Krimi Casebook: The Green Archer (Jürgen Roland, 1961)

It’s been far too long since we last took a peek into the head-spinning world of Rialto Films’ series of West German Edgar Wallace adaptations, so what better way to get re-acquainted with their particular brand of ersatz-English weirdness than by screening 1961’s ‘The Green Archer’ (or ‘Der Grüne Bogenschütze’, as the Germans more poetically have it)?

This was the fourth entry in the series insofar as I can make out, released just one month prior to Alfred Vohrer’s definitive The Dead Eyes of London, and… it certainly gets off to a flying start.

Thunder crashes, and lightning splits a tree in the midst of a field of rain-lashed stock footage countryside overlooking an imposing gothic manor house. Immediately kicking a few bricks out of the ol’ fourth wall, series mascot / comic relief supremo Eddi Arent adjusts his regulation Stan Laurel-esque bowler and speaks straight to camera; “You couldn’t possibly make a movie out of this. Impossible!”

The scene, we gradually realise, is a dark and stormy night in Garre Castle, wherein elegantly attired secretary / caretaker Julius Savini (Harry Wüstenhagen, looking rather like a young Martin Landau) is conducting a public tour, apparently without the permission of his absent employer.

Arent’s characteristically eccentric reporter character (he works ‘for the newsreels’, and carries an antiquated box camera, despite this film being set in the early 1960s) is among the guests at this rare function, who, helpfully, are in the process of being briefed by Savini on the legend of The Green Archer - an emerald-hued avenger who is said to have fought against the house’s tyrannical medieval owners back in the 12th century, and whose spirit is now alleged to haunt the joint.

Quite why the aforementioned tyrannical owners chose to retain a statue of this irksome individual in their study is anyone’s guess, but… there ya go.

As the tour moves on, an elderly gentleman lingers, carefully examining the statue of the archer with an eyeglass. Shortly thereafter, the man turns up dead, with a bloody great green arrow sticking out of his back!

In true Krimi style, the other guests respond to this cold-blooded slaying with a mixture of amusement and mild annoyance, whilst a crash zoom brings us back into Arent’s confidence. “Yes, I think this will make a very nice movie,” he concludes.

Roll credits (featuring more rollickingly weird, Peter Thomas-esque music from the delightfully named Heinz Funk), and…. before we know it, we’re being haphazardly introduced to a bewildering multitude of loosely sketched out characters and sub-plots. Trying to keep track of what the hell is actually going on here in fact proves quite challenging, but, for the sake of this review, I’ll gird my loins and try to give it my best shot.

So, first of all, there’s this wealthy young man named John Wood (Heinz Weiss), who appears to have bought the abandoned building which sits opposite the gates to Garre Castle, with the intention of turning it into an orphanage. (“Bringing happiness to children is my greatest joy,” he exclaims, not at all suspiciously, shortly before we see his face reflected in a broken mirror.)

He is accompanied in this mission both by Valerie (the flawlessly beautiful Karin Dor), and by a silver-haired gent who appears to be her father, though the exact relationship between these three characters remains somewhat unclear. Valerie is apparently in desperate search of her biological mother, and believes (for reasons which also initially remain mysterious) that she can make progress in this direction by snooping around Garre Castle. As such, I suppose the implication must be that she is a former resident of one of the other orphanages administered by Weiss, and that the silver-haired fellow must be her adoptive father, but… who knows.

Anyway, Valerie also appears to be involved in secret tryst with one Mr LaMotte (top-billed Klausjürgen Wussow), whom we initially meet lurking around in a darkened room in her new home. It subsequently turns out though that he is actually a police inspector working undercover, and in this capacity he subsequently pops up, cunningly disguised behind a set of false whiskers, as a kind of handyman / wood carrier within the castle.

In doing so, he is replacing yet another ancillary character, an even shiftier, disgruntled handyman who some comes a-cropper, becoming the second latter-day victim of The Green Archer after inviting Arent’s reporter character back to his bungalow in, uh, Stanmore, apparently (hmm, someone’s been looking at the tube map, methinks) to dish the dirt on his employer.

This leads us on to the police contingent, sadly not headed up on this occasion not by everyone’s favourite playboy detective Joachim Fuchsberger or his principal Sir John, but by the rather more down-at-heel, fish-faced Inspector Higgins (Wolfgang Völz). He and his unequally unmemorable crew of underlings are of course soon all over Garre Castle like a rash, though they initially seem less intent on solving the attention-grabbing murder that has recently occurred there than they are on merely keeping tabs on the house’s errant and disreputable owner (of whom more later).

Meanwhile, there’s also this gargantuan, bald-headed fellow named ‘Coldharbour Smith’ knocking about. Resplendent in white suit and dark glasses, Coldharbour Smith (played by Stanislav Ledinek) runs “a disreputable nightclub down by the docks”, named ‘The Shanghai Bar’. (In a regrettably lazy touch, this more urban locale is introduced via stock footage of Piccadilly Circus - an area of London not notably close to any “docks”.)

