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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Three Films Make A Post: The Screen Explodes With Wondrous Spectacle Bigger Than Anything You Have Ever Seen!!

Seven Blood-Stained Orchids aka Das Rätsel des Silbernen Halbmonds aka Sette Orchidee Macchiate Di Rosso (1972): Compared to the awe-inspiring insanity of Spasmo, Seven Orchids is a bit of a lame duck among Umberto Lenzi's giallos, a middling film that plods more or less competently through its plot without doing much that excites. It is (perhaps thanks to the fact it is a German co-production sold as an Edgar Wallace adaptation over here?) quite lacking in the four corner virtues of giallos - sleaze, style, violence and brain-melting insanity - with nary anyone getting undressed, hardly a shot that's particularly interesting to look at (Lenzi instead overuses zooms the way people always say Jess Franco does, even though Franco doesn't), murders that mostly feel harmless, and nothing particularly insane going on even in a few scenes taking place in an asylum.

Seven is not a horrible film - Antonio Sabato's horrid jackets and Riz Ortolani's score are worth the price of admission alone - it's just not particularly interesting.

The Great Impersonation (1935): Alan Crosland's (middle) adaptation of E. Phillips Oppenheim's thrice filmed novel is strictly part of Universal's low budget arm, making use of the studio's b-roll actors and sets built for some of the studio's more ambitious movies. Seen in this context, the film is a rather successful effort, its somewhat melodramatic plot flying by with enthusiastic pace. Despite this, I find myself somewhat disappointed by the film, for, treated with more visual creativity and a deeper script, its wedding of 30s espionage pot-boiler and Gothic romance could have been something rather more special than the competent little film The Great Impersonation turned out to be.

Temple of A Thousand Lights (1965): The last in our trio of mildly diverting movies is another Umberto Lenzi film. Richard Harrison plays a charming rogue without the charm by making his "I'm a mighty fine specimen of man, I am" face a lot, Malaysia plays India, and a lot of Italians wear brownface. The film's attempts at being light-hearted only emphasize how much of an asshole its hero is (his basic humour mode is "racist jerkwad"), and there's little happening I haven't seen in more exciting movies before. Again, this is not a horrible movie, just an excitation challenged one.

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In short: Der Turm Der Verbotenen Liebe (1968)

aka Tower of the Screaming Virgins

Paris, 1315. The city is in minor upheaval, for nearly daily the dead bodies of nobles are fished out of the Seine. The public makes the "Witch of Nesle" responsible, a mythical creature supposed to kill the men in her tower on the outskirts of the city. In truth, Queen Marguerite de Bourgogne (Teri Tordai) and some of her chamber maids, goaded on by her chancellor the Duke de Lorrain (Karlheinz Fiege), use the tower for a kinky hobby: luring random nobles to a night of masked debauchery and letting them get slaughtered by just as nicely masked henchmen afterwards. One has to while away the time the King is gone somehow, right?

It's a good time for Swashbuckling war hero Bouridan (Jean Piat) to return to the city to protect the woman he has decided to marry, Blanche Du Bois (Uschi Glas). Blanche needs all the help she can get, for de Lorrain has taken an interest in the end of her virginity, and he's quite the cad when it comes to this sort of thing. Adding to that, Bouridan has his own reasons to hate de Lorrain and the Queen, but since they have reason to fear and hate him too, and are in quite a position to make his life hard, things will get difficult even for the best fencer in France.

The German-led German/French/Italian co-production Der Turm der Verbotenen Liebe (which translates to "The Tower of Forbidden Love") mixes three genres, two of which are particularly seldom seen in German post-war cinema. Not surprisingly, there aren't really all that many German swashbuckling adventures, nor are there many Gothic horror films. I'll give our local cinema that it did have its own style of exploitation movies, with more "educational" films about schoolgirls than one wants to imagine. Fortunately the exploitation elements in the film at hand are somewhat more interesting than those in a Schulmädchen-Report. As always, the integration of breasts into a plot filled with entertaining events makes an exploitation film more interesting than the mock documentary "report" (it's the German version of mondo, really, just more provincial and less racist) style.

