychodrama, in which the expressionist set design pits Gaspar’s militaristic dead dad against his even stricter schoolmarmish mother. Instead of going to therapy, Gaspar allows his murderous rage to swallow him whole.
The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks focusing on Gaspar’s deranged and closed-off POV. It is not until we hear Liudas’ side of a conversation that the full force of the film’s tragedy is made clear. Gaspar makes a series of assumptions based on hearsay and half-heard words that are almost entirely drowned out in Piazzolla’s raucous nuevo tango score, an alluring blend of tango, straight-ahead nightclub jazz, and Max Steiner-esque symphonies. The sound design as well as the cinematography keep clarity just outside of Gaspar’s reach. DP Ricardo Younis, reportedly a student of Gregg Toland, isolates Gaspar in pools of blackness to indicate the beginning of a flashback, further emphasizing his totalizing loneliness and despair. Carlos Cores was a major star of the 1940s, but here he gives a remarkably self-abnegating performance, letting his statuesque handsomeness crumple as much as his suit.
Los Tallos amargos won the Silver Condor Award (Premio Cóndor de Plata), Argentina’s equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar, but despite the film’s many accolades, it mostly disappeared from view. That is, until Muller and the Film Noir Foundation had a fortuitous encounter in Argentina. As reported by Raquel Stecher in Out of the Past, Eddie Muller went to Buenos Aires in 2008 following Fernando Martín Peña’s discovery of missing footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). On this trip, Peña showed Muller his private 16mm print of Los Tallos amargos, and after viewing, Muller said, “I will do whatever it takes to raise money to restore this film and to have it finally seen in English-speaking countries.”
Peña was eventually able to track down the film negative, which was moldering in the basement of one of the producers’ family estates, with “weeds growing up from the floor, no air-conditioning whatsoever, the cans completely rusted shut.” Miraculously, the negative was intact, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive was able to complete the restoration, pairing the audio from Peña’s 16mm print with the image from the 35mm negative. It’s a remarkable story of film preservation and an even more remarkable film, a pitch-black noir where desperation is fated to meet bad luck.