Within the rather groovy, tiki-styled interior of the Shanghai Bar, we are introduced to an additional floozy (Edith Teichmann) whom, it transpires, is the wife of Julius Savini (you remember, the castle secretary guy), and who also appears to be somehow involved in… whatever the hell it is that may or may not be going on in or around Garre Castle.

Amidst this scattered and salty crew however, by far the most memorable character in the film turns out to be the aforementioned owner of the castle, Abel Bellamy (Gert Fröbe), who eventually arrives, disembarking from a flight at good ol’ London Airport, having apparently just spent some time over in the USA.

Indeed, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the German language track, Bellamy is meant to be FROM the USA, where he appears to made his name as a notorious, Al Capone-styled gangster who, for some reason, has bought himself a historic English manor house, where he wishes to live in privacy.

Fat chance of that however, as he is mobbed by a phalanx of reporters at the airport, firing questions at him about his unsavoury associations back in Chicago, and the murder which just took place on his property. A bullish and aggressive man whose Churchillian girth surpasses even that of Coldharbour Smith, Bellamy responds with rage, intimidation and violence - qualities which continue to define his interactions with pretty much everyone through the remainder of the movie.

Now, if you’re wondering how all of the above is able to coalesce into a coherent plotline, well… cards on the table, I haven’t the faintest idea. Simultaneously horrendously convoluted and hopelessly vague, Wolfgang Schnitzler and Wolfgang Menge’s adaptation of Wallace’s 1923 novel represents a singularly unsatisfactory example of the screenwriter’s art. (1)

In fact, by the time the thread of the narrative degenerates into a repetitive series of nocturnal creeping about, confinements and escapes during the latter half of the film, it’s probably best just to give up trying to figure things out, and just go with the flow.

After all, we have essentially got everything a Krimi fan could ask for at easy reach here. A creepy, ancient house full of labyrinthine corridors, complete with the inevitable secret passage leading down to a set of subterranean caverns; an over-stuffed cast of shifty, scheming oddballs; touches of urban modernity provided by nightclubs and gangsters; and, most importantly, some loon in a costume derived from a medieval spectre, running around murdering extraneous characters in a suitably outlandish manner.

Jürgen Roland’s direction is… decent. Though he lacks the attention-grabbing eccentricity of Alfred Vohrer or the pulp kineticism of Harald Reinl, he nonetheless utilises some stylish framing here, revelling in the pleasures of cramped, chaotic, multi-layered compositions, perhaps mirroring the film’s tangled plotting. He rarely fails to arrange the all-too-numerous figures on-screen into interesting patterns anyway, throwing in plenty of nice, looming foreground objects and subtle, gliding camera moves to keep things lively whilst he’s at it.

He is greatly aided in this by both Heinz Hölscher’s top notch black and white photography, and Mathias Matthies & Ellen Schmidt’s splendid production design, which incorporates many of those neat little props and macabre oddities found in all the best Rialto Krimis. (The skull and crossbones flag appended to castle gates to warn of an electric fence, the arm of the archer statue serving as the secret passage lever and the scurvy stuffed monkey in the interior of the bar, provide just a few examples).

The cast do solid work too, on the whole. I found Arent a lot less annoying here than in some other films in the series (or, perhaps I’m just gradually warming up to his unique comic stylings, god help me). Dor meanwhile is absolutely radiant, and Frobe certainly makes an impression as perpetually furious Abel Bellamy (both he and Ledinek’s Coldharbour Smith prove great heavies).

It’s a shame then, that - as I may have already mentioned once or twice - the film’s egregious scripting deficiencies mean that none of these qualities ever quite gel together the way they should.

Despite providing a fair amount of ambient / aesthetic enjoyment, ‘The Green Archer’ eventually sinks under weight of its own convolutions, combined with a lack of any fully sympathetic or charismatic characters, and a failure to deliver anything truly memorable or outlandish.

Most egregiously, The Green Archer himself is given very little to do, ultimately playing only a minor role in proceedings. A decision seems to have been taken to keep the phantom bowman either entirely off-screen or confined to the shadows, which strikes me as a very bad move. After all, the titular evil-doers in Monk with a Whip or The Face of the Frog weren’t at all shy about turning up to wreak on-camera havoc on a regular basis, lending a sense of berserk surrealism to proceedings which is sorely missed here.

That said though, after dragging rather dreadfully through its middle half hour, ‘The Green Archer’ does at least come to life a bit in its final ten minutes, briefly descending into all-out chaos as Abel Bellamy launches all-out war against the men of Scotland Yard, who are attempting to lay siege to his castle.

Suddenly, we’ve got machine guns blazing, detectives brandishing fizzing, cartoon-style bombs, half the remaining cast desperately trying to escape from one of those classic rapidly flooding dungeons, Eddi Arent roaring around in a weird little car… and all is right with the world.

