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.

Past Misdeeds: Der Mann mit dem Glasauge (1969)

aka The Man with the Glass Eye

Scotland Yard’s most boring best (well, at least fifth or sixth best) man Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert, who was always more lively in these films than in anything else he did, but still ends up rather on the somnambulistic side) has quite the case before him and his insufferable assistant Sgt. Pepper (Stefan Behrens) – yes, that’s the sort of joke you’ll have to suffer through in this one – when first a dubious rich man and then the man’s girlfriend are murdered by hands unknown. This being a Rialto Wallace cycle movie, these two murders won’t be the last, and quickly, Perkins is enmeshed in the dealings and murders of a masked glass-eye wearing knife-throwing avenger, a ring of girl traffickers and heroin traders with a particularly abstruse modus operandi (you see, they only traffick dance troupes, and smuggle their drugs in billiard cues). There is the usual horde of suspects and weird hangers-ons/future murder victims in form of figures like a heroin-addicted Lord named Bruce (Fritz Wepper – future assistant to Tappert in all 281 episodes of the painfully boring mystery show Derrick, by the way - doing his best Kinski, which alas is a mediocre Kinski at best), a dancer with a mysterious past (Karin Hübner), the owner of the most disturbing ventriloquist’s dummy ever to sprout a head nearly as large as its ventriloquist (seriously, that thing is soul sucking), a glass eyed bad guy only known as Boss (the wonderfully named Narziß Sokatscheff whom you won’t confuse with Bruce Springsteen) and so on, and so forth.

Der Mann mit dem Glasauge is veteran Wallace adaptation director Alfred Vohrer’s final film in the cycle, and, not surprisingly by film number fourteen for the series for him, it’s far from his best effort (which would either be the stylish Die Toten Augen von London or the insane Im Banne des Unheimlichen).

Obvious first point of criticism is how overboard Vohrer goes with the odious comic relief here, with way too many scenes of Scotland Yard boss Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck) being “funny”, or even worse “humorously obtuse”, bringing the film to a screeching halt whenever he appears – which is too often. And just don’t get me started on Sgt. Pepper (shudder), the connected long-hair jokes (because a guy with a mild Beatles-esque haircut is a hippy to a 55-year old director, and hippies are icky and oh so funny), or Sir Arthur’s brain-dead secretary. I’ve grown somewhat patient with the humour in the Wallace adaptations over the years, found myself even chuckling at the antics of Siegfried Schürenberg or Eddi Arent from time to time, but the second row of comic relief as embodied by von Meyerinck and co is too painful to endure for long even for me.

And of course, the quagmire of comedy here really hurts the film’s impact as the sort of stiff (we are German, after all) pulp crime movie I want from my Wallace adaptations, because it really takes away from the death traps, the curious contraptions and the grotesque flights of fancy of production design and script. There is still some – alright, quite a lot - of that to be found in Der Mann mit dem Glasauge to be sure, but where Vohrer’s better late-series films manage to integrate the pulp elements, the unfunny humour and his personal sense of the grotesque with each other in a way that doesn’t exactly cause them to make sense (because nothing in Wallace adaptations ever does, much) but that treats them as things that belong together and work with one another to produce the particular Vohrer mood of the strange, here every scene seems to stand (or fall) exclusively by itself.

So there are – particular in the film’s second half – still moments of joy to find here, but they never connect into an actual movie. Or, if you have no love for the German Wallace adaptations at all, you might even say they connect even less into an actual movie than usual.

But let’s not continue with the sour grapes, and let me instead list – like the Marquis de Sade with his hobbies I can’t talk about the Wallace adaptations without listing stuff, it seems – some of the film’s inspired and puzzling high points. There is, for one, a surprisingly fun billiard room brawl. If you don’t know about billiards, it seems to be a game exclusively played by people wearing suits in a smoky yet somewhat classy establishment that is of course a front for the heroin trade, a situation perfect to devolve into a brawl between two bunches of beefy guys in excellent late 60s suits, Sgt. Pepper (who knows billiard fu, it turns out), and Horst Tappert, who finally gets to use the little stick he’s been carrying around the whole film for no reason beyond it being the sort of visual detail Vohrer loves so dearly.

While I’m being informative, I also need to enlighten my imaginary frequent readers (hi, Mum! Oh wait, she doesn’t speak English…) concerning the nature of heroin. Heroin, you see, is a white powder addicts carry around in little paper sugar bags, and which they exclusively ingest orally, preferably in public places, or just five seconds before they expect their mother to meet them. What’s shooting up?

I am also – for once - quite happy about the identity of our masked avenger in this particular film, because it goes very much against the deeply conservative grain (they are German, you understand) of these films. Even more peculiar, method and motivations of the avenger even make sense; well, sense for the kind of pulp United Kingdom the Wallace films take place in, where becoming a masked avenger is the thing to do when you’ve been horribly wronged and need to put things right.

Other joyful moments and elements are the pretty colourful and deeply late 60s - as seen through the eyes of middle-aged guys from Germany - set and production design with some really popping colours that would strike many a contemporary director of photography dead of colour shock; the excellent murder of the ventriloquist (of course committed by someone wearing the head of his dummy because it is that disturbing) that for one scene very suddenly suggests a proto-slasher of particular weirdness; and various Vohrer-isms in form of the whole glass eye stuff, objects circling, and a playful approach to close-ups.


However, as I said, to get at these very pleasant moments, one has to drudge through the horrors of multiple comic relief characters and not let oneself be put to sleep by the film’s disconnectedness (rather comparable to the amount of parentheses and digressions you find in this write-up here, curiously enough) so this is probably a film not meant for anyone but the krimi veteran who needs to have seen every single film Vohrer made in the genre whatever the quality. So, me.

Past Misdeeds: Der Fälscher von London (1961)

aka The Forger of London

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  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.

Peter Clifton (Hellmut Lange) and Jane Leith (Karin Dor) are getting married, but the bride at least isn't very happy about it, seeing as she only marries Peter so his money can provide for her uncle, the not very successful postcard painter John Leith (Walter Rilla). Peter for his part should be happier, for he loves Jane madly, but he's surprisingly moody nonetheless, as if several dark secrets were hanging over him and his affairs.

On the couple's (such as it is) wedding reception, some of these secrets begin to come to the fore. Firstly, there's some curious business about a forged five pound note. When Scotland Yard inspector Rouper (Ulrich Beiger) finds it in his heart to go to a frigging wedding reception to question people about a forged five pound note, family doctor and friend Donald Wells (Viktor de Kowa) says he got it from Peter, who of course and quite believably says he knows nothing about it. Still at the same wedding reception, Basil Hale (Robert Graf), an admirer of Jane appears to make a very loud nuisance of himself, insinuating much and achieving little. And because fun comes in threes, next up is a certain Mrs Unterson (Sigrid von Richthofen), who races in to loudly complain that Peter doesn't deserve all his money. By rights, it should belong to her (dead) son, his half brother. Or so says wedding crasher number three.

After the best wedding reception ever is over, the newlyweds go on their honeymoon in a dark and spooky old castle that'll surely lighten everyone's mood. Jane - who doesn't want to sleep with Peter because he "bought" her, by the way, even though it really looks rather more as if she sold herself to him quite purposefully, as neither shotguns nor blackmail were present at the wedding - soon learns more awesome things about her new family life. Turns out Peter fears he has inherited a bit of violent schizophrenia from his dear dead dad. And might be the biggest forger of Britain, known as The Cunning. And might be going around murdering rude people like Hale.

