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.

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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.

 

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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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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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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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Der Mönch mit der Peitsche (1967)

aka The College Girl Murders (which seems to have been re-cut for those poor, slow Americans)

aka The Prussic Factor

A series of peculiar murders committed with a new-fangled poison gas that is either shot from bibles or contraptions that look - depending on your taste - like ray guns or like hair dryers shakes a girls' boarding school populated by girls who are fastly nearing their thirties in Edgar-Wallace-England.

What neither Scotland Yard's - now psychologically educated for a new running gag - Sir John (the inevitable Siegfried Schürenberg), nor poor, beleaguered gum-chewing Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) know - but may or may not find out - is that the murders are committed by prisoners who are carted in and out of their place of imprisonment as if an open door policy were in place.

Behind it all stands - or rather sits - a shadowy mastermind with an excellent villain lair full of colourful light, alligators, aquariums, snakes and blue cat statues. Apart from the prisoner of the day and an evil chauffeur, said mastermind also has the titular Monk with the Whip working for him, an impressive henchman dressed in a red monk's habit with a red Ku Klux Klan hood, wielding a white, movie-magically neck-breaking whip.

Higgins and Sir John of course have to deal with the usual gallery of suspects in form of various shady, perhaps even sleazy, teachers, a definitely sleazy writer (the always wooden Harry Riebauer), and the main suspect in any cosy piece of crime fiction, a deeply suspicious gardener (Claus Holm). At least, our heroes also have the assistance of girls' school good girl and prospective girl detective Ann Portland (Uschi Glas), who also makes an excellent kidnapping victim; we all know how important that trait is in a Wallace adaptation.

Will Higgins crack the case as long as there are still girls alive in the school?

Now this is the good stuff when it comes to Rialto's cycle of Edgar Wallace adaptations. As its title (which translates to "The Monk with the Whip") promises, Wallace main-stay Alfred Vohrer's Der Mönch mit der Peitsche delights with an eye-poppingly coloured pulp villain with an iconic dress sense working for an evil mastermind with an iconic lair sense (yes, the aquarium/zoo/light show combination is that delightful), doing pulp bad guy stuff that may not make all that much sense as an actual crime plot but is much more fun to watch than something that would make sense.

Vohrer, who sometimes tends to step over the line of winking self-irony a bit too long in these films, here finds the perfect balance between knowingly showing the silly elements (see the plot synopsis as well as a hundred things not mentioned there) of his film as silly half of the time, and just as knowingly accepting the silly as if it were the day-to-day for the rest of the time; it's pretty beautiful, in its own, peculiar way.

Visually, Vohrer has room to indulge in many of his obsessions: there's gothic, incredibly bright fog, colours often nearly as artificial as in a Bava movie (yes, it's that villain lair again), quite a few shots of eyes peeping through various holes (even after having seen the movie, I'm not always sure whose eyes are poking through these holes at all times, since everyone in a Vohrer movie is something of a voyeur - villains, Scotland Yard and would-be girl detectives alike), and camera angles that often point out their own artificiality. It's like a - somewhat provincial, we are still in German pretending to be the UK, after all - pop art dream of a pulp novel made film.

If there is something to criticize about Der Mönch then it is the film's surprising lack in actual action. Joachim Fuchsberger (who was pretty good at this sort of thing, actually) has not much opportunity for fisticuffs or even running around girls' school corridors. He's there to chew gum, crack the case after large parts of the cast are dead, and give the straight man to Schürenberg's - surprisingly funny - "I'm a psychologist now" shtick, but isn't involved in much action. Which is a bit of a strange thing for a film that feels as pulpy in every other respect as Der Mönch does.

However, the film's pacing and style never leave much breathing room to be disappointed in the lack of pulp-appropriate chases and brawls. If done right, and Der Mönch mit der Peitsche does it oh so right, it turns out, it's the mood and not the fist that makes a film part of pulp cinema.

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Three Films Make A Post: LEAVE THE CHILDREN HOME! ...and if YOU are SQUEAMISH STAY HOME WITH THEM!!!!!!!

