“The greatest Argentine film”, according to film critic Ángel Faretta, is the story of a man who discovers a prostitute with a face resembling his dead wife’s. Many in Argentina saw it as an early version of Vertigo. It could be that Boileau and Narcejac, the authors of The Living and the Dead (1954), the novel that Hitchcock’s film is based on, had read Bruges-la-Morte, the novel by Georges Rodenbach (1892) adapted into Más allá del olvido (Erich Wolfgang Korngold had already made into an opera, Die Tote Stadt, which was an international success the moment it premiered in 1920). Argentina Sono Film called del Carril to direct after Carlos Schlieper and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson had turned it down.
Del Carril was the acclaimed director of the social problem film Las aguas bajan turbias (1952) and a tango singer who had played Gardel in a 1939 biopic. He was also a fervent Peronist and recorded the party’s official anthem in 1949. When Perón was overthrown, del Carril spent some time in prison, including while this film was being made. The project may have seemed outside of del Carril’s interests, but it instead revealed an unknown side of him, inspiring him to create a unique film as both actor and director. “A late fruition, end and exception of this trend [the adaptation of European literary works in Argentine film in the 1940s], a more decadent, delicate thing than the Belgian Rodenbach could have imagined, […] Hugo del Carril’s most personal film is exceptional in every sense” (Alberto Tabbia). “Made with a Baroque visual style, the story vanishes in the sturm und drang of an Argentine Gothic work” (Guillermo Cabrera Infante).