Past Misdeeds: Die Blaue Hand (1967)

aka Creature with the Blue Hand

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


(This write-up concerns the original German cut of the movie, and not that abomination some cruel American producer created out of it and random horrible inserts later on.)

Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski), descendant of a formerly rich family, is sentenced to a nice little holiday in the establishment of local shady psychiatrist (so untrustworthy he's even wearing a monocle, for Cthulhu's sake! in the 60s!) Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) for killing the family gardener.

Nobody cares much that Dave has insisted on his innocence in the deed throughout the trial, or that the evidence against him is pretty circumstantial, least of all his "loving" mother Lady Emerson (Ilse Steppat).

Dave seems to have one friend at least, or how else would one explain that his stint in the loony bin is cut short by some shadowy someone giving Dave the key to his cell door and providing our young escapee with a convenient rope ladder? Please applaud the brilliant security measures of Dr. Mangrove's institution here.

Dave legs it to the family mansion, and once there, begins to disguise himself as his conveniently disappearing twin brother Richard. Though Dave might be as innocent as he says, it has now become more difficult to convince the gentlemen of Scotland Yard - in the form of the mandatory Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) and Inspector Craig (Harald Leipnitz) - of it, for his escape has coincided with the death of a nurse by strangling, and the killing of a guard who followed him to the mansion by a black robed guy wearing a glove called "The Blue Hand", an object obviously constructed by a medieval fan of Wolverine (the character, hopefully not the movie).

This being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, the poor guard won't be the last victim of the titular killer before the ridiculously contrived plot is solved, various evil masterminds trying to double-cross each other are caught, and the mandatory lady in peril in form of Dave's sister Myrna (Diana Körner) has been kidnapped, threatened by a rat-and-snake dispenser, and rescued.

If you ask me, a German long suffering under the general dreadfulness and lack of ambition of German genre cinema, the German Krimi, specifically as it presents itself in the Danish Rialto Films' series of Edgar Wallace adaptations, is one of the few bright spots in my country's history of exploitation cinema. At least in the case of a certain group of films of the genre to which Die Blaue Hand quite clearly belongs.

(A short aside: Germans don't apply the word "Krimi" - a short form of "Kriminalfilm"= crime movie - as specifically to the Wallace films and stylistically similar affairs as many English language cult movie fans seem to think. We use the word to describe any kind of crime or mystery story on screen (or on paper), be it by or based on Wallace, Chandler, or the Scandinavian author of the week. I like using the word to only describe the Wallace and Wallace-alike sub-genres, though. Sounds a lot better than Wallace-alike.)

Alfred Vohrer's Die Blaue Hand falls into the beginning of the decadent phase of Rialto Films' Wallace movies, when the films started to transform from their traditional black and white to a more 60s-appropriate colour, and their scripts moved further away from Wallace's novels (no big loss given Wallace's bland plotting, if you ask me) and towards ever increasing self-consciousness. It's also pretty obvious that the films began to become inspired by elements of the early Italian giallo they themselves had helped shaped in one of the classic cases of cult film genres feeding back into each other in what more sceptical people may see as a moebius strip of rip-offs (see also the Spaghetti Western and the Chambara).

To me, none of these changes to the krimi are a bad thing, because the strengths of the Wallace films never were in keeping close to Wallace's writing anyhow, and the turn from more moody black and white to what probably was meant to be pop (as interpreted by directors born before the end of World War I) colour did work out perfectly well for the films.

Although the German directors weren't as consistently style-conscious (or perhaps visually creative, or blessed with genius technicians at their sides) as their giallo counterparts, there are still great aesthetic pleasures hidden away in their films. Die Blaue Hand's Vohrer is probably a more peculiar director than the other important Rialto guy, Harald Reinl. Vohrer's forte was to mix the stylistic tradition of the German melodrama (best developed in form of the "Heimatfilm" of the 50s that spoke to all the most conservative impulses of a painfully conservative post-war Germany, and consequently might make less hardened viewers vomit through their awesome power of hypocrisy), with its stiff overacting taking place in well-composed but curiously lifeless and improbably square visual surroundings, with a very German concept of Britishness as interpreted through the telescope of pulp fiction, and a sense of self-irony very much of the 60s. In Vohrer's movies, styles collide, and stiff theatricality is often suddenly subverted by a wildly cranked zoom objective. It's certainly a thing to behold.

Die Blaue Hand does that part of its job as well as anything by the director, and would be worth a recommendation alone for being lifeless and conservative and lively and pop at once, but the film is also pretty good with other things that make my cult movie fan heart beat faster: thrill to the embarrassing presentation of mental illness (there's surely no better way to get a bit of semi-nudity into your film than to have your policemen watch an "insane" stripper who just can't stop stripping through a peephole)! Be delighted by the most laconic butler outside of the UK, as always in these films played by Albert Bessler or Eddi Arent! Be Awed by fine, stupidly fun pulp trappings like The Blue Hand, the evil psychiatrist, crawling through secret passages, and so on!. If you like this sort of thing (and who doesn't?) there's really no good reason to avoid Die Blaue Hand.


Plus, it has Klaus Kinski kinda-sorta doing a double role, throwing around various patented Kinski stares and ever so slightly making fun of the stiffness of his co-actors without actually having to do much.