Neues vom Hexer aka Again the Ringer (1965): Alfred Vohrer's sequel to his own Der Hexer is a decidedly middling part of the Rialto Wallace adaptation cycle. It features a few of Vohrer's trademark sight gags and moments of fourth wall demolition, a fun bad guy henchman turn by Klaus Kinski, and Drache, Rütting, Schürenberg and Arent in their usual roles, as well as a slightly insane soundtrack by Peter Thomas, but the film never feels as fun as it should do. For my tastes there's just a bit too much normal mystery tedium and too little of the pulp thrills I've come to expect from the Wallace films, leading to a film that is too well done to be completely unsatisfying yet too often trades in the anything goes feel of my favourite Vohrer movies for standard German mystery fare. For once, the German movie going public must have agreed with me, for the sequel Again the Ringer (and wasn't he called the Wizard in the English language version of the first movie?) sets up in its final scene never was made for lack of success.

One Point O aka Paranoia: 1.0 (2004): This is a pretty fantastic little (as in: obviously low budget yet just as obviously knowing how to cope) SF film in the classical mindfuck style that heavily echoes Dick in its un-real circling around questions of reality, identity and ownership of said identity. Directors/writers Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson update the whole thing with a bit of nanotech-virus SF-science, but mostly, they let their design sense (seldom has a brown apartment building in a sideways future seemed more appropriate) and the peculiar rhythm of their film drag the viewer into an emotional place where the Weird and the surreal collide. There's also some fine acting (and fine acting's a difficult thing in a film going for the Weird this intensely) by Jeremy Sisto and Deborah Kara Unger - both no strangers to strangeness on screen - and smallish appearances by the great Udo Kier and the great Lance Henriksen to praise.

The Soul of a Monster (1944): Well, it sure is nice to see that Val Lewton's productions for RKO were regarded highly enough by executives in other studios to imitate them, like director Will Jason set out to do here for Columbia. Alas, as it goes with imitations, whoever was mainly responsible for The Soul did not actually understand how and why the Lewton productions worked so well, replacing ambiguity with cloying Christian moralizing and characters with flat clichés. While the photography is moody and beautiful, it's badly served by a script that doesn't really seem to know how to tell its story effectively, and direction that tries to take up all the outward appearances of the Lewton style without showing the necessary sense of timing and depth of meaning necessary to make that style work. I'd blame Jesus, but then the film makes it quite clear I'm not allowed to.

 

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Hairy Beasts: Der Hund von Blackwood Castle (1968)

aka The Monster of Blackwood Castle

aka The Horror of Blackwood Castle

Warning: there will be spoilers.

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may resurrect the dead as mid-tempo zombies) toward everything hairy and beastly: King Kong, cuddly little dogs and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

Der Hund von Blackwood Castle, despite a title that translates to "the hound of Blackwood Castle", only barely qualifies for the "Hairy Beasts" theme, because it may contain an evil dog, but it's really treating the poor thing strictly as a murder weapon that could be replaced by just about anything.

When Jane Wilson's (Karin Baal) estranged father, Captain Wilson (Otto Stern), dies, he leaves her run-down old Blackwood Castle and a bunch of problems she surely didn't expect.

For one, there's Wilson's shady lawyer's (Hans Söhnker) heavy insistence on Jane selling the castle as soon as possible (but only to the people he chooses, which would be him), there's a cellar full of snakes, and there's the Captain's former factotum Grimsby (Arthur Binder), all dress-sense a few centuries out of fashion and threatening demeanour, and these are just the problems Jane learns about early on in her stay.

Among the mysterious occurrences surrounding her Jane doesn't yet know about is the start of a series of murders; various shady people taking residence in the nearby inn of Lady Agathy Beverton (Agnes Windeck) and her brother Henry (Tilo von Berlepsch) meet a horrible end when walking the moors by the fake (and pretty ridiculous looking) poison fangs of the titular hound. The hound's victims also have a tendency to disappear afterwards.

That is, until one of them finally re-appears right in Blackwood Castle's living room. Jane, being the heroine of the piece, calls Scotland Yard, but to the audience's disappointment, there's no inspector available, so Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) and his secretary Miss Finley (Ilse Pagé) take on the case personally. Poor Jane.

Sir John will for once actually have to use his own brain to cut through the mystery. And I haven't even mentioned the added complexity of the case provided by the not murdered shady residents of Lady Agathy's inn (Wallace inspector actors Heinz Drache and Horst Tappert, among others), or by the suspicious manner in which village doctor Doc Adams (Alexander Engel) and Sir Henry act. Only one thing is clear: there must be something quite valuable hidden in or around Blackwood Castle, and whoever knows of these valuables is willing to murder people with a hound.