Obviously, once she finds her husband in bloody clothes and with a bloody hammer by his side, Jane decides she suddenly does love her husband. That sudden love is so gigantic, Jane's even willing to hide murder weapons and lie to the police. Speaking of the police, another Yard inspector, Bourke (Siegfried Lowitz), is just as willing as Jane to break the law to protect Peter, for both he and the woman suspect somebody has it in for the young man, and that he is a poor beleaguered innocent.

This early in the Wallace movie cycle, nothing about the movies was as set in stone as it would soon become, so there was still room for a movie to be quite different from those that came before or after it. Der Fälscher is quite a bit more of a "normal" mystery than most of the other Wallace krimis, though also a film quite focused on its melodramatic elements, while the pulp elements are rather underplayed. This doesn't mean the film is totally devoid of your typical Wallace-isms, or in any shape or form interested in being realistic, its feel is just delightfully weird in ways slightly different from other Wallace films.

Sure, the film's comparative lack of two-fistedness, evil orphanages and odious comic relief (well, Eddi Arent pops in for a curious very minor double role, but I always rather liked him) may come as a bit of a shock to the krimi neophyte, especially since the first two of these things are elements of the genre the film's director Harald Reinl usually excels at, but a plot that manages to be at once obvious and ridiculously convoluted and a series of well-paced revelations, semi-revelations and reversals will soon enough distract from that particular shock.

Der Fälscher's major positive surprise for me is the emphasis its script puts on Jane as an actually active character. I suspect the relatively heavy influence of (gothic) melodrama to be the catalyst for this not very Wallace-ian change. The melodrama, after all, is one genre in film history absolutely dominated by its female characters. In a typical Wallace adaptation on the other hand, the female lead is usually there to be threatened and kidnapped, and sure as hell isn't allowed to do anything regarding the solving of the film's core mystery.

On a plot level, the damsel in distress here is really Peter, who may not get kidnapped but is knocked out and confused more often than not, and is utterly unable to help himself in any way. Even though Jane isn't allowed to solve the whole mystery herself - that's what Siegfried Lowitz in an unusually sympathetic and finely ironic performance is there for - she is the audience identification figure of the piece, not given to hysterics, and resolute when she needs to be. Even more surprising is how well Dor - all too often an actress with much beauty but little presence - sells the role. She's still as stiff as usual, but here, her stiffness seems to be there to tell us something about her character, and not because she's totally lacking in personality. If it weren't for a slight subtext of helping one's spouse during a murder investigation seen as a married woman's duty, I'd even call the film's gender politics progressive instead of just progressive for a German film made in 1961. But I'm not complaining.


While Reinl's direction has been more obviously strong in other krimis, he still shows his usual fine, often clever, sense for the blocking of scenes, an eye for the slight gothic touch - especially whenever the plot concentrates on the rather fantastic looking castle and his surroundings -, a hand for pacing that works for this melodramatic pulp mystery as well as it does in the pulp adventure movies most of his other Wallace krimis are, and of course an un-Germanic love for dynamic set-ups in the movie's few action scenes. Add to Reinl's talents some rather beautiful, moody, photography by series mainstay Karl Löb (who is probably as responsible for the actual look of the krimi as any of the various directors he worked with), and a fine semi-jazz soundtrack by Martin Böttcher (who somewhat unfairly always stood in the shadow of the slightly more crazy and original Peter Thomas, even though his scores are generally nearly as good), and you have yourself a Wallace krimi as fine and entertaining as they get.

Past Misdeeds: Der Schwarze Abt (1963)

aka The Black Abbot

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  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.


The new owner of the hunting cabin (whose inside looks more like that of a bungalow to me, but what do I know about hunting cabins) on the estate of Lord Chelford (Dieter Borsche) is knifed in the back by a man dressed up as the legendary Black Abbot. Said Abbot is supposed to protect a mythical gold treasure hidden in the ruins of an abbey on Chelford's estate.

Scotland Yard sends Detective Puddler (Charles Regnier) and his comic relief assistant Horatio (Eddi Arent, of course) to deal with the problem by living in Chelford's estate for a time, which seems eminently reasonable once you've gotten to know Chelford's surroundings.

The Lord himself is clearly on the verge of some sort of breakdown, obsessing over finding the legendary treasure and charming his fiancée Leslie Gine (Grit Boettcher) with talk about "owning her". Leslie, you see, is the sister of Chelford's lawyer Arthur (Harry Wüstenhagen), who - as we will learn - is in the habit of selling his sister, a woman so pliable it's difficult to imagine a better argument for radical feminism, off to the highest bidder to help with his betting debts. Early in the movie, the bookmakers Arthur is indebted to will all turn out to be one single person, Arthur's office manager Fabian Gilder (Werner Peters). That villain will then proceed to blackmail the lawyer into selling his precious sister to him instead of Chelford. Gilder also would very much like to get his hands on the gold treasure and has planted a crook going by the delightful and totally believable nom de plum of Thomas Fortuna (Klaus "KINSKI!" Kinski) as a Butler with Chelford. Gilder too cooperates with Chelford's former secretary Mary Wenner (Eva Ingeborg Schulz). Wenner promises to lead Gilder to the treasure if he only somehow manages to stop the engagement between Chelford and Leslie so that she can have the Lord - and especially his title - for herself.

Having a headache already? Then you won't be pleased to hear of the existence of Dick Alford (Joachim Fuchsberger), Chelford's cousin and financial administrator. Dick is doing his best to protect Chelford from any suspicion the police may have against him, but his loyalties are torn between Chelford and the fact that he is also romantically interested in Leslie - and his interest, Leslie actually reciprocates. But Dick has other secrets too, secrets that may not be quite as innocent; or are they?

Clearly, this volatile mix of interests and shady people can only lead to violence, madness, and KINSKI! skulking through abbey ruins.

Der Schwarze Abt is another one of the half dozen krimis (all adaptations of either Edgar - like this one - or Bryan Edgar Wallace) director Franz Josef Gottlieb made in 1963 and 1964, all of which suggest a talent that doesn't show in anything the man directed before or after. If you told me these six films were made by Gottlieb's secret twin, or a mysterious masked director using his name for equally mysterious reasons, I'd believe you at once. It's a more satisfying, and obviously less boring, explanation than "he had a talent for this sort of film he never used before or after".

In the film at hand, Gottlieb's visual imagination doesn't get quite as bizarre as in the later Das Phantom von Soho, but that's mostly because he seems to have made the surprising choice of mirroring the slow increase of the plot's derangement and complexity (or is it mere complicatedness?) in his visuals. So the film starts off slowly, with a lot of scenes of nasty people being nasty to each other that are shot flatly, staged simply, and are lit too brightly for my tastes in black and white films. But the more the plot increases in bizarrery and density, the stranger Gottlieb's approach to the framing and staging of scenes becomes; the brightness is becoming less and less bright, the fog more artificial and the ruins ever more gothic and picturesque. A dialogue scene that would have been filmed in a very standard manner in the film's early parts is now shot from behind the swinging pendulum of a clock, and Richard Angst's camera becomes increasingly mobile. Despite their general visual superiority over other German post-war films (seeing as most German post-war films were absolutely allergic to anything that smelled of visual interest or elegance), this sort of ambitious set-up is uncommon even for the Wallace films, rather pointing towards the giallo, so I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear it were explicitly Gottlieb's films rather than those of his genre colleagues Reinl or Vohrer which influenced that genre visually.


