In short: Das Ungeheuer von London-City (1964)

aka The Monster of London City

While certain authorities are beginning to shake their censorious fists, a new hit play about the murders of Jack the Ripper starring Richard Sand (Hansjörg Felmy) as the killer is pleasing 60s London’s public. However, a killer who is supposedly following the modus operandi of Jack the Ripper (and will eventually start sending out mocking letters signed thusly) is beginning to kill his way through the London prostitute population, certainly heating up those calls for censorship.

Is it possible that Sand himself has lost his sense of reality and is committing the murders? He’s acting suspiciously enough, but then, everybody else in the movie is too. I’m sure awfully boring policeman Inspector Dorne (Hans Nielsen) and idiot private eye Teddy Flynn (Peer Schmidt), or perhaps forensic scientist Dr Morely Greely (Dietmar Schönherr) will crack the case eventually.

This non-Edgar Wallace Krimi produced by Artur Brauner that lists Bryan Edgar Wallace as script doctor in its credits (seriously) is as close to the Italian giallo as our homegrown sibling managed to get. Austrian director Edwin Zbonek’s filmography otherwise suggests little of the sense of long, suspenseful stalking sequences and expressionist shadow play he very ably demonstrates here, so I’m not at all sure where the visual artfulness and the very stylish and moody camera work on display throughout Das Ungeheuer are coming from, but I certainly do appreciate it.

As I do the killer's very classic giallo and Krimi killer get-up, the complicated plotting where no upper class character can get away without offering up at least one dark secret to the narrative gods, and the film’s wonderful willingness to dissolve its London of the German imagination into empty stage streets and stark shadows. In its best moments, this is nearly good enough to deserve a descriptor like “phantasmagorical”; in its worst, it’s all a bit talky and melodramatic, though usually still shot rather well.