A couple of months back, TCM's Noir Alley presented a foreign film that was new to me (and, as far as I know, relatively unknown in the US in general) and that got a restoration and release to DVD/Blu-ray: La bestia debe morir, also known as The Beast Must Die.
The movie opens up at one of those big houses outside the city that rich people owned. The movie itself was made in Argentina, but based on a book by "Nicholas Blake", which is a pseudonym for Cecil Day-Lewis, father of Daniel. The few mentions of place names and some signs imply an English-speaking country, and all the characters have English sounding surnames, but the film's locations don't particularly look American. It's a look I actually liked, since there's a sort of mysterious Anywhere, Any Country vibe to the proceedings.
Anyhow, the master of the house is Jorge Rattery. He's coming home to a family dinner, with his wife Violeta; his stepson; his mom; his sister-in-law; and a couple of other people. He's got some sort of medical condition that requires him to take medicine daily, so just before sitting down to dinner he takes that medicine. However, somebody poisoned the medicine, and Jorge drops dead! The young stepson, Ronnie, takes the vial of medicine and hides it so that the police can't search.
The police come, and pretty much everybody is a suspect; I haven't mentioned Rattery's business partner Carpax yet, who had the rat poison necessary to put in the medicine bottle. But anybody could have surreptitiously gotten access to that bottle. There's only one person who isn't a suspect, because he wasn't at the house at the time of the killing: mystery writer Felix Lane, who left his diary at the house. That diary is found, extremely upsetting Jorge's sister-in-law, the actress Linda Lawson, who was also Felix's girlfriend. But now it's time for the flashback to see how we got to Jorge's death and why that diary is important.
Felix is a widow with a young son Martie who is about the same age as Ronnie. They were living in a small town that looks like an obvious backlot set; here, Felix writes his mystery novels. It's his birthday and he's out of cigarettes. The housekeeper is busy, so Martie, wanting to be grown-up and independent, offers to go to the bodega and get several packs for Dad, this being an era where a kid could do that. However, it's a foggy night, and on the way back from the bodega, Martie is hit and killed, the driver driving off.
The police do an investigation and aren't able to find anything, while Felix is first driven to a deep depression, and then a steely sense of resolve as he vows to find the person who killed Martie and get revenge. If this weren't a movie, we'd all say fat chance of finding the killer, but since we already saw Jorge die in the first reel and it's a movie, we know Felix is going to find the killer.
It's a ridiculous set of coincidences that enables Felix to find Jorge and figure out he killed Martie. Felix is driving, and gets stuck at just the same spot that Jorge did after fleeing from the scene of the accident. To get help, Felix has to go to a farmhouse, and there he finds the lady of the house is a big fan of movie stars, including Linda Lawson, who just happened to be Jorge's passenger at the time of the accident. So Felix goes looking for Linda.
The meet and of course fall in love. Linda has been trying to suppress memories of the accident because Jorge is a thoroughly nasty man. Linda's sister Violeta has remarried to Jorge, and Linda is afraid for Violeta's and Ronnie's safety, which is why she hasn't done anything about reporting Jorge for the accident. Not that Felix has been letting on he knows about the accident. When he's able to get Linda to divulge the identity of the driver, he comes up with a plot to kill Jorge without telling Linda about it, only writing it down in the diary. She convinces Felix to accompany her on a visit to Violeta, and we're getting ever closer to Jorge's death. There are still a few more twists and turns, however....
La bestia debe morir is a really interesting little movie. I said at the beginning that it was made in Argentina, but it has a sort of ethereal quality in part because of giving everybody their English names while none of the characters are recognizably American (or British). In some other movies, notably Purple Noon, the inability to be American causes some problems, but here there's more of a timeless quality to it that works in the movie's benefit.
I hope TCM runs La bestia debe morir> again soon, since it's a thoroughly enjoyable little movie.
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