Designed with an unusually picaresque yet repetitive structure for an exploitation film, it was only after plodding my way through SCANDAL IN DENMARK that I learned it was based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. This went a long way toward explaining the movie's more eccentric characteristics, but the story still doesn't map quite right into the soft-R grindhouse genre.
Film follows the adventures of a soldier played by Willy Rathnov, who meets a strange and bewitching woman on his way back from... somewhere. Conscripting him to help her steal a lighter from a trio of criminals, the woman promises the soldier all the money he wants - she's only interested in the trinket. Back at her place, the soldier starts asking her about the lighter's significance, though the woman refuses to explain. In a fit of frustration, he ends up killing her, absconding with both the lighter and the money and becoming toast of the town as he hangs out in fancy strip clubs (there's that R rating) buying all the patrons drinks.
While shopping for shoes, the soldier encounters a baroness, and learns from the sales clerk that her parents keep her locked in the family mansion for fear of a prophecy that she will marry a common soldier. Finally giving himself away to the criminals he's robbed by his use of the lighter in a bar, it's - surprisingly - the soldier who ends up extorting them, demanding they kidnap the baroness and bring her to him at night in exchange for not revealing their criminal enterprise. The baroness soon takes to the handsome soldier, but when the girl's parents discover what's going on, the whole thing ends up in court - and guess who's the judge and his magistrates?
If you're American like me, you might (I hope) be excused for not being familiar with Andersen's "The Tinder Box," on which this film is based. In all honesty it doesn't strike me as a very good fairy tale, with the protagonist murdering a witch for no reason and then getting to romance a princess despite being a thief and criminal. It makes SCANDAL IN DENMARK much more interesting knowing this background to the script, as it's intriguing to watch the way the film maps its elements onto a modern landscape; however, the narrative still seems arbitrary and fragmented at best, and depressingly amoral at worst (there's really no motivation for the soldier killing the "witch" here, and the film just ignores it after, never bothering to justify this transgression). As a piece of early sexploitation, it's quite tepid (though probably played substantially hotter in 1969): the nudity is limited to a few gratuitous strip club numbers and some bedroom canoodling between the protagonist and his lover. Hopelessly obscure by now, it's hardly worth seeking out in its own right - unless, like me, you're fascinated by oddball adaptations and remakes.
