Past Misdeeds: Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959)

aka Face of the Frog

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 presented with only the most basic re-writes and 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.

For over a year now, a (rather large) gang under the leadership of the mysterious masked villain only known as the Frog (played by himself, if we can believe the credits), has been terrorizing Britain with a series of robberies and break-ins, blackmail, as well as a bit of murder to make things more interesting, always leaving behind the mark of a frog at the places of their crimes. Why it's so difficult to catch the members of a gang in the habit of branding its own with the sign of the Frog in a pretty visible place I don't know.

On the case is Scotland Yard's Inspector Elk (Siegfried Lowitz, who'd later go on to play another smug and rude cop in the long-running - and pretty damn boring - TV police procedural Der Alte, in popularity only second to Derrick), a man of a smugness and rudeness as great as his success at catching the Frog is small. But even the incompetent must get lucky some time, and Elk's time comes when the Frog takes a carnal interest in a certain Ella Bennet (Eva Anthes). The villain's idea of romance is a bit peculiar: suddenly appearing masked in a lady's room at night and declaring that you'll come again to take her with you another night, whether she wants to come or not is - I think - not what Miss Lonelyhearts recommends. I'm not sure what Miss Lonelyhearts says to blackmailing the lady of your heart by pulling her improbably naive brother (Walter Wilz) into a contrived murder affair, but that's The Frog's Way of Romance™, too. Whatever happened to roses and long walks in the park?

The Frog's rather dubious handling of his romantic situation is good news for Elk, though, for it provides the inspector with ample opportunity to gather clues regarding the plans and identity of his enemy.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Elk's not the only one the case. Cocky millionaire amateur detective (and nephew of Elk's boss) Richard Gordon (Joachim "Blackie" Fuchsberger, some time before his career as a popular TV host, or as we Germans say, "Showmaster") and his competent comic relief butler James (Eddi Arent) are inserting themselves into the investigation. Gordon's pretty damn enthusiastic about his hobby, too, at least once he's met Ella; he's also a bit more competent at the whole romance thing than the Frog.

Now, our heroes will only have to find a traitor inside of Scotland Yard (don't trust the thin 'staches and eyebrows), investigate a dubious night club, survive captivity and wait until so many of the film's human red herrings have been killed off that there's only one guy left who can be the Frog.

Watching the very first of Rialto's Edgar Wallace adaptations (this early in the proceedings still keeping comparatively close to Wallace's novel, I am told), it's becomes clear at once why the cinematic Wallace krimis took Germany by storm. Compared to just about anything else the country's cinema put out at the time, Der Frosch is pure pop cinema: a bit lurid (as lurid as you could possibly be in Germany in 1959, really, which isn't that lurid, but certainly also not coy), a bit silly, delightfully pulpy, taking itself not too seriously, yet not walking into the trap certain later Wallace movies would enter where a film takes itself seriously so little it can be read as self-hatred or as an attempt at self-destruction. It's not the sort of film you'd expect coming from German cinema at all, especially not in 1959 when pop cinema as an idea didn't really exist over here and pop culture itself had entered the slow, sad years between 1959 and 1961 when it looked as if pop itself had only been a fad.

Mainly responsible for the film's energetic (and energizing) effect is Harald Reinl's direction. Though they roughly belonged to the same generation of filmmakers who started out in the biz in the 1930s and were therefore pretty damn old for being "pop", Reinl's style is quite different from that of his Wallace adaptation colleague Alfred Vohrer - until now the only krimi director I've talked about here or over at my home base. Where Vohrer likes his acting melodramatic and his direction zooming in the direction of the surreal, Reinl seems to be going for an updated serial effect, using the much better technical and financial state of his production when compared with a serial to achieve a feeling of dynamism and intensity atypical of the usual ponderous German movie. Reinl uses a lot of separate shots for every scene (pretty much the antithesis of all German filmmaking), loves snappy (ditto) and tight editing and is no friend of scenes going on for too long. The editing is especially effective when it comes to the action scenes. As you probably know, neither the 50s nor Germany are usually praised for their action choreography, but (if you can ignore the minor fact that fists don't actually seem to connect with faces in Wallace land) Reinl and his editor Margot Jahn manage to actually make the action sequences exciting through the cinematic wonders of clever framing and speedy cuts.

Reinl's no slouch in the atmosphere department either. There are some fine examples of moody (studio) night shots to be found whenever appropriate, with some stylish uses of high contrast light and shadow play you can describe as noir-ish without having to stretch things too far.


Ironically, all that visual beauty comes from a director whose filmography shows him as a pure work for hire guy who spent his time directing whatever was thrown at him - Wallace krimis, Heimatfilme, unfunny comedies, Karl May adaptations, some Erich von Däniken "documentaries" or even (later in his career) a would-be Roger Corman Poe adaptation. Directors like Reinl never get a fair shot at being taken seriously outside of our cult movie specialist world, as if the qualities of a director were defined by the commercial situation he works in, and not by what we see on screen. This isn't to say that parts of the director's output aren't pure and simple crap - because man, they sure are – but then we should probably not decide the worth of a life's work by looking at someone's worst films.