Night Falls (1952)

Original title: La noche avanza

Jai-alai (google that one, kids) player Marcos (Pedro Armendáriz) is quite the piece of work. Convinced by his past and present successes to be the same kind of Nietzschean superman as his later Brazilian brother in spirit Coffin Joe, he lords his superiority about everyone he encounters in life, pushing men in the shittiest macho ways he can come up with (and he has the imagination to go with it), and seducing women left and right, to then mistreat them to his heart’s content.

He’s getting away with it, too, or rather, he has been getting away with it until he impregnates good bourgeois daughter Sara (Anita Blanch) and drops her in the most underhanded way possible. Turns out he isn’t quite as great as he thinks he is, and even his impressive talent for weaselling out of trouble will not keep him away from what’s coming for him forever.

I tend to be somewhat sceptical about movies whose main goal appears to be showing horrible people being horrible, and then detailing their eventual karmic (or otherwise) punishment, mostly because spending time with assholes isn’t typically my idea of a good time, and I only have a limited degree of sadism inside me to really enjoy watching cruel but just punishments.

However, Roberto Gavaldón’s highly melodramatic noir is a clear exception to that rule. Armendáriz is delightfully hissable a villain, so smug, so full of the kind of shitty pseudo-philosophy you’ll find in today’s manosphere, it does indeed become a joy to witness his eventual fall. Gavaldón never attempts to make the man likeable or give him even the tiniest redeeming quality (unless you believe “is good at sports” to be one, but the director clearly doesn’t). Marcos is simply the living embodiment of what’s worst in all of us, or at least us men, using and abusing his position, the perks his gender provides him with, and other people’s inability to believe anybody could be a scumbag of quite his dimensions.

Even once Marcos gets in trouble, the suspense here isn’t built on seeing him finding increasingly desperate methods to get away, but in the hopes for witnessing his eventual punishment. Though, the film even doesn’t leave him in peace even once he’s dead: the final scene shows a placard with Marcos’s name blown into the dirt on a streetcorner, a dog urinating on it (!), and a garbage collector carrying the whole mess off.

Gavaldón shoots all this in the all the black and white colours of the true noir, where heightened intensity is the norm, and suspense scenes happen to everyone.