This is all topped off with my favourite bit of ersatz-English weirdness in the film, which occurs during the the closing wrap-up scene, where we find a burly police constable moving between the shell-shocked survivors, sternly offering them “TEA WITH RUM” - a hearty beverage which seems to perfectly capture the essence of this uniquely odd sub-genre, and which I will henceforth make a point of enjoying each time I brave a visit to Krimi-land.

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(1)Quoth IMDB trivia: “The producers originally wanted Wolfgang Schnitzler to become on of the regular writers of their Edgar Wallace Series. When Schnitzler’s script of this film was re-written by Jürgen Roland’s regular screenwriter Wolfgang Menge, Schnitzler was displeased and decided to leave the series.”

Krimi Casebook: The Hunchback of Soho (Alfred Vohrer, 1966)

There’s nothing quite like movies which present a mythic/fantastical/completely absurd take on places quite near to where you live, is there? (“Have you seen ‘The Hunchback of Soho’?”, “Seen ‘im? I think I bought him a pint down The White Horse last week!”, etc.)

In fact, this is probably the element which most appeals to me above all about the West German Edgar Wallace ‘Krimi’ films spearheaded by Copenhagen-based Rialto Film - their bizarre conception of a phantasmagorical England that feels like an amalgam of the 1960s and 1890s, defined by strangulations in fog-choked, cobblestoned alleyways, sinister rendezvous in neon-lit, subterranean speakeasies and elaborate tea parties in gothic manor houses, all of which are liable to be interrupted at any moment by dapper, pipe-smoking detectives as they break down the plywood doors (probably using an oversized umbrella), enunciating that cry guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of all rapscallions and ne’erdo wells, “SCOTLAND YARD!”.

Despite its magnificent title however, there is sadly little Soho ambience (either real or imagined) to be found within Alfred Vohrer’s ‘Der Bucklige von Soho’, even as it opens in attention-grabbing fashion with the titular hunchback committing exactly the kind of back alley strangling described above, callously throttling a young lady in black lingerie and high heels as she flees from what appears to be another one of those sinister nightclub-brothels which seem to proliferate in Krimi London.

In fact, the vast majority of this caper takes place on a series of interior sets, variously representing the opulent drawing room of the elderly General & Lady Peabody, the authoritarian religious school for wayward girls which they sponsor, the secret subterranean workhouse / villain lair within which the criminally-minded proprietors of said school conduct their dastardly business, and the casino-cum-nightclub wherein the imprisoned girls are put to work as dancers / hostesses.

All of these locations seem to be inter-connected in a way that I never fully understood, allowing characters to move between them as if they were merely popping between rooms, and thus largely doing away with the need for exteriors, beyond the aforementioned alleyway set and a few stock shots of police cars zooming around Westminster and Piccadilly. Efficient though this must have been from a production perspective however, it lends the film a rather claustrophobic, repetitious feel which doesn’t necessarily serve it well.

Achieving a delicate balance between illogic and boredom, the plot here is likewise a bit sub-par, rehashing elements of Vohrer’s earlier, arguably definitive, krimi The Dead Eyes of London (1961, itself a loose remake of the similarly-named 1939 Bela Lugosi movie), with a distinct sense of diminishing returns. The familiar material is given a bit of a Women in Prison makeover this time around, making it feel reminiscent at times of Pete Walker’s later ‘House of Whipcord’ (1974) – albeit,  a somewhat softer, more innocent variation on the scenario in which the doddering elderly couple remain blissfully unaware of the kinky depredations being perpetrated below stairs, or in the dungeon, or round the corner, or wherever the heck the ‘school’ is supposed to be in relation to their house.

Though the perennial theme of girls being kept imprisoned against their will is explored in abundantly suggestive fashion here, the film’s mid-‘60s production date ensures that the floodgates to full-on sleaze remain closed, with the obligatory lechery and low-key sadism presented in a prim, buttoned down fashion that, ironically, makes it all feel far more icky and perverse than would have been the case if they’d just thrown in a bit of good ol’ no nonsense nudity and brawling to relieve the tension.

So, no shower scenes, cat-fights or lesbian frolics here, but we instead get to enjoy such curious sights as the imprisoned girls being forced to sing jaunty hymns against their will, and – in probably the film’s weirdest tableau – a newly captured heiress in elegant evening wear being thrown on the filthy floor of the ‘workhouse’ set and doused with a hosepipe by the leering hunchback, whilst the other girls toil on around her, paying no mind.

Earlier in the ‘60s, Vohrer had established himself as by far the most inventive and accomplished director on Rialto’s payroll, but unfortunately his work proves disappointingly pedestrian here, suggesting that he was either working under greater time and budgetary pressures than usual, or was simply dog tired of making these damned things.

As such, uninterrupted master shots tend to predominate, and the bizarre stylistic experiments which proved so memorable in Vohrer’s earlier films are notable by their absence. No shots taken from the POV of a newspaper, or from the interior of someone’s mouth, here, sadly. About the best we get are a few strangling and/or gun-wielding hands looming into frame from the bottom left, comic book style. A nice touch, but pretty trad, dad, by the wacky standards set by Vohrer’s earlier work.

