No abras nunca esa puerta

Anfang der 1950er Jahre erwarb Carlos Hugo Christensen die Rechte an einer Reihe von Kurzgeschichten von Cornell Woolrich, dessen Stoffe auch Robert Siodmak, Alfred Hitchcock und François Truffaut inspirierten. Neben dem Serienmörderfilm SI MUERO ANTES DE DESPERTAR ging daraus 1952 auch ein B-Picture mit zwei unabhängigen Episoden hervor. Die beiden Geschichten von NO ABRAS NUNCA ESA PUERTA teilen eine Neigung zur tragischen Pointe. Ihre bürgerlichen Figuren sind verwundbar, getrieben von Rachegedanken oder von verzweifelter Verleugnung, wie jene blinde Protagonistin des zweiten Teils, die schließlich den eigenen, kriminellen Sohn verrät und die Dunkelheit zu ihrer Waffe macht. (rw)

Kuratiert von Fernando Peña und Roger Koza.

The film adapts two unrelated stories by William Irish. The first story, ALGUIEN AL TELÉFONO, is an almost abstract mystery that makes us believe we know something that we actually don’t, with the same thing happening to the main male character, played by Ángel Magaña. Christensen extracts the most from a very tight plot, the tortured beauty of Renée Dumas and a payoff that deepens the mystery instead of solving it. The second story (EL PÁJARO CANTOR VUELVE AL HOGAR) begins more or less conventionally, before growing into a work of major suspense due to the fact that one of the main characters is blind and plays a very active role in the plot.

The great German cinematographer Pablo Tabernero (née Peter Paul Weinschenk) did amazing work in this film, particularly in a sequence that works at very narrow limit between what can and can’t be seen. Christensen initially intended to present three of William Irish’s tales in one long feature but the production company decided that the resulting running time would not be ideal for the commercial distribution. So they asked him to cut two different films, with NO ABRAS NUNCA ESA PUERTA as the second one.

Curated by Fernando Peña and Roger Koza..