I am tempted to call Alfred Vohrer's Hund von Blackwood Castle an archetypal example of the German Edgar Wallace Cycle that began in the 50s, but that would only be half true.

Sure, half the film's cast can also be found in about half of the other Wallace movies, and the film's plot is a variation on all the usual Wallace themes - there's the innocent woman inheriting money and a whole lot of trouble from a shady relation, the mysterious killer who murders other nasty people by bizarre means, the typical assortment of secret doors, threatening animals, and other signs of pulp cinema, and a plot that is so convoluted it becomes difficult to keep track of the cast and their motives (which isn't helped by the fact that people's actions only barely make sense even when you take their hidden agendas into account).

On the other hand, Herbert Reinecker's script puts some work into using some of these elements a bit differently than usual. Firstly, while using Siegfried Schürenberg as the main police detective gives the man a bit too much room for a comedy shtick that is generally more amusing when used sparingly, it also gives the movie the opportunity to eschew the whole "male hero romances the heroine" business that nearly always is a weak point in films of the series completely; it's just too bad that the script doesn't use this opportunity to make Karin Baal's character more active, but since this is a German movie and not one made in Hong Kong, that would be too much to hope for.

Secondly, Der Hund confuses the role of its hero even more by casting actors like Tappert (seriously playing a man called Donald Fairbanks) and especially Drache (his character name is Connery, Humphrey Connery) who would usually play the male hero as some of the film's bad guys. To make matters even more self-conscious, Drache does seem to play his usual inspector/private eye/etc working incognito part for large parts of the movie, only to finally be exposed to be just as evil as everyone else is.

Thanks to this twist, Der Hund has the rather curious distinction of being a movie in which every character apart from the heroine is either an idiot (hullo Sir John, hullo Lady Agathy), evil, a snake, or a dog with ridiculous fake teeth. Which would put Der Hund's world view right next to that of the more pessimistic noirs, if its inherent silliness and the self-conscious winking at the audience Vohrer so loved in his movies wouldn't suggest that to be an indulgence in over-interpretation.

On the directorial side, Vohrer seems most alive here when he can indulge in his love for silly gadgets (I still don't have a clue how that sarcophagus/chess set contraption is supposed to work - it's awesome anyhow) or slightly bizarre sight gags (Vohrer truly loves making jokes about monocles and eye patches). The director's treatment of the suspense scenes seems less enthusiastic this time around: while the scenes of dog attacks and people sneaking through the moors aren't done badly - Vohrer probably being too much of the professional for that - I couldn't help but think his heart wasn't really in them while I watched the movie.

Which, in combination with the high self-referentiality of its most interesting elements, makes Der Hund von Blackwood Castle quite typical of the decadent (colour) phase of the Rialto Wallace krimis. It's not exactly a film I'd recommend to people starting out with the series, but one that reserves its charms for an audience (pretty much like its contemporary German audience that had been eating these films up for a decade by then, and would continue to do so in TV broadcasts for decades to come) well versed in the ways of the Wallace cycle.

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Der Zinker (1963)

aka The Squeaker

Until now the criminal mastermind known as "the Squeaker" has kept his hands off crimes directly involving murder (though sure as hell not from profiting from other people's murders). This laudable state of affair ends when another member of the underworld finds out his (or her) true identity. Just before the man can betray the Squeaker, the fiend kills him with his new favourite implement - a foldable, pressure-driven poison dart thrower loaded with the poison of a black mamba his delightfully named henchman (or is he?) Krishna (Klaus Kinski!) has stolen from the animal storing dungeon (really, that's the only fitting description for that place) belonging to the large animal trader the dear, creepy man is working for.

It seems Scotland Yard has quite enough of the Squeaker's funny business now, and so sends out its smuggest Inspector, Bill Elford (Heinz Drache) to finally catch the guy. It's better this way too, for his first murder seems to have given the Squeaker a new taste for killing. The evil mastermind's now very murderous activities seem to concentrate on the already mentioned animal trading business chaired by Frankie Sutton (Günter Pfitzmann), and the surrounding group of more or less suspicious people and assorted hangers-on, to nobody's surprise played by Wallace adaptation regulars like Barbara Rütting (as a crime writer, not a bar maid), Albert "of course I'm a butler" Bessler, Inge "am I old and eccentric or old and creepy" Langen, Siegfried "nope, not Sir John this week" Schürenberg, Eddi "I'm a reporter (if I'm not a butler)" Arent and other persons of dubious renown. Will the Inspector be able to sort through them before everyone is dead?