Meanwhile, ‘Hunchback..’ suffers further from the absence of the majority of the group of actors I’ve come to think of as the “Krimi gang”. Although Siegfried Schürenberg returns as the perpetually flustered ‘Sir John’ (a role he played in over a dozen Wallace adaptations), big hotters like Dieter Eppler, Werner Peters, Karin Dor and Klaus Kinski were all AWOL for this one - as, regrettably, was our usual dashing silver fox, Joachim Fuchsberger.

In his absence, Günther Stoll (who for some reason would later go on to corner the market in Italian-German giallo/krimi crossovers, appearing in Dallamano’s ‘What Have They Done to Solange?’ (1972), Duccio Tessari’s ‘The Bloodstained Butterfly’ (1971) and Freda’s ‘Double Face’ (1969)) steps into the obligatory suave, pipe-smoking detective role, but, despite a peculiar bit of comedic business about him doing his laundry, Stoll lacks that patented Fuchsberger charm; as a result, he is assigned relatively little screen-time and ultimately proves a bit of a non-entity.

One familiar presence we cannot escape here though is, naturally, that of ubiquitous funnyman Eddi Arent, although mericfully, his role actually takes quite an interesting turn during the film’s second half, as he ditches his usual ‘finickety, simpering choirmaster’ shtick, donning mirror shades as he reveals that that persona was actually nothing more than cover for his true identity as a dastardly criminal mastermind overseeing the whole ‘white slavery’ operation – a role which he throws himself into with hard-edged gusto .

There is, however, no shortage of gratuitous comic relief to be found elsewhere, between a bungling, short-sighted solicitor, the delusional General Peabody perpetually re-living WWII tank battles, and the aforementioned Sir John. Together, these over-enunciating oddballs conspire to make sections of ‘The Hunchback of Soho’ pretty tough sledding, especially as the English fan-subs on the version of the film I watched did little to preserve the no doubt uproarious phrasing and comic timing of their high-pitched German exclamations.

I swear, during one drawing room tea party scene which united all of these characters, plus Arent in his comic persona, I thought I’d died and become trapped in some kind of particularly fiendish purgatory. It was only the sight of the generous platter of shortbread and bourbon biscuits they were enjoying alongside their Earl Grey which kept me going, together with pondering the political ramifications of a West German film which presents a retired British general as a bumbling, senile buffoon with a tendency to end sentences with things like, “..and that’s why we won the war!”.

On the plus side, ‘Hunchback..’ has the distinction of being the first Krimi made in colour, and I must say, they did a very good job of it too, capturing that very specific, mid-‘60s grungy/atmospheric pseudo-Technicolor look in which deep pools of black contrast with vast swatches of brown and dark green and intermittent blasts of bright red, lending the film a visual depth which, if it’s not quite up to the standard of Hammer’s pre-’66 gothic horrors, at least compares favourably to some of their more handsome imitators.

By far the best thing here though is Peter Thomas’s characteristically hellzapoppin’ score, which arguably proves more exciting than anything which actually transpires on screen, beginning with a title theme that takes the “hoo, hah” backing vocals from Sam Cooke’s ‘Chain Gang’ down for a beating in some subterranean, reverb-drenched hell, before proceeding to take us on a chamber-of-musical-horrors tour incorporating bulbous, Residents-esque discordo-jazz, spidery, Ventures-at-Halloween surf guitar and assorted screams and wails of the damned, all set to a persistent pulse of thunderous caveman drumming.

I know that Thomas has something of a cult rep amongst the more shadowy corners of the soundtrack/library collectors world, but seriously, has anyone ever reissued the music he recorded for these Krimis..? If not, they really should. It’s completely out to lunch, some of the wildest, most errant aural craziness I’ve ever heard crow-barred into a motion picture (this side of the Indian sub-continent, at least), and I’m sure it would go down a storm with whatever remains of the garage punk/exotica contingent.

That aside though, I’m afraid ‘The Hunchback of Soho’ is, on every level, a disappointment. In addition to featuring very little Soho, it even has the audacity to give us a FAKE hunchback, if you can believe that. Richard Haller, who portrays Harry the hunchback here, proves a pale imitation of Ady Berber’s unforgettable turn in ‘The Dead Eyes of London’, and yes, in the final reel, Stoller pulls aside his jacket to reveal a false hump! Hopeless. (Though it must be said, the mystery of quite why this guy found it necessary to go around pretending to be a drooling hunchback 24/7 proves far more perplexing than anything in the film’s ostensible plotline.)

In spite of the novelty of colour and a somewhat higher sleaze quotent than was permitted for entries earlier in the decade then, we must sadly chalk this one up as weak tea for Krimi enthusiasts, and a total write-off for any viewers hoping to make a sideways move into the genre from straight horror. It’s a perfectly reasonable time-killer, and nice to look at, but really - only completists, WIP historians, Peter Thomas archivists or the terminally bored need knock upon this door.