Der Schwarze Abt is very proto-gialloesque in other aspects too, with its concentration on nasty people being nasty to each other, a plot that's even more complicated than usual for the krimi, and its relegating of the titular masked evil-doer to more of a normal murderer than the masked pulp super-villain of many of the other Wallace krimis. Often, the less pulpy Wallace adaptations are the less interesting to me too, but that's only because many of the lesser films of the cycle seem to relegate the villains to the side lines only because they seem ashamed of those villains' lurid pulpiness, exactly the part I find most enjoyable about them. Der Schwarze Abt just knows other places where it can also find that pulp feeling, namely in headache-inducing plot convolutions and some very well done melodramatics, and so decides to provide all the luridness and excitement its audience could ever wish for through them.

Past Misdeeds: Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor (1963)

aka The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle

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  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.


Former colonial bureaucrat Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau) has found a pretty sweet set-up for himself. He's soon to be knighted for his crimes against humanity/deeds for the British Empire, and spends his life sponging off the money belonging to his niece Claridge Dorsett (the inevitable Karin Dor) which he is uses to rent most of the castle of a certain Lord Blackmoor (Walter Giller). Oh, and he also has an oven full of stolen raw diamonds he's slowly selling off to the - of course - shady bar owner Tavish (Hans Nielsen). Because Clark's lazy, he has hired on ex-con diamond cutter Anthony (Dieter Eppler as Klaus Kinski) as pretend butler, so that everything needed for the illegal diamond trade is happening in house, or rather in castle.

Alas, all good things have to come to an end, and so Clark soon enough finds himself confronted with various problems, most of them connected to his dark past (so it's all his own fault). First and foremost, a masked man who knows quite a lot about Clark's past wants him to hand over the diamonds, and kills whoever gets in his way. That guy, let's call him "The Strangler", strangles his victims and then cuts an "M" into their foreheads before he decapitates them for extra fun and games. Then there's the fact that Tavish, the shady lawyer Tromby (Richard Häussler) and barmaid Judy (Ingmar Zeisberg) - in varying configurations - would very much like to acquire some of Clark's diamonds without having to pay for them. Oh, and did I mention Claridge's colleague Mike (Hans Reiser) and Lord Blackwood are also acting quite suspiciously? Or that Anthony's raving mad, wants to make sweet sweet love to the diamonds, and would prefer to make Clark rich by killing Claridge instead of seeing his boss sell his precioussss?

Fortunately for the blandly innocent Claridge, Scotland Yard sends its most wooden inspector, Jeff Mitchell (Harry "I'm so emotionless, I'm two pieces of wood" Riebauer) to romance her painfully somehow solve the strangler cases.

Der Würger is yet another of those non-Edgar Wallace krimis that are doing their best to emulate the successful formula of the Rialto movies; that's certainly easier to do when you have, like krimi veteran director Harald Reinl does here, a Bryan Edgar Wallace novel to adapt. Edgar Wallace's son did, after all, make a career out of emulating his father and selling his surname to the highest bidder (that frequently being German producer impresario Artur "Atze" Brauner, who is as close to one of the eccentric producer impresarios of the US and the UK as we Germans ever got), so the shoe fits perfectly well.

Of course, with the sort of movies I generally champion, keeping as close to a successful formula as possible is not necessarily a bad thing as long as one knows what to do with it. Reinl (and scriptwriters Ladislas Fodor and Gustav Kampendonk, both men of excellent names, interesting filmographies, and a talent for writing absurdly confusing scripts) is as good at producing excellent, low budgeted entertainment out of a formula as one can be. Whenever I praise one of Reinl's krimis, I mention his highly mobile camera, his talent for serial-like action sequences and the noir-like mood of the slower scenes (often also thanks to cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke), and these three elements are again what turn Der Würger into a pretty great time.

Sure, the action isn't quite as good and frequent as in some of Reinl's higher budgeted Rialto productions, but what is there of it is as exciting as action in German movies of this period (or, frankly, any period, for German director almost always just suck at this sort of thing) gets, showing off some nicely creative touches.

The art direction also isn't quite up to the Rialto standards; fake Britain is not as playfully fake as it sometimes gets, nor does the film show quite the absurd imagination of its big predecessors. There's your standard castle, there's fog, there's a boring bar, and for most of the film's running time, that's perfectly enough to put me in the not-Britain of the krimis.

The film's other big flaw is clearly the acting. While German movies of this period always tend to the stiff and slightly melodramatic, most of the performances here are just the decided bit stiffer than usual (that might vary with the dubbed versions, of course); the performances aren't horrible, they're just not as good as the could be. There are two exceptions to that in the cast: Riebauer who plays exactly the same character Heinz Drache or Joachim Fuchsberger usually played lacks so heavily in charisma I have a hard time understanding why anybody would want to cast him as anything, not to speak of as the male lead, while Dietler Eppler may not be a Klaus Kinski, but sure as hell does his utmost to channel the great actor's spirit by ranting, raving and making bug eyes at Karin Dor, something I do heartily approve of.

I also do approve of the production's peculiar choice of soundtrack. The krimis always had a tendency to involve some of the better German film composers like Martin Böttcher and the godly Peter Thomas, but Der Würger goes one step further by (like a few other films did) employing the pioneer of electronic music Oskar Sala, co-inventor of the Trautonium and all-around eccentric musical genius. His weird, abstract electronic score probably isn't what one would expect to hear in a piece of pulpy entertainment like this (some of Sala's musical decisions seem somewhat perverse) but it's often exactly what the film needs to feel more unique than it actually is. Sala's music even turns what may be the most boring bar in the krimi genre into a place of weirdness and (slight) wonder.


Now, even though I've been pretty critical about nearly every part of the movie, I do like Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor quite a bit, even ignoring Sala's and Eppler's contributions. The film may not be quite up to the standards of the best of the Rialto Wallace krimis, but those films are as good as this genre gets; Der Würger may not be quite as excellent, yet it's still an all-around fun film despite all of its flaws.

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.

Past Misdeeds: Der Todesrächer von Soho (1972)

aka The Corpse Packs His Bags

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.

A murderer with a very peculiar modus operandi haunts London. Concentrating on people visiting the fair city, he first packs his victims' bags, then kills them with an incredibly precise knife throw. As you do.

Inspector Ruppert Redford (Fred Williams) - oh, the hilarity! - of Scotland Yard has quite a bit of trouble solving the case. I'm sure his trouble has nothing at all to do with him being a typical early 70s smartass playboy who just loves to let civilians do his job for him, like the (weirdly competent, obviously odious) comic relief photographer Andy Pickwick (Luis Morris) or his personal friend, the crime writer Charles Barton (Horst Tappert).

To be fair to Redford, one has to admit the case is rather complicated, seeing as it not only involves the strange murders, but also a shady doctor (Siegfried Schürenberg) with more than just one secret, his lovely assistant (Elisa Montés) with another secret all her own, a drug ring peddling a drug thrice as potent as heroin, various bombings, one or more revenge plots, and Barton's secret. Not unlike Redford (who will solve his case by going where Pickwick tells him to, and being obnoxious), I lost track of the plot about halfway through the movie, and never was quite sure what was going on in some of the plot lines, so it's difficult to blame him.