First and foremost, though, this is a candy-coloured swashbuckler (based on a book by Dumas senior) that director Franz Antel (a director who did a bit of exploitation of the type we know and love, but spent most of his career in the most horrible of German movie genres, the "Musikfilm" and the "Heimatfilm") dynamically enhances with the Gothic horror by way of the krimi moments concerning the tower, the breasts, and the mild kinkiness (whips, masks, and inadvertent incest are the main course of the day here). It's not deep stuff, and Jean Piat's hero isn't as charming as he seems to think he is, but Antel's direction has verve and uses slightly pop-arty colours, fine sets, well chosen locations in Hungary and improbable (a pop fantasy of the middle ages, really) but awesome costumes to concoct a real crowd-pleaser, at least when the crowd concerned is me.

I suspect the whole affair was an attempt by various elderly filmmakers to channel the spirit of '68 into their cash registers while still working with a base genre that let them avoid including hippies (therefore avoiding the classic pitfall of old men exploiting youth culture of having no actual clue what any given youth culture is actually about) and was compatible with the tastes of slightly older parts of their audience too. For what it's worth, Der Turm der Verbotenen Liebe is one of the better efforts at this particular thing, with nary a moment that isn't entertaining in one way or the other.

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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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Der Gorilla von Soho (1968)

aka Gorilla Gang

A guy in a ruddy gorilla costume wanders through nightly London, killing rich foreigners and leaving their bodies floating in the Thames. Scotland Yard's Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck), the higher-up in charge in case Siegfried Schürenberg's Sir John is too competent, puts unpleasantly rude Inspector Perkins (a pre-zombification Horst Tappert) and his assistant Sgt Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen) - seriously - on the case. The policemen's only clue are little dolls with messages in some kind of African language written on them left with the dead bodies. Perkins and Pepper acquire the help of Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas) as a translator of these messages.

A true expert, Susan identifies the language used in the messages as "Tunisian" and translates them into some nonsense of dubious help about gorillas and murder. Still, it's enough to let the cops theorize that the gorilla gang (a gang known to - quite reasonably, I'm sure - dress up as gorillas for their murders and to only commit them during night and fog) has returned.

This being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, Susan will of course help the police out further and get into peril, there will be evil-doers disguised as benefactors running a home for criminal young women trying to get at an inheritance, and more shady characters than you can shake a stick at will try to blackmail and rob each other in a plot as complicated as it is absurd. The inspector's investigation will lead him to a foundation with the excellent name of "Peace and Love for People", and into one of the more peculiar nightclubs anyone will find outside of a Jess Franco movie.

With Der Gorilla von Soho, I again enter the decadent phase of Rialto's Edgar Wallace cycle. Quite unlike the earlier Der Bucklige von Soho, with whom the film at hand shares not only Soho (or rather "Soho") but more than just a few plot points, Der Gorilla is not collapsing under the weight of its own campiness, nor does it wink-wink, nudge-nudge at its audience so often said audience is bound to lose its patience. This time around, director Alfred Vohrer manages to find the right balance between the silly, the poppy, the ridiculous, and the sort of old-fashioned, pulpy thrills that belong into a film that not only features a killer in a gorilla costume, but a killer in a gorilla costume sticking his victims into a drown-o-mat.

The acting here is not quite as artificial and melodramatic as in some of Vohrer's other Wallace adaptations like Die Blaue Hand, but I suspect the director pushed for a slightly (and only slightly, this is still incredibly far from the Method and all it entails, for good and for ill) more naturalistic acting style than was his wont so that the not quite so artificial acting would contrast all the better with the particularly heavy artificiality of the film's sets. Especially the nightclub some of the films shadier characters (and Sir Arthur, of course) frequent is a thing to behold: stuffed with lots of mandatory red lights, and fashioned with a room where interested guests can photograph nude women and men (this time around, there's real  nudity - of both genders! - on screen) who are standing on pedestals "for artistic purposes". Obviously, this is not a club one could imagine to encounter anywhere outside of a movie, and therefore quite a perfect place to encounter inside of a movie.

The film's plot does of course work through the same elements and dramatic arcs as just about every other of the Wallace films. Der Gorilla, though, does its thing with what looks like real enthusiasm, even a willingness to provide as many cheap thrills as the basic conservatism of German filmmaking of its time and place allows, resulting in a film that not only duly presents these thrills, but actually dares to revel in them, as if Vohrer had gotten up one day and thought to himself "why not be earnest about all this silliness this time around". That's - and this will not come as a surprise to anyone reading this, I suspect - exactly the kind of attitude a film needs to show to win my heart. And who am I not to give my heart to a film working this hard for it?

 

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