radiobirdma

In 1968, young German actor/ producer Dieter Geissler had a job for a certain Martin Scorsese who had recently filmed his debut Who's That Knocking at My Door in Amsterdam. And so 25-year-old Marty sat down and refined a Dutch Peeping Tom script with his very genius. „Very good!", he encouraged with a blue pen, or reprimanded: „Whole masseuse-chase sequence is much too detailed." While he penned those priceless suggestions, Hitchcock buff Francois Truffaut recommended composer Bernard Herrmann to director Pim de la Parra, and BH – hold on to your hat – actually had a few sheets left on his escritoire he had forgotten there in 1932. Apart from the opening sequence, next to nothing works in this ill-conceived Rear Window homage despite (not all too much) sex, drugs and, erm, Bernie's ghastly dated soundtrack. At least the masseuse-chase scene was trimmed – it makes no f*ckin' sense anyway –, and Marty returned to the Netherlands six years later to ask his old friend Pim whether he knew someone who could do the soundtrack for his latest project Taxi Driver. Oddly enough, a few weeks later Bernard Herrmann churned out a quite cool and modernist jazz score for that one. While Marty recalled with a smile that those Dutch fellows had paid him 500 American bucks for his expertise back then. With a smile, yes, but more of a knowing grin: There's plenty of ways to spend half a grand in Amsterdam.

Yo, Super Mario. Though while later Eurocrime "cult" actor Mario Adorf does quite a convincing job as the retarded serial killer in Robert Siodmak's Nazi noir The Devil Strikes at Night, ex-boxing-champion Claus Holm – imagine a German Van Heflin – as the crippled police Kommissar and Hannes Messemer as his SS-Obergruppenfuehrer opponent easily steal the show from him: Their confrontations, chock-full of icy dialogue, constitute the epicentre of this sardonic high tensioner that doesn't lose its momentum for a single second, due to Siodmak's remarkably concentrated direction, aided by the unobtrusive, but perfectly effective camera work by unjustly forgotten cinematographer Georg Krause (who did Kubrick's Paths of Glory – !! – a year before), competent editing by Walter Boos (who went on to do some Schulmaedchen-Reports in the 70s), and excellent supporting performances by Werner Peters and the strikingly beautiful Annemarie Dueringer. "Belief? Where did you dig up that word?", Messemer's slick SS herrenmensch asks the crushed Kommissar. Once, they even had great screenwriters in Germany, among them Werner Joerg Lueddecke, who sets the fast-paced, bitter, cynical and sometimes darkly humorous tone of the movie. When the Kommissar is sent to war in the end – the year is 1944 –, he reassures his trembling girlfriend: "It won't take much longer. Soon, you can reach the front line by city train."