Say what you will about German producer impresario Artur "Atze" Brauner's attempts at jumping on the successful Edgar Wallace adaptation wagon by making a contract with Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace that allowed him to use the younger Wallace's name and the often very fine titles of the man's books and make completely unrelated films out of them, but the man did show good taste when it came to the international co-operations late in his Wallace Junior cycle. After having co-produced Argento's Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Brauner hired beloved auteur Jess Franco for his next Bryan Wallace movie, Brauner's second version of Wallace's Death Packs A Suitcase.

Now, I have gone on record saying that I generally prefer Franco's more personal films - at least when we're talking about his work of the 60s and 70s - to his attempts at making more conventional genre movies, but Der Todesrächer von Soho (which translates as "the death-avenger of Soho", and no, the word "Todesrächer" does exist in German as little as "death-avenger" does in English - it's just a lovely case of the sort of random composite noun the German language loves so dearly) turns out to be an exception to the rule, and may in fact be one of my personal favourites among Franco's films. It's probably because Franco might not have been allowed to indulge in his erotic obsessions as heavily as his fans are used to - well, beyond a very short nightclub sequence and a lot of women wearing boots, anyway - but does indulge heavily in his love of pulp and a visual and narrative style that have come down through the serials (on the visual side of course combined with the man's usual tics and enthusiasms).

While Der Todesrächer doesn't work at all as a straight pulpy narrative (what with it having a plot so byzantine my first viewing didn't even leave me with an understanding of the knife-thrower's motives, even though I guessed his identity without much trouble with his first appearance on screen), it's a virtual feast of classic pulp, serial, and krimi clichés as seen through the slightly skewed but loving perspective of Franco. The whole film is basically Franco shooting classic poses of the genres he's working in from his favourite weird perspectives and through glass tables while a pretty hip soundtrack by Rolf Kühn (with some contributions by Franco himself, apparently) plays, pretty obviously having a lot of fun with it and for once not even trying to achieve transcendence through boredom. In fact (and genre-appropriately), Der Todesrächer is as fast-paced and sprightly as a Franco movie gets, with nary a minute where nothing exciting or at least interesting is happening on screen, making this one a Franco movie that's much easier to appreciate for the amateur than his more self-indulgent films. How could I not appreciate Franco having fun in this way?

As much as I love the director, I usually do not use the word "exciting" to describe any of his films, but Der Todesrächer von Soho is an exception to that rule too, working as a timely reminder that Franco could be versatile if a given project interested him enough.


German viewers will probably have another reason to look fondly, or even with mild astonishment, at the film, for its use of Horst Tappert is quite an eye-opener. Here in Germany, Tappert is primarily known today as the star of the long-running (I thought about eighty years, Internet sources speak of only twenty-four) cop show Derrick. The show's complete run of 281 episodes was written by Herbert Reinecker whom you also might know as one of the core writers of Rialto Film's Edgar Wallace cycle (and yes, Tappert was in some of those too, and quite lively at that). Unfortunately, Reinecker's attempts at a more psychological crime show only resulted in a show as visually dead, emotionally and intellectually dull, and politically conservative as anything I'd care - or rather not care - to imagine, and drove Tappert to performances that would be cruel to call "wooden", for even pieces of wood have feelings that can be hurt. Having grown up with Derrick, and somewhat forgotten Tappert's part in the earlier Wallace movies, it came as a real shock to watch the actor here, about two years before he started on the show that was to make/end him, smiling, acting, even over-acting, and possessing an actual physical presence like, well, an actual human being, outplaying the film's cop character with effortless charisma. It's quite a thing to behold, though not enough for me to ever want to revisit Derrick.

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.

Der Teppich des Grauens (1962)

aka The Carpet of Horror

A mysterious mastermind and his gang have returned from a merry time of evil-doing in India (which must still be a British colony in this film’s version of 1962, or at least very much sounds as if its were) to continue their work in London. However, the gang’s professional success is threatened by a pack of documents that details the membership of their little group and discloses the otherwise identity of our mastermind, which is unknown to anyone but Henchman #1. Obviously, not only the side of the Law is interested in these documents, so soon there’s a bit of a thinning out of the ranks of evil necessary. The mastermind – who really could have used some sort of nom de plume like The Monitor or something comparably Marvel silver age in tone – doesn’t just shoot his enemies. Instead, he throws cute little gas balls with a mysterious Indian poison onto the clean carpets of people, not just killing but also producing the film’s ever so slightly exaggerated title by MAKING TINY STAINS ON THE CARPET! The Horror!

While the police are shuffling their feet, amateur sleuth Harry Raffold/Raffles – depending on whether you believe what the end titles say or what the German parts of the cast actually say - (Joachim Fuchsberger) and his black comic relief butler Sam (Lorenzo Robledo) – who is as painful to watch as you imagine – are on the case too. When he’s not punching out bad guys, sneaking around, or following mysterious hints into the luxury bed and breakfast of one Mabel Hughes – whose name our dear early 60s Germans inevitably and rather hilariously pronounce as “Mabel Huge” –, he finds the time to romance the niece (Karin Dor, as boring and kidnap-prone as ever) of a dead gang member.

Because the Edgar Wallace rights were in the velvet grasp of Rialto, other companies, not the least among them Artur Brauner’s Constantin Film who were also distributing the Wallace films for Rialto, were buying up whatever vaguely comparable other writers’ books they could to then ignore for their scripts, to create their own Rialto style krimis. The directors, the actors and various crew members of the Rialto films were up for grabs too (a Fuchsberger’s got to eat, after all), so there’s a more than respectable number of non-Wallace krimis to go around. This one is based on a novel by Louis Weinert-Wilton, directed by rather important early Rialto director Harald Reinl, features Wallace mainstays Fuchsberger and (alas) Dor, but surprises by filling out the rest of the cast with Italian and Spanish actors. This is a German/Italian/Spanish co-production (with Eugenio Martín as one of the co-writers!), after all, and while you certainly don’t see much of a difference in style – this looks and feels like your typical Reinl Wallace – the krimi world really must have needed a horrible black “comic relief” guy from Spain replacing Eddi Arent.

Otherwise, this is a solid example of middle-of-the-road krimi filmmaking, with not quite as much direct insanity as some of the Wallace films offered, too few bowler hats (what is this, the real UK?), and alas way too much of the Fuchsberger/Dor romance stuff that as usual with this combination ranks among the least passionate romance subplots imaginable. I blame Dor, of course, who might have been very pretty but lacked any ability to project emotions, at least at this point and place in time.

However – and fortunately – most of the film consists of Reinl’s typically enthusiastic nearly-serial-style but lacking the intensity action, so many very mysterious side characters (of mystery!), stupid deaths, and a plot that’s much more complicated than it has any right to be are the main concern of the day. Add to this fine, moody photography by Godofredo Pacheco, and you have a fun little 90 minutes of solid and dependable krimi.

Zimmer 13 (1964)

aka Room 13

Evil mastermind Joe Legge (Richard Häussler) returns to his native London with plans for a Great Train Robbery. Because of a mysterious shared past he is able to blackmail pillar of society Sir Marney (Walter Rilla) into providing a hiding place for the loot once the deed will be done. Marney isn’t happy at all with this and hires two-fisted private eye Johnny Gray (Joachim Fuchsberger) to take care of business. At the same time, a black-gloved killer is slitting female throats with a razor that just might belong to Sir Marney.

Gray will need to hit various people in the face, romance Sir Marney’s daughter Denise (Karin Dor), and pal around with comic relief crime scene forensic Dr Higgins (Eddi Arent) to get behind what’s really going on. Gray isn’t helped by the police investigation into the matter being pursued by Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) himself, nor the fact that his client quickly decides hiring him was a very bad idea.

If you’re among those people who are understandably a bit sceptical about the influence the German krimi had on the Italian giallo (before the giallo started to influence the krimi right back), watching Zimmer 13 will probably clear up all doubts, for its side plot about the razor killer – including the identity of the killer and the explanation for their madness - is pretty much exactly what you’d get a few years later from the Italians, just not as stylishly and sleazily done here, and unfortunately made by people who really rather seem to prefer the train robbery business. Still, the influence is obvious.

Apart from the influence game, Harald Reinl’s film is one of the lesser known Rialto Wallace films, probably because it’s another one of the cycle’s films that very much is a thing all its own instead of a repetition of the best beloved elements of half of the other films, with no masked pulp mastermind hiding in an bizarre lair (Legge’s really just a clever criminal, and working from a nightclub), no curious murder methods, and not even a proper threatened heiress. The resulting film still goes for a pulp/serial type of enthusiasm (which is much preferable to the few attempts to make a “realistic” Wallace film in the Rialto cycle, because those turned all out rather awful and pretty darn boring), but where the core Wallace films are very much weird crime pulpy goodness, Zimmer 13 is more Gangbusters than the Shadow.

This certainly might be a problem in a film that doesn’t actually deliver on the required amount of fisticuffs, car chases, shoot-outs and train robberies. Fortunately, it’s this slightly more straight stuff Harald Reinl was best at, so Fuchsberger and company find themselves in a film much faster and rather less talky than usual in Germany, with seldom more than two scenes going by before some sort of outward excitement happens. Even better, the action is as good as a German filmmaker of the time could provide, so even as a hardcore fan of mysterious people in masks, I found myself rather too entertained by the stuff on screen to complain about the lack of Blue Archers or Hogs with Masks.

I found myself also rather pleased with the way the proto-giallo subplot went, even somewhat subverting the way basically every other Rialto Wallace film ends. Add to that a bit of the cycle-mandated off-beat weirdness like Eddi Arent’s (whose character is once again even doing something beyond being funny or “funny”) sexual relationship to a manikin, a Peter Thomas score that sounds more peculiar the closer you listen, an adorable strip tease (though one Alfred Vohrer would have done more with) and the expected professionalism in front of and behind the camera, and you’ll find me enjoying myself quite a bit with this one.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,harald reinl,joachim fuchsberger,karin dor,richard häussler,walter rilla,siegfried schürenberg,eddi arent

On ExB: Der Mann mit dem Glasauge (1969)

They can’t all be hits, and so Alfred Vohrer’s final Edgar Wallace adaptation isn’t exactly his best work.
Yet, despite some major flaws, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the film, as you will see when you click on through to the sugar-ingesting Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,alfred vohrer,horst tappert,karin hübner,fritz wepper,stefan behrens

Three Films Make A Post: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT...FOREVER.

The Fighting O’Flynn (1949): I suspect Arthur Pierson’s swashbuckler featuring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as former Irish mercenary protecting Ireland (and the United Kingdom) from a Napoleonic plot, mostly doing so to woo Helena Carter, won’t be on anybody’s list of favourite swashbucklers, or even favourite swashbucklers with Fairbanks. It’s a bit slight even for a genre that doesn’t usually go for too much depth anyway, with nary a moment that actually feels dangerous for our hero and a tone that comes down slightly too much on the comedic side of the genre, undermining the melodrama and romance a little. The film is completely fluffy good fun, though, with Fairbanks giving an enthusiastic cliché Irishman that might even count as a racist stereotype, the plot zipping alone nicely, and boredom a faint memory while watching. So even though there’s little I’d call actually memorable about the film, it’s a very nice way to spend a lazy, too warm winter evening.

Der Fluch der gelben Schlange (1963): I probably should be all over Franz Joseph Gottlieb’s very pulpy Rialto Edgar Wallace krimi because of its pulpiness but it’s rather difficult to appreciate a film this unrelentingly racist. I know, it’s trying to shape itself after the Fu Manchu films and other Yellow Peril stuff but in a film made in 1963, this sort of thing just leaves a very bad aftertaste in the mouth particularly because the film doesn’t just use unexamined racist tropes like a lot of comparable material does, but seems really enthusiastic about its racial politics. That’s not much of a surprise in a German film, really, given the kind of racist wonderland Germany still is even 50 years later, with your typical German bourgeois losing all of the liberality he pretends to be so proud of when confronted with anybody who isn’t white, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be able (or willing) to enjoy it. It doesn’t help that Evil Eurasian™ Pinkas Braun’s yellowface is quite this egregiously bad, making even Christopher Lee’s version of Fu Manchu look authentic, that our heroine is a wet blanket even for a Wallace film, nor that our supposed hero Joachim Fuchsberger is as rude as he is racist. It’s all just so very unpleasant I really didn’t even found myself wanting to overlook the bullshit watching it.

Gallows Hill aka The Damned (2013): Victor García’s “stranded in an old house with a possessive witch” movie (that’s a sub-genre, right?) is perfectly fine entertainment for the 90 minutes or so it goes on. The acting’s fine all around, García knows how to pace this sort of thing, and the film does some neat things with the bilingual nature of some of its characters. Despite these virtues, I can’t say the film really grabbed me. The nature of its central evil is just a bit too played out right now, and the additional twist of a possessor who always hops into the body of the person who killed it doesn’t sit right with me, and feels more like a way to crank up the drama in easy ways than something that fits the monster’s background organically. I was also rather miffed by the film’s very clichéd hymns on family love even when it leads to Very Bad Things, and by the fact that the first act doesn’t do much work to actually prepare later character developments. It must have sounded like a good idea to have a monster that knows everyone’s dirty secrets, but it’s a wasted idea if a film never prepares these secrets but springs them on the audience with a “we needed a shocking plot twist here, so magic” gesture.

This doesn’t make Gallows Hill a bad film as much as one that wastes too many opportunities to be a great one.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,in short,adventure,romance,krimi,horror,douglas fairbanks jr.,helena carter,franz joseph gottlieb,joachim fuchsberger,pinkas braun,victor garcía,sophia myles

Die Tote aus der Themse (1971)

aka Angels of Terror

Royal Opera Ballet ballerina Myrna Ferguson (Lyvia Bauer) has – like some of her colleagues – worked as a drug mule for a not very mysterious trio of drug lords, but she’s now helping Scotland Yard in form of the intrepid Inspector Craig (Hansjörg Felmy) keeping London heroin free by betraying her former friends.

Not surprisingly, particularly since Scotland Yard doesn’t seem to know about the concept of protective custody, Myrna is soon shot dead in a hotel room. In a curious development Myrna’s body disappears before Craig and co. can take a look at it. The very next morning, Myrna’s sister Danny (Uschi Glas) arrives in London from her Australian home – the place where all Edgar Wallace characters who aren’t from London seem to arrive from – for a vacation with her sister.

