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.

On WTF: Der Schwarze Abt (1963)

aka The Black Abbot

Apart from Alfred Vohrer and Harald Reinl, some other directors did work on Rialto's Edgar Wallace cycle too. One of my favourites among this number is Franz Josef Gottlieb, who directed six krimis in two years and did no direction work worth one's eyes before or since.

Der Schwarze Abt features KINSKI!, a particularly convoluted plot, and lots of shots of people looking through holes. My column on WTF-Film takes a peek at the movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,krimi,franz josef gottlieb,joachim fuchsberger,grit boettcher,dieter borsche,klaus kinski,charles regnier,eddi arent,other places

Das Phantom von Soho (1964)

aka The Phantom of Soho

A shadowy figure wearing a skull mask and what looks a lot like silver oven mitts stalks the streets of Soho to start a charming little series of murders. Curiously, the killer doesn't steal from his victims, but leaves manila envelopes with money and little gifts with them; if it were Christmas, you'd probably think him to be a Santa Claus themed serial killer. Chief Inspector Patton (Dieter Borsche) and sort of comic relief Sergeant Hallam (Peter Vogel) are investigating the case, but after the first success of realizing that the murders have something to do with a bar cum bordello named the Zanzibar, it's slow going.

There are just too many suspects - most of whom will soon enough turn into victims of the murderer - and unlike the audience, the policemen don't even know these suspects share a dark secret that may very well be the motive for the murder. Among the dubious people Patton and Hallam encounter are the wheelchair-bound and scarred owner of the Zanzibar, Joanna Filiati (Elisabeth Flickenschild), the gangster who manages the place for her (Stanislav Ledinek), a member of parliament (Hans Nielsen), a peculiar masseur (Werner Peters), a sea captain (Hans W. Hamacher), and the young club photographer (Helga Sommerfeld). Really, the policemen can thank the murderer for slowly whittling down the number of suspects.

However, there are other problems troubling Patton, too. The head of Scotland Yard, Sir Phillip (Hans Söhnker), takes a personal interest in the case, and acts increasingly like a good suspect himself, while Sir Philip's girlfriend, crime writer Clarinda Smith (Barbara Rütting) does her damndest to be part of the investigation.

Das Phantom's director Franz Josef Gottlieb is another filmmaker whose stint in the krimi genre hints at a talent neither his later nor his earlier films would suggest. By now, my working hypothesis explaining this singularly strange - for post-war German filmmaking - tendency is that the krimi was the only genre where either producers allowed the directors to do more than point and shoot, or one of the few genres that actually interested them enough to put some effort in. Looking at the horrible TV shows Gottlieb worked for at the end of his career (45 episodes of a show starring a chimpanzee as its most talented cast member will kill anyone's creativity, I suppose) I'd tend to the latter explanation.

Be that as it may, fact is that the Franz Josef Gottlieb who directed this Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptation for Artur Brauner's CCC Filmkunst, was quite a different director from the director he would all too soon turn into. There's hardly a second in The Phantom where the director isn't setting up a creative shot, letting his camera glide from a room's ceiling to a more normal position, positioning his camera in a cabinet, or letting it swirl nearly psychedelically in a knife throwing sequence. Somehow, Gottlieb still manages to keep his stylistic excesses at least so much in check the film they dominate doesn't fall apart; it's just a bit more surreal than one would expect of one the actually more sanely plotted krimis.

I was a bit surprised, even slightly shocked, by how much of an exploitation movie - for something made in Germany in 1964 - Das Phantom is: there aren't just the comparatively intense knife murders, but also more weird nightclub scenes than in a Jess Franco production (and I'm sure if the great man saw this one, he must have approved of it heartily as made by a kindred spirit), and two striptease numbers that actually show bare breasts, completely going against the spirit of a prudishness that was at its most obvious when a given film was trying to be risqué that always haunted the Wallace adaptations, be they based on Edgar or Bryan.

Gottlieb's visual oomph and the distractions of bloods and breasts and pretty people (well, pretty women - the men here are all of the sort of stiff-necked middle-age that makes girls cry and boys never want to grow old for sheer terror of what they might become) are very helpful as a distraction from the weaknesses of its script, or rather, the script's love for long, pointless dialogue scenes that always threaten to overwhelm the awesome bits with their sheer length; fortunately, unnecessary scenes of characters talking can be made quite bearable through a distracting execution Alfred Vohrer would be proud of.

So, if you want to venture into the weird, sometimes wild, sometimes hilariously conservative not-England of the krimi, you could find far worse films than Das Phantom von Soho.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,franz josef gottlieb,dieter borsche,barbara rütting,hans söhnker,peter vogel,helga sommerfeld,krimi