After visiting a handful of non-Wallace krimis these last few weeks, I got a mighty hankering to use improbable language to watch some of the undiluted stuff again, and when it comes to that, there's hardly much that's better than Der Zinker, a fine example of director Alfred Vohrer at the height of his powers.

Der Zinker is pretty much all-around awesome, going from scenes of stylish tension, to silly yet well-imagined murders, to scenes of - often even funny - fourth wall breaking humour (the perfect moment of that surely is when Pfitzmann goes to bed while a fantastic piece of Peter Thomas "bada-bada-da" plays loudly on the soundtrack only to stop when the actor turns off the radio the music obviously does not come from), to melodrama that this time around actually works at intensifying the rest of the movie instead of bringing it to a screeching halt. Here, Vohrer manages to unite these disparate elements that make up the krimi genre without going to far into any single direction, giving the same care and attention to the silly stuff (see Eddi Arent buried in snow by Kinski), as to moody scenes of Kinski stalking through the fog, as to creepy scenes of Kinski being a bit too close to his animal friends for comfort. It's a bit like alchemy, if alchemy did know how to make use of Kinski. And did I mention Kinski?

The script by Harald G. Petersson does some rather interesting things with the Wallace adaptation formula too. This time around, the identity of the killer (if not his actions) makes some sort of sense, and the way the film goes about unmasking him is completely different from the usual krimi method of killing off as many characters as possible until there aren't many suspects left. The climax does two surprising things at once: using a krimi cliché character type in an unexpected way, and letting Drache's inspector actually find out who the killer is by a method slightly more hinting at competence than waiting until the heroine has been kidnapped and then stumbling into his lair. In fact, there will not even be a kidnapped heroine. Turns out that building some variations into the (at this point in the Wallace cycle already pretty codified) plotting leads to a more interesting, possibly even exciting, film. Who'd have thunk?

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In short: Der Hexer (1964)

aka The Mysterious Magician

aka The Wizard

aka The Ringer

A group of human traffickers of the usual societal make-up in an Edgar Wallace adaptation - a lawyer, a fake priest, etc. - using a very Edgar Wallace human trafficking plan with the usual home for criminal young women and a home-made submarine make a capital mistake when they kill the sister of Arthur Milton, the vigilante known as "Der Hexer" (I'd translate that as "The Warlock", clearly not "The Wizard"). Once Milton hears of his sister's death, he and his wife (Margot Trooger) fly in from their exile in Australia, and they're not just coming for the burial.

Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) does his damndest to catch the traffickers and the vigilante, but even with the help of retired Inspector Warren (Siegfried Lowitz, unconvincingly aged by dying his hair white), Higgins is always one step behind the gangsters and two steps behind Milton who goes about avenging his sister with some enthusiasm. Things would be easier for the two Inspectors if they at least knew how Milton looked, but as it stands, he could be anyone, like, for example, the kleptomaniac comic relief butler (Eddi Arent) or the Australian writer James Wesby (Heinz Drache) with his tendency for always being exactly where Higgins or The Warlock are.

Alfred Vohrer's Der Hexer has always been a favourite among German fans of the Rialto Wallace cycle, yet I can't help but disagree with them emphatically. Sure, the film is decently made on a technical level (though it is not difficult for a movie to look better than your average German movie of this era), and concerns itself with some of the plot elements many of the Wallace films obsess about - the home for difficult young women lead by a shady or fake priest, a genius vigilante, mysterious people from equally mysterious Australia. However, the film is also inordinately in love with particularly unfunny comedy that is disrupting the film as soon as some of its pulp action threatens to become actually fun. Apart from the usual antics by Schürenberg and Arent (that are actually funny in some of the other films, but not here), there's also a lot of humour of the unpleasant "aren't women dumb? - but look at their legs!" type. The film wastes way too much time on jokes about Higgins's brain-dead girlfriend stereotype that haven't been funny when they were invented back in the stone age, and sure weren't funny anymore in 1964.