Krimi Casebook: Der Hexer (Alfred Vohrer, 1964)

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to settle down with a ‘Krimi’, but earlier this month I was suddenly struck with an urge to check in on Rialto Films long-running series of ‘60s West German Edgar Wallace adaptations, and 1964’s ‘Der Hexer’ (offered up to English-speaking audiences at some point under the far less enticing title of ‘The Mysterious Magician’) fit the bill nicely.

As might well be expected from a Wallace film, our Hexer / magician here is not an actual magician (of either genuine or stage variety) but instead a wily, Fantomas-type super-criminal. In keeping with this, ‘Der Hexer’ leans strongly toward the part of the ‘60s pop cinema venn diagram that sees the aesthetic of the krimi cross over with the more whimsical end of the era’s Eurospy / ‘moving comic book’ sub-genres, as exemplified by the ‘OSS 117’ and ‘Fantomas’ movies being overseen by André Hunebelle in France at around this time. Nonetheless though, director Alfred Vohrer still manages to cram in a few gothic flourishes along the way.

This melange of styles can be clearly seen in the film’s super-pulpy shock opening, which sees a solicitor’s foxy secretary shrieking as she is overpowered by a pointy-shoed assailant, before we cut directly to a view of her lifeless body, apparently enclosed within what looks to be a groovy little two-man submarine! This sub, it transpires, is being pushed beneath the water of what seems to be some kind of vaulted, subterranean drainage chamber, by an imposing, barge-pole wielding man who bears a passing resemblance to a young Boris Karloff.

Cue the credits, which in true krimi style crash suddenly into full colour (lurid, blood-dripping red lettering against a swirling, blue-and-green-tinted proto-psychedelic backdrop), accompanied by a frankly demented, reverb-drenched spookshow garage-rock theme tune from the reliably weird Peter Thomas. (Seriously, it’s got whips, chains, gun shots, orgasmic moans and cries of terror thrown into the mix – absolutely bonkers!)

I don’t know about you, but three minutes in and I’m confident that this movie is going be pretty great.

Once the movie-proper beings, a prototype swinging London / mod type vibe seems to be in play as we follow a beautifully turned out, mod-ish young blonde lady (Elise, played by Sophie Hardy) as she trades barbs with a revealingly attired, curvy young secretary (Finnish starlet Anneli Sauli, returning from Vohrer’s The Dead Eyes of London) in what, rather unexpectedly, turns out to be the office of a senior police officer.

Who could it be of course but that rakish silver fox himself, Joachim Fuchsberger, appearing here in the role of the dapper Inspector Higgins, a man clearly intent on shakin’ the dust off those other squares in Scotland Yard!

Chief target in the dust-shakin’ department is Higgins’ blustering superior Sir John (recurring krimi authority figure Siegfried Schürenberg), and through the antagonistic banter between the two, we soon learn that the girl whose body has been found washed up on the bank of the Thames was one Gwenda Milton of 17 Barkley St, London, and that her brother, currently based in Australia, is none other than Henry Milton, better known as that most notorious of villains… Der Hexer!

Time for a quick cut, and we find mention of that name putting the very fear of god into Jochen Brockmann, that seedy fat guy who appears in all krimis, working his usual magic here as Herr Messer, the unsavoury solicitor for whom the dead girl worked as secretary.

Messer, it turns out, is actually running a white slavery ring in cahoots with that Karloff-looking guy (Carl Lange) and a couple of other, similarly salty characters. (Hilariously, Messer keeps the door control for the secret passage in his office inside a bear skin hanging on his wall –the bear’s eyes flash when someone in the secret passage wants to be let in.)

In a direct call-back to the aforementioned ‘Dead Eyes of London’, this crew are orchestrating their devious operation using a rather scary, Victorian girls finishing school as a front. There’s even a Suspiria-esque monster-matron, and Lange is the headmaster. Having realised that they’ve just gone and accidentally killed Der Hexer’s sister for getting too close to their dark secrets though, the gang are one petrified bunch of nogoodniks, as they await his inevitable retribution.

So far, this film is clearly turning out to be far too much fun, and so, with a perfectly timed “guten tag gentlemen”, enter Eddi Arent, all-purpose dispenser of krimi comic relief, this time around playing a kleptomaniac-turned-butler named Archibald Finch.

Fear not though - as irritating as Arent’s initial “oh dear, poor old me, I can’t help but swipe things as soon as people turn their back” routine may be, ‘Der Hexer’ benefits from a relatively thin spread of his comic stylings. For some reason, his character entirely disappears for long stretch in the film’s central half hour, and when he does reappear, he is on his best behaviour, having become a lot more interesting following the revelation that his character has actually been planted in Messer’s hideout as a spy for Der Hexer.

Meanwhile, the film’s count of attractive, self-confident women with mod haircuts is further increased when Der Hexer’s wife (Margot Trooger) arrives in town for her sister-in-law’s funeral (taking place in “London’s central cemetery”, wherever that is). Certain that her husband must be lurking nearby, Fuchsberger is soon in hot pursuit, accompanied by his new partner in the investigation, Inspektor Warren (Siegfried Lowitz), a mercurial retired detective who has returned to Scotland Yard to take advantage of the opportunity to finally apprehend his arch-nemesis.

Whilst hassling Mrs Derr Hexer in a hotel lobby however, Inspektor Higgins also makes the acquaintance of a curious chap named James Wesby (Heinz Drache), an affable Australian crime writer who is also on the trail of Der Hexer, meaning that he often makes a habit of turning up in close proximity to the villain’s nefarious acts. Hmmm, I wonder….

Whilst this rather hum-drum “who’s the baddie?” plotline works itself through however, the film is at pains to ensure we remain sufficiently entertained, throwing in some delightful bits of comic book hijinks on a fairly regular basis.

After an evening spent horsing around in Elise’s flat for instance, Inspektors Higgins and Wilson set off on a frantic rooftop chase, in pursuit of some sinister, black-clad intruder. As smoke billows from dozens of huge, stone chimneys, I almost expected Dick Van Dyke to pop in for a cameo, but more than anything else the imagery harks back to those founding texts of the Euro-pulp aesthetic, Louis Feuillade’s silent-era ‘Fantomas’ and ‘Les Vampires’ serials – a comparison which also springs to mind when we visit the hideout of Messer’s smuggling operation, located beneath a trap door in the dusty, wine-barrel filled storeroom of an old manor house.

Meanwhile, it almost goes without saying by this point that the mysterious black-gloved killer who spends much of this movie creeping around the place throttling people feels like a direct precursor to the conventions of the giallo which would soon take root in Italy’s popular cinema.

(Lest we forget, Mario Bava’s epochal ‘Blood & Black Lace’ came out in the same year as ‘Der Hexer’, and was produced under the assumption that it would be presented to West German audiences as a Wallace film. The murder sequences here certainly bear a passing similarity to the kind of lurid set-pieces Bava would oversee in full colour in his film… although sadly he nixed the submarine.)

In another sign of things to come, ‘Der Hexer’ also dares to get just a little bit more kinky than we might have expected, given it’s year of production. This is largely due to the presence of Sophie Hardy, who appears here in full-on, raging sex kitten mode, even indulging in a salacious shower scene has her revealing some luscious bare back before asking Fuchsberger to dry her off. Lengthy scenes in which the pair fool around (fully clothed) on her bed, drinks in hand, meanwhile are suggestive of a dissolute lifestyle unbecoming of yr average early ‘60s movie hero… especially in view of an earlier, rather edgy, visual gag that revolves around Fuchsberger using the darkroom in his office to develop dirty pictures of his secretary.

Elsewhere, ‘SNAKE KILLS MAN’ reads the billboard behind a super-imposed Trafalgar Square newspaper vendor, foreshadowing another great bit of business which sees a nefarious villain hiding poisonous snakes in the pockets of our heroes’ overcoats whilst they dine at a restaurant.

Other highlights meanwhile include a moody and violent scene in which the policeman guarding the submarine tank after it has been secured by the cops is dragged into the water and knifed by a sinister frogman (shades of both 1965’s krimi-ish gothic horror The Embalmer and actual frogman-related krimi ‘The Inn On The River’ (1962))… and then, there’s the genuinely rather astonishing shot in which we see a grand country house being dynamited (it doesn’t look like a model shot).

A restlessly imaginative director with a distinctly whimsical sense of style, Alfred Vohrer certainly does his utmost to keep things lively here. At certian points, I suspect Vohrer is deliberately having fun with the kind of artificial studio backdrops necessitated by low budget productions; the view from Fuchsberger’s office window for example, rather than stock photo of London, displays some boldly sketched, cartoon-like rooftops, whilst some of the doors and windows in Messer’s office set are clearly painted directly onto the walls. A nice use of budgetary limitations to create an amusing, somewhat post-modern effect, this can also perhaps be observed in shots which see exterior ‘brick’ walls clearly chalked onto flat black set dividers.

Vohrer also employs some amusing business with moving figures being followed through holes in newspapers (in shots taken from the POV of snoopers observing them), and with extreme close ups of said holes being burned in the papers by cigarettes. (If nothing else, this stylistic quirk at least proves that the production went to the trouble of acquiring genuine British newspapers – ‘RESCUE BY SHRIMP BOAT’ is the unlikely headline in the Daily Mail.)

At one point, the director even attempts to top his audacious “POV from interior of mouth as man cleans his teeth” shot from ‘The Dead Eyes of London’, with a shot purportedly taken from inside a rotary telephone as a character dials a number.

(Although the sheer eccentricity of these “impossible POV” experiments remains unique to my knowledge within European pop cinema, you could, at a stretch, perhaps draw a line to Dario Argento’s later fondness for employing “impossible” camera placements – of an admittedly far less ridiculous variety - within his work.)

In spite of all this fun and games however, ‘Der Hexer’ finally flags somewhat in its final act. The story’s Big Plot Twist can be seen coming a mile off, and the decision to go with one of those dreary ‘whodunnit’-style finales in which the cast stand around en masse explaining the finer details of the plot to each other in lieu of any action, is regrettable.

Although it eventually comes up short on the kind of sadistic, baroque and surreal elements which have increasingly endeared krimis to horror fans in recent years though, ‘Der Hexer’ is still a ton of pulpy 60s fun – a richly atmospheric romp which mixes swinging spy movie tropes with exquisitely moody black & white photography, some startling moments of violence and weirdness, a top-line cast of krimi regulars (Klaus Kinski’s absence notwithstanding) and characteristically idiosyncratic and stylish direction from Vohrer.

It’s probably not the film I’d select as an initial introduction to the krimi oeuvre, but if you’ve already “got the bug” with regard these movies and find yourself in the mood for a kooky caper in the vein of Franco’s Attack of the Robots or one of those ‘60s Dr Mabuse movies, ‘Der Hexer’ should do the job nicely.

Krimi Casebook: Das Verrätertor / ‘Traitor’s Gate’ (Freddie Francis, 1964)

BLOGGER’S NOTE: It was actually a complete coincidence that I had this post, which discusses the intricacies of a curious Anglo-German co-production, scheduled to appear on the day of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union. As a strong believer in co-operation between nation states, open borders and the breaking down of cultural & economic boundaries, I’m unsure at the time of writing whether I’ll be weeping tomorrow morning or merely putting the whole sorry mess behind me and moving on, but – checks watch – I believe there’s still time to get to the polls today, so would urge all UK citizens reading to please consider rejecting petty nationalism and doing the decent thing. And hey, why not let this tale of zany Germans running around idyllic 1960s London waving guns about guide your hand..? (Ok, maybe not.)

[Political mithering ends. / Movie review begins.]

By late 1964, Copenhagen-based Rialto films had been churning out Edgar Wallace ‘krimis’ for the West German market for nearly five years, and had released no less than seventeen entries in the loosely connected series.

Given this level of productivity, and the creative burnout it must inevitably have incurred in the studio’s small stable of writers, directors and actors, it makes sense that someone in Rialto’s boardroom must have sat up one day and realised that the film industry in the UK – where all of these films were ostensibly set – also boasted its own, equally efficient, genre movie production line, as exemplified in particular by Hammer studios, whose unprecedented international success in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s could scarcely be ignored by other European producers.

Perhaps those fuzzy stock shots of Big Ben and Trafalgar Square were starting to get a bit ragged, or constantly redressing those ‘Scotland Yard office’ and ‘cobbled East End back street’ sets was getting a bit tedious - or perhaps Joachim Fuchsberger and Harald Reinl just REALLY needed a holiday - but whatever the reason, feelers were extended, hands shaken, and when ‘Das Verrätertor’, the 18th entry in Rialto’s Wallace series, went into production, it did so in actual, real life London, with Freddie Francis (fresh off ‘The Evil of Frankenstein’) in the director’s chair, and a script provided (under a pseudonym) by Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster.

Sadly, the eventual result of all this bold co-productionin’ sass is an odd mish-mash that basically plays out as if a few of the more distinctive faces from the ‘krimi gang’ (Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent) had accidentally blundered into a mediocre British thriller in which everyone inexplicably speaks German - but nevertheless, it is not without its merits, and it remains vaguely interesting as a historical curio, at the very least. (1)

Things certainly get off to a good start, with an edgily shot prison break from a joint that I suppose is supposed to be Dartmoor (eventual destination of all krimi ne’erdowells). Bleak, wide angle overhead shots are here mixed with juddering, handheld footage and a tense, mod jazz soundtrack, as our protagonist (British actor Gary Raymond) scrabbles across scrubland with armed guards in close pursuit, only to find himself rescued by a Luger-toting Kinski, who ushers him into a waiting helicopter in which the pair make their getaway.

Back in London however, it soon becomes clear that this going to be another one of those creaky old “plan to steal The Crown Jewels” type heist capers, with all the discussions of alarm systems, guard duty rotas and unspeakably tedious footage of Beefeaters trooping about exchanging keys that that invariably entails.

Perhaps this might have all carried a bit more of a sense of novelty to German audiences than it does to us Brits, but it’s more likely that ‘Das Verrätertor’ simply suffers the kind of narrative structure that – much like that of the routine whodunit – has withered particularly badly under the glare of our somewhat different 21st century entertainment expectations.

I mean, first off, hands up who really gives two shits about the Crown Jewels? I suppose back in the ‘60s they probably still carried a certain mystique and cultural importance vis-à-vis British identity and so on, but now… well, you tell me when concern for their security last crossed your mind. And do any of us *really* care that much about the rather routine and unsurprising methods by which some fictional crooks might go about stealing them..?

No, what we really want to see in a story like this is the excitement that ensues during the after the heist, as things go wrong and people get hurt, as the perpetrators flee the law and double-cross each other, and so on. The jewels themselves should be little more than a McGuffin to set up the human drama. Unfortunately though, this is a point that Sangster and Francis (and perhaps Wallace, assuming anything in this yarn can actually be traced back to him) largely fail to appreciate, instead choosing to take us again and again through the not-terribly-riveting aspects of the gang’s planning whilst saving the big jewel-grab itself for the final reel.

Normally, Sangster was a writer who could be relied upon to put a cynical new twist on the formulaic genre material he was assigned to work on, but, perhaps playing it safe for a co-production aimed at an overseas audience, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ is an uncharacteristically bland effort, hitting the expected beats of its plotline with nary a trace of surprise or innovation. (A shame, as the twisted aesthetic of the krimis might in other circumstance have made for a perfect match with the black humour and imagination of Sangster’s better writing.)

Elsewhere in the film, Eddi Arent pops up as – I bet you never saw this one coming - a bungling German tourist, who gets inadvertently involved in the heist gang’s plans when, in the course of his day-to-day bungling, he accidentally visits a pleasantly authentic-looking Soho strip joint, the “Dandy Club”, wherein he witnesses triggerman Kinski doing away with a snitch – the gunshots muffled by the drummer in the house band playing a roll on the snare.

Slickly staged by Francis, this episode is just as much fun as it sounds, and indeed, there are some lovely bits of authentic London street footage to enjoy here too, largely shot around Piccadilly and Soho, all of which serves to make the corresponding passages of ‘changing of the guards’ / ‘buggering about with the beefeaters’ type material go down a little easier. (2)

In fact, Francis’ direction is probably the film’s strongest suit. He keeps things brisk and visually interesting through even the dullest stretches, occasionally experimenting with bold techniques and stylish moments which, it must be said, do not really equate to anything found in the British horror films he was directing at around the same time. This leads me to wonder whether he was in fact simply following the dictats of his producers in tailoring the look of the film to fit Rialto’s preferred “house style”, incorporating the kind of tricks (wide angle and deep focus shots, use of on-screen camera lens and mirrors, handheld shots and the like) that we have previously attributed to ‘krimi’ specialists like Reinl and Alfred Vohrer.

As you might have expected given the plot-line, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ features absolutely none of the macabre or fantastical elements that have livened up the others krimis we’ve thus far examined in this review strand, but as a straight-down-the-line crime caper, it is executed with what must have passed for a somewhat glamorous, high-tech sheen in 1964, exhibiting a particular fascination for camera lenses, telescopes, hidden tape recorders, clocks and so forth, verging momentarily into the realm of total ridiculousness for one particularly enjoyable moment in which the film’s heroine falls afoul of a specially modified taxi that fills the back-seat with knockout gas at a simple button push from the driver.

For the most part however, ‘Das Verrätertor’ is disappointingly down to earth. Presumably due to the fact that it was actually made in the UK with the participation of British personnel, the “bizarro world London” flavour that gave films like ‘Dark Eyes of London’ such a unique, out-of-time atmosphere is entirely lacking here, as the more buttoned down, English way of doing business vis-à-vis low budget thrillers leaves us instead with a far more quote-unquote “realistic” portrayal of London in 1964, completely devoid of psychotic masked villains, knife-wielding vagabonds, subterranean gangster hideouts, blood-thirsty fetishized murders and the like, although the presence of Kinski does at least bring a hint of this kind of thing to the table.

Spending much of his time obsessively licking his fingers and dispassionately threatening people with guns as only he can, one particularly surreal scene back-stage at the aforementioned strip joint sees Klaus lurking about near the head of a pantomime horse, whose teeth he at one point pretends to examine. In fact, I’d say that Kinski’s presence alone makes ‘Das Verrätertor’ worth seeking out, were it not for the fact that the unspeakable bastard made so many other films through the ‘60s in which he similarly delivers the goods, making such completism unnecessary for any but the most dedicated fans of his unique brand of strangely hilarious psychopathic menace.

Above and beyond the various drawbacks I have outlined above, there is one central fault that I feel stops ‘Traitor’s Gate’ from overcoming them and hitting home as a decent bit of entertainment, and that is the fact that no one else in the film is remotely interesting. With the exception of Kinski and Arent (who are both basically just goofing on their established screen personas), there is not a single character here who will stick in your mind after viewing – in fact I can barely remember a thing about any of them, and I watched this damn thing twice for review purposes.

A far cry from the sweaty-palmed blackmailers, seedy servants and playboy detectives we expect to find rounding out a krimi cast-list, in ‘Das Verrätertor’, the crooks, the innocent lead couple whom the persecute and the cops who peruse them barely have two character traits to rub together, and the blandly professional cast play out their assigned roles within the story as if they were simply experiencing a mildly stressful day working in an insurance office.

As a result, there is simply no suspense, and nothing beyond the occasional nice shot or visual flourish to even keep us awake. Will the heist succeed or not? Will the crooks be brought to justice? What do we even care, when we barely know enough about anyone concerned to decide who we should cheer or boo?

Though the film’s production values and technical credits are solid and the Rialto crew do their best to entertain, it is easy to conclude that ