Background
Hugo Fregonese was born on 8 April 1908 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Hugo Fregonese was born on 8 April 1908 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Harry Black and Blowing Wild are triangle stories set in exotic parts—the first in India, the second in South America—pressurized in one case by a rogue tiger and in the other by an unruly oil well. Blowing Wild has Fregoneses laconic bleakness at its best: Gary Cooper is visited one night by an old flame, Barbara Stanwyck; in a darkened room, he puts on a desk lamp, directs it first at her face, and then at her legs.
It is a dislocated career, begun in Argentina, the bulk in Hollywood, disappointed by the death of Val Lewton (who produced Apache Drums) and by the failure of Stanley Kramer at Columbia, for whom he made My Six Convicts, and then driven out into Europe. There are dull films—Untamed Frontier is one—but at his best, Fregonese has that smoldering, grudging beauty' that is characteristic of Boetticher and Ulmer—men who clung to Holhwood’s underbelly. Given an opening— such as Jack Balance as Jack the Ripper in Man in the Attic—Fregonese shows all his instinct for sharpness.
In the days when European art houses were welcoming the rather sweaty films of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Hugo Fregonese was hard put to find work. He may not be worthy of Borges, but he was an exponent of American violence: economical, abrupt, a visual narrator able to inflict ordeal on his characters within moments of a film’s start. Black Tuesday and The Raid—both from Sidney Boehm scripts—are intricately organized, the first a true gangster movie, the second about a Confederate attack on a Vermont town.