As I already mentioned, Der Hexer isn't too bad visually, but Vohrer never achieves the creative mix of the stiff German melodrama, weird pop stylings, noir influence and home-made Gothic he does best. There are a few scenes of good, dynamically edited pulp action, and the camera sure isn't nailed down, yet that's as far as Der Hexer ever comes. This aspect of the movie is just too routine to make it worth wading through the "humour" for.

 

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Der Bucklige von Soho (1966)

aka The Hunchback of Soho

A mysterious hunchback (Richard Haller) haunts Soho, strangling young women. All of the victims have curiously rough hands, but that's not a hint that leads Scotland Yard's leading puffed-up idiot Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg), nor the notoriously crap at keeping people alive Inspector Hopkins (Günther Stoll) anywhere, probably because they don't actually seem to be looking. Hopkins repeatedly prefers to do his washing to investigation.

At the same time, young Wanda Merville (Monika Peitsch) arrives in London to accept the inheritance of her rich, estranged father. This being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, Wanda is promptly kidnapped by the shady Alan Davis (Pinkas Braun), who doesn't hide her away like a normal gangster would, but inters the girl in the home for young women who have come into contact with the wrong side of the law he's managing for the elderly Lady Perkins (Agnes Windeck). Lady Perkins also just happens to be Wanda's aunt, which may or may not be mere chance.

Davis (and one or more mysterious partners) has quite an operation going on: he uses the girls in his home as slave workers in the dry cleaning business (of course only using the cheapest detergents - yes, that's a plot point), and the best they can hope for (apart from getting killed by the strangler who of course works for Davis, too) is to become prostitutes in a friendly bordello.

How will Hopkins solve this difficult case?

Der Bucklige von Soho is the first film in Rialto Film's cycle of Edgar Wallace adaptations that was shot in colour, so of course it is often the film that is pointed out as the one beginning point of the series' downward spiral. I'd agree with that particular theory a lot more if the films following Der Bucklige had all been worse than those that came before, or if all Wallace films that came before it had been better. In truth, the Wallace films don't really lend themselves very well to that sort of narrative, because to me, their biggest weakness was their unwillingness to change their style very much over time, a handful of outliers notwithstanding.

Sure, the later films in the cycle were somewhat more convoluted than the early ones, and they did take themselves even less seriously than the early ones, but this isn't so much the case of a series of films changing for the worse over time than a series of films concentrating even more on their main characteristics. Even the change from black and white to colour as exemplified in Der Bucklige is not quite as extreme a change in visual style as it could have been - it's not as if the Wallace films were suddenly turned on their heads by the sensational new technology they found.

Having said that, I'll have to agree with general consensus that Alfred Vohrer's Der Bucklige von Soho just isn't a very entertaining movie. It's an example of a particular weakness in German genre filmmaking (something that has - generally - made German movies not produced for the arthouse rather crap), a weakness I can best describe as cowardice. Der Bucklige, like so many other films made in my native country, is a movie that seems to really, truly want to be a real, true exploitation film, seeing as it contains potentially lurid elements of women in prison cinema, sexploitation, horror, what was already the Eurospy movie, and so on, and so forth. However, also like so many other films made in my native country, it is also a film that does not dare take the final step into the lurid, that always promises to become sleazy, but always stops itself before it actually commits and never is anything more than a bit naughty.

It's this unwillingness to not just promise exploitational values, but to actually deliver them that can make some of the Wallace films (and most other German genre films) so very frustrating - they're always teasing, but never take themselves seriously enough to let their teasing lead anywhere.

The Wallace films didn't suffer from this problem quite as much as the rest of German cinema, and often seemed feeling just fine with being low-brow/trashy/what-have-you. Other films of the series somewhat manage to overcome this flaw by virtue of creative direction, a sense of weirdness that comes from their overexcited and confused plotting, and the general feel that everyone involved had a hell of a time making them. Der Bucklige, however, mostly feels tired and distracted, with Vohrer only managing to provide two or three scenes that actually feel as strange or as fun as the whole film should. There's some fine "look, Ma! I'm evil" acting by (usually playing "comic" relief parts in these films, so there's some creativity there) Eddi Arent, at least, and some of Vohrer's mandatory zoom lens mangling (I suspect in a different life, Vohrer would have loved to go the Jess Franco way and zoom in on female pubic hair a lot, instead of ending up directing Die Schwarzwaldklinik), but that's not really enough to make Der Bucklige von Soho one of the Rialto Wallaces I'd recommend to anyone but completists.

 

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