On learning about her sister’s death, Danny quickly develops ambitions on doing some amateur detective work. However, she really doesn’t seem to be cut out for the job, seeing how prone to being kidnapped and threatened, and in need of Inspector Craig’s assistance she is. Well, she and Craig have a lot in common, really, particularly their lack of talent in the realm of detection. So it is rather nice of a mysterious black gloved figure to shoot various witnesses as well as the heads of the heroin ring quite dead, otherwise, this case would never progress.

At the beginning of the 70s, the Rialto Wallace adaptations were in a bit of an identity crisis: on one hand, Alfred Vohrer’s contributions had become increasingly self-referential and ironic, an approach that works perfectly looked at from today, but must have felt highly unusual for the contemporary German audience, and if there’s one thing that’s archetypically German, it’s to treat the unusual as suspect. On the other hand, the other series directors were attempting to update or change the formula in other ways.

Routine German genre film director (and soon to be TV specialist, the poor man) Harald Philipp’s Die Tote aus der Themse for example tries to unify traditional Wallace film values with visual and stylistic elements taken from the Italian giallos that had artistically and commercially overtaken the krimi by miles at this point, as well as a very German approach to luridness – which is to say a quaint, harmless and a bit lamely conservative approach that I can’t imagine shocking anyone in 1971. At least in the last regard, the film reminds me a bit of 70s Hammer attempts of pretending to be hip.

The traditional Wallace values are represented by series mainstays Siegfried “Sir John” Schürenberg, Werner “I’m a bad guy” Peters and Harry “no idea why he was in so many of these things” Riebauer, and Uschi “hey, at least I’m allowed to do more than Karin Dor” Glas, some mild mysterious villain aspects to the set-up of the heroin dealers, and some utterly bizarre business about the drug smuggling ways of ballerinas. These rub against the film’s more modernist tendencies in curious ways, as if your grandfather suddenly started popping the drug of the week. It’s a very strange mixture of the old-fashioned (by 1971) with approximations of the modern (of 1971) that can only result in an uneven film.

Fortunately, it also results in quite an interesting film, or at least in one where you never really know which of its conflicting instincts it is going to follow in the next scene. To me, this sort of weird and slightly broken thing is endlessly fascinating.

It becomes even more so because Philipp and Rialto Wallace main director of photography Karl Löb are doing some rather good giallo imitations throughout the film, giving it a visual unity the script never reaches. So watch out for people dwarfed by bottles of alcohol (though not J&B, unfortunately), mildly meaningful use of colour that pops out in a way that’ll frighten the blue and teal blues away (Shaw Brothers coloured blood!) and a camera that’s generally mobile and moves in interesting ways. In this context, I at least have to give a friendly nod to Peter Thomas’s score that sees the great man of German weirdo soundtracks going full-on Morricone.

Last but not least, I couldn’t help but enjoy the film’s utterly hideous interior decorations, things so much of their time I’m a bit surprised I’m actually allowed to look at them in this sainted year of perfect taste.

All this doesn’t really add up to anything I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t already seen a dozen or so other Wallace movies, but once you’re through the best part of the canon, a peculiar little number like this is rather nice. And if you enjoy the juxtaposition of things that just don’t belong together you just might like it, too.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,harald philipp,uschi glas,hansjörg felmy,werner peters,harry riebauer,vadim glowna,siegfried schürenberg

In short: Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee (1962)

aka Secret of the Red Orchid

In a development that’s enough to make one’s bowler rotate, two rival American blackmail gangs, or in one case what’s left of one, make their way to the shores of London and start their brutal ways there. Scotland Yard is shocked, because clearly, before the Americans came, there was no violent crime, and certainly no machine gun murders, in peaceful straight-laced Great Rialto Britain.

Inspector Weston (Adrian “Boring” Hoven) is on the case, though, and seeks the occasional help of FBI man Captain (look, I didn’t write the script) Allerman (Christopher “The American” Lee), who helps out as much as the budget allows. Hilarity in form of murder ensues.

As much as I agree with the early Rialto Wallace adaptation cycle’s attempt to not deliver films completely to one formula, it’s difficult to ignore most of the films that were really mixing up things just ended up like Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee, which is to say, not very good.

Part of this particular film’s problems surely is Helmut Ashley’s technically competent but stylistically uninvolving direction that recommended the man for the career in indifferent German TV direction jobs he took up soon after. Where Rialto Wallace core directors Reinl and Vohrer (both later TV victims themselves) always demonstrated the kind of style and personality that effortlessly turns silliness and distractible scripts into assets, Ashley’s attempts at something comparable feel much more like a series of tonally disparate scenes, following a plot nobody involved actually cared about. Even the identity of the evil mastermind – as much as the film even has one – is obvious even to the dumb very early on, making a lot of the plot’s contortions look like pointless ways to prolong the inevitable.

Das Rätsel is not horrible, though. Apart from the film’s basic competence, there are some actually fun moments hidden behind the indifference. At least one third of Eddi Arent’s humorous shenanigans are actually funny, Kinski (playing a gangster called “Pretty Steve”, if you can believe it) seems in a particularly good mood, the Peter Thomas soundtrack is groovy before groovy was invented, a pre-Italian exploitation movie Marisa Mell demonstrates how much better her acting got a few years later, and Christopher Lee’s German is pretty fine. Of course, Lee also seems bored, and Adrian Hoven wins the no-prize of “dullest Wallace adaptation Inspector” but then you can’t win all the time, or so I’m told.

I have to admit, I would have hoped a film adding fake-Americans to the bizarre fake-England of the Rialto Wallace films would be rather more exciting but then I didn’t expect the fake-Americans to be this less interesting. So it really is true you can’t win them all.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,krimi,in short,helmut ashley,adrian hoven,christopher lee,marisa mell,klaus kinski,eddi arent

Die Tür mit den 7 Schlössern (1962)

aka The Door with 7 Locks

When safe cracker Pheeny (Klaus Kinski) comes to Inspector Dick Martin (Heinz Drache) of Scotland Yard to tell him a curious story about some people bringing him to a secret area to open a strange door with seven locks, Martin doesn’t really know what to think, and mostly shrugs the whole thing off. When he finds Pheeny dead in his cupboard, he’s sure something is going on.

It doesn’t take long until Martin and his intrepid assistant Holms (Eddi Arent) suspect Pheeny’s mysterious door is connected with the first two in what will soon become quite a series of murders, whose victims both carried two very similar keys around. A bit later, Martin encounters the proverbial unsuspecting young heiress in danger (Sabine Sesselmann), and finds himself wading through a lot of suspicious people, like mad scientist Antonio Staletti (Pinkas Braun), owner of a musical chair Betram Cody (Werner Peters) and his domineering and quite evil wife Emely (Gisela Uhlen), a frightening brute (Ady Berber), and so on, and so forth.

Die Tür mit den 7 Schlössern is only the second Rialto Edgar Wallace adaptation directed by series mainstay Alfred Vohrer. It doesn’t indulge quite as intensely in the director’s visual tics and obsessions, so there aren’t as many shots of peeping or enlarged eyes as usual (though Staletti has some very fine glasses), and the self-references and irony aren’t coming quite as thick and fast; probably because there just weren’t enough Wallace films made by Rialto to have finalized a house style to be self-ironic about.

There is still a lot going on that is very typical of Vohrer’s krimis, though, like the often creative, generally eccentric framing and blocking of shots and scenes, the director’s – and probably director of photography Kurt Löb’s – use of deep focus, and visual dynamics that emphasize the more grotesque aspects of any given scene and set, establishing early and often that the UK the film takes place in is a dream made out of cheap thriller novels and every cliché about the country Germans of the time probably not really believed in, yet still fancied quite a bit. At this point in the cycle, Vohrer operated with true verve, and while this is very close to the platonic archetype of what the Rialto Wallace formula would become, the resulting film feels fresh and lively, and as fun as these things come.

I was a bit surprised by the important role of the film’s mad scientist as played with great, sweaty enthusiasm by Pinkas Braun, or rather, I was surprised by the degree of mad science the Die Tür, quite atypical for the Wallace films, indulged in, with Staletti having already created his own mentally disabled brute and planning on continuing his good work by transplanting the head of a human onto an ape body (great shoddy ape costumes there, by the way), so that the geniuses of humanity can live on eternally, complete with as clear of an echo of certain Nazi “science” ideas as German pop cinema dared use at the time. As they say, SCIENCE! Staletti further recommends himself by taking the time to indulge in a little slide show presentation to inform the film’s heroine of a two-headed dog supposedly created by Pavlov, and gloating so intensely said heroine has ample time to slink away from him.

The film takes a bit of time to reach these heights of pulp nonsense (there’s, for example, also a gun hidden in an arm prosthesis to delight you if you like that sort of thing, and why wouldn’t you?). In fact, at first Die Tür seems a bit harmless and tepid. This is, however, Vohrer taking a run-up so he can then go as full out crazy as anything you’ll find in the cycle, with nary a second of the film’s latter half going by that does not contain a neat visual gag, or an absurd idea presented with the greatest matter-of-fact-ness. It’s a joy to watch, and, I can’t help but suspect after the resulting film, it looks as it was a bit of a joy to make too.

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In short: Das Gasthaus an der Themse (1962)

aka The Inn on the River

A smuggling mastermind called The Shark perturbs the London police. His hobbies are harpooning people, diving through the London sewer system, and being quite mysterious.

London’s River Police has put their best man (?) on the case, as well as young, energetic Inspector Wade (Joachim Fuchsberger), who is so good at pretending to be competent while always coming too late to catch his man, even Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) kind of likes him. Wade concentrates his investigation on the Mekka, the shady Thames-bordering inn of Nelly Oaks (Elisabeth Flickenschildt). Though he can’t prove anything, Wade feels sure she is in league with the Shark. Plus, Wade has taken quite a shine to Oaks’s underage (but just barely) niece Leila Smith (Brigitte Grothum).

Wade might even be right with his suspicions about the inn, for the place is nearly bursting with the usual Wallace adaptation suspects. Just take shady spice merchant Gregor Gubanow (Klaus Kinski), always sweating, sneaking around, and dressed as if he were somewhere in the Colonies. Or Mr. Broen (Heinz Engelmann), a man supposedly a friend of Leila’s dead mother, but clearly a very particular kind of gold digger. If you know your Wallace adaptations, you might imagine there’s a plot line about some kind of large inheritance too, and most of the suspects won’t survive the course of the movie, and you will be absolutely right.

I have praised the Rialto Wallace adaptations directed by Alfred Vohrer (as well as those of Harald Reinl, of course) quite a bit during the last few years, often as films that come to terms with the problems of genre film in Germany despite on the surface having all of these problems.

Das Gasthaus an der Themse is no exception to this, with Vohrer using very German weaknesses like a very particular type of stiffness in many of the performances to create a slightly weird, never naturalistic world all his own, the only place where the film’s also very German ideas about the ways of the United Kingdom could actually fit into, because they sure as hell don’t have anything to do with reality. Fortunately, I always found reality to be badly overrated, and the world of the better Rialto Wallace adaptations quite delightful (unless you’re the one getting harpooned), so Vohrer’s approach does suit me very well.

At this point in the cycle, its rampant irony, silliness, and weirdness weren’t as overwhelming as they’d become later on (for better and for worse), so it’s not difficult to enjoy Das Gasthaus as a pleasantly skewed bit of pulp entertainment, with a typically fun performance by Fuchsberger, a typically bland female lead, the rest of the case, particularly Flickenschildt and Kinski, strutting their stuff with scenery-devouring enthusiasm, and Eddi Arent popping in from time to time to make lame yet not particularly painful jokes (he has been better as well as worse). All taking place in some always interestingly shot locations and sets that combine conscious fakeness with a sense for the telling detail.

Of course, Vohrer always was Vohrer, so you can also expect many shots of eyes peaking through this or that hole, extravagant blocking, and an ability to make full use of Karl Löb’s fine photography to create moods of whimsy as well as pleasant excitement. For me, Das Gasthaus an der Themse’s aesthetic is a lot like a comfortable shoe, and who’d complain about that?

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Der Rächer (1960)

aka The Avenger

Murder-plagued London is disturbed by a killer who prefers to deposit the heads of his victims – most of whom are these proverbial criminals who escaped the law - in nice cardboard boxes for the police to find keeping the bodies all for himself. Publicly, he goes by the name of the Head Hunter, though he himself prefers to see himself as the Benefactor.

The Head Hunter’s latest victim was a traitorous member of the British security service, so this organization’s boss (Siegfried Schürenberg) puts agent Michael Brixan (Heinz Drache) on the case. Some quite vague hints quickly convince Brixan to home in on a film production in which Ruth Sanders (Ina Duscha), the niece of the murdered agent, is playing a bit part as the best place to concentrate his investigation on. Not only does he hit it off with Ruth very nicely, it is also difficult to assume he’d find a better group of potential killers anywhere else.

There are, after all, former explorer, current sleaze-bag and owner of a very large collection of swords Sir Gregory Penn (Benno Sterzenbach), frighteningly intense dramaturge Lorenz Voss (Klaus Kinski), cynical veteran actress Stella Mendozza (Ingrid van Bergen) and oh so nice and friendly director and producer Jack Jackson (Friedrich Schoenfelder) all there for the suspecting. And that’s before we come to Penn’s servant Bhag (Al Hoosman), a gentleman of colour who, in alas typical German post war manner, embodies the Big Black Man As An Animal trope with all the racial sensitivity you’d suspect; which is to say, none whatsoever.

I foresee shots in the darks, secret doors and punching in Brixan’s future.

Der Rächer is one of only two German post-war Edgar Wallace adaptations not made by Rialto Films. It was made by an outfit called Kurt-Ulrich-Film instead. After the success of the first two Wallace movies, Rialto bought up the rights to all Wallace novels, except for the two that were already sold, this one, and “The Yellow Snake” which was owned by the inevitable Artur “Atze” Brauner (who was also involved in the distribution of the Rialto films, because the German movie industry was small).

Tonally, Der Rächer is made pretty much from the same mould as Harald Reinl’s Frosch mit der Maske, which is to say, as close to classic pulp-style filmmaking as German post-war cinema got, and pretty darn entertaining with it, even though it keeps away from Rialto’s insertion of humour. The production design and the music aren’t quite as fine as that of the Rialto films, I think, but the film still doesn’t look at all like the quickly shot affair meant to cash-in on the Wallace boom nobody involved can have expected to last as long as it did that it was. There’s real style and real commitment on display, both things that make or break the sort of melodramatic pulp mystery the German krimi was at its heart.

Director Karl Anton had been active since 1921, so you can see more than just an echo of German expressionism in his efforts, if you want to. Particularly some of the later scenes with their mild chiaroscuro effects, their clever use of shadows, and their melodramatic mugging are remarkable in this regard, and give the film an intensity that – again – isn’t exactly typical of German filmmaking of the era, particularly outside the krimi world. Even though he isn’t quite on the level of Harald Reinl, Anton also has a nice sense of keeping things dynamic: events zip along, camera and actors move so as to keep everything else moving, and action scenes are actually staged with a degree of care and enthusiasm. It’s all pulp cinema 101, of course, and the film’s as old-fashioned as all get out (though not as old-fashioned as Wallace’s books) but then knowing this doesn’t make the film any less entertaining to me.

Der Rächer is also quite remarkable for introducing three future mainstays of Rialto’s Wallace movies to the Wallace style krimi, with the as always cool (and how often can I use that word when describing a German actor?) and intense Heinz Drache, eternal Sir John Siegfried Schürenberg (surprisingly enough not in a comical, or “comical”, role), and not in need of a description Klaus Kinski. It’s as influential a bit of casting as you can imagine, and even if you’re one of those people who dislike Der Rächer because it doesn’t offer itself for ironic appreciation (the coward’s way of appreciation, as I see it) too well, you’ll have to respect at least that aspect of the film.

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In short: Die Schwarze Kobra (1963)

aka The Black Cobra

Truck driver Peter Kramer (Adrian Hoven) is having a bad week: his latest cargo turns out to be drugs oh so cleverly disguised as washing powder, the owner of the cargo, a gangster known as The Corse, makes a very rude front-seat passenger, and then a competing gang working for the Syndicate kills the Corse right in front of Peter's eyes to boot. Which of course makes poor Peter a risk for the gangsters.

Soon enough, Peter finds himself alternately fleeing the Syndicate, the former gang of the Corse, and the police. Because this is that kind of movie, what ensues is mostly a series of kidnappings and re-kidnappings of Peter's girlfriend Alexa (Ann Smyrner) by the various factions, while Klaus Kinski betrays one gang to the other so he can snort that sweet, sweet coke. Also an appearance make Klaus Löwitsch as "Boogie", the violent pumped-up coke fiend to Kinski's snivelling one, a mysterious police undercover agent, a mute thug named Goba (Michel Ujevic), a knife-throwing Herbert Fux, mildly eccentric policemen (Paul Dahlke and Peter Vogel, the latter doing a milder version of the traditional Eddi Arent bit), Peter's former box champion now roadside rest stop animal show owner friend Punkti (Ady Berber), and a cobra (well, for one scene).

Obviously, Rudolf Zehetgruber's Die Schwarze Kobra is another non-Edgar Wallace krimi attempting to catch a bit of the commercial fire of the Rialto movies. Despite being shot in Vienna and at least nominally being an Austrian film, Zehetgruber's film features many of the usual faces in the more or less usual roles. The German language genre film world wasn't big after all, and really, when you can hire Kinski to do some snivelling, you do hire Kinski to do some snivelling.

Stylistically, this is - of course - much less intricately styled than the Rialto films were, with some okay sets and locations but also a handful of rather impoverished looking ones. The visual influences of and parallels to noir and gothic are mostly rather minor; moodiness, it seems did not stand high on Zehetgruber's list of things to include. Instead, the director does his best to make up for a very silly and often inappropriately melodramatic script (so one quite typical of German as well as Austrian genre writing), by getting as energetic as genre films of its place and era got. He's not quite as elegant at it as Harald Reinl was in comparable Wallace movies but the resulting film still is pleasantly fast-paced and action-filled. Sure, the fight choreography and quality of the stunt work (such as it is), isn't anything intricate, but the film had no problems convincing me that watching two big, slow man ponderously and very visibly not hitting each other in a fight was a rather fun thing, soon to be followed by other fun things, which is really all I expect of pulp-y krimis.

After having seen Die Schwarze Kobra I'm not at all surprised Zehetgruber would go on to direct a few of the Komissar X movies. While not being quite as enjoyable and pop as the later films, Die Schwarze Kobra is clearly the product of exactly the sort of sensibility best suited to bringing to live that particular series of cult film fan favourites, and therefore a fine way to spend ninety minutes.

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Das Indische Tuch (1963)

aka The Indian Scarf

After Lord Lebanon dies of a heart attack that looks a lot like him being strangled with a scarf, a rather large group of disparate family members is called together for the reading of his will by lawyer Frank Tanner (Heinz Drache). Lebanon's wife, Lady Emily (Elisabeth Flickenschildt) and her obsessive pianist son Edward (Hans Clarin) aren't too happy to share their inheritance with people like the Lord's bastard son Peter Ross (Klaus Kinski), the pretty young Isla (Corny Collins), explorer Sir Henry (Siegfried Schürenberg for once not working for the Yard), or Mrs Tilling (Gisela Uhlen) who is - gasp! - married, unhappily so, to an American (Hans Nielsen).

However, before Tanner is actually allowed to read the will and anyone is coming into one's fortune, the whole family has to spend six days and six nights in the family manor in Scotland together. Soon, it looks like one among the gathered - perhaps with the help of butler Bonwit (Eddi Arent, of course) or handyman Chiko (Ady Berber)? - would really rather prefer a larger share of the inheritance and begins to strangle a family member per night with one among the numerous Indian scarfs in the house.

Thanks to a fortuitously arrived storm front, the mansion is cut off from the outside world, so it falls to Tanner to play amateur detective and find out who is killing off people left and right before nobody is left to read a will to.

Das Indische Tuch is far from your typical Rialto Edgar Wallace adaptation (except for the number of murders, of course), for it rather prefers to be your typical old dark house movie, despite a deplorable lack of men in gorilla suits. It's a nice change-up for the series, and, given the small number of necessary sets, was probably also a nice way for Rialto to save a little cash. Why, even the mandatory outside shot of the old dark house is replaced with a highly theatrical slide in an act of conscious artificiality.

That sort of artificiality is of course something director Alfred Vohrer excelled at, and he consequently uses Das Indische Tuch to wallow in everything anti-naturalistic he loves so well - dramatic zooms, cameras positioned at curious places and angles, lots of shots of people peeping at other people through various holes, steaming phallus-shaped objects, and moments of what Germany in the early 60s imagined to be risqué filmmaking that look all the more awkward because they're positioned among so many sexual symbols.

Vohrer, ably assisted by production designers Walter Kutz and Wilhelm Vorwerg, also loves to include never explained, utterly weird details in the sets, like the gigantic Beethoven bust (who knew Beethoven's head was that of a three meter giant?) standing behind Hans Clarin's piano, and the stuffed horse taking up a third of the music room. The Vohrer-typical moments of high melodrama are more often than not pulled in rather ironic directions by these curious elements of the film - creepy and loud mother/son relationships take on a rather funny dimension when played out in front of a stuffed horse.

The film also finds time to update the rule of Chekhov's Gun to that of Vohrer's Tarantula, gives Kinski and Clarin time to show off their respective skills at making crazy-eyes, teaches us that all artists as well as all members of noble families who aren't young women for the leading man to romance are crazy, includes an often absurdly chipper Peter Thomas score, and ends on one of those silly, self-conscious notes Vohrer loved so dearly.

Needless to say, Das Indische Tuch feels often even more like a black comedy than your usual Vohrer krimi, but since I found myself laughing about its jokes and strange digressions more often than not, I don't think that's a bad thing. After all, how could one make an old dark house movie in 1963 while keeping a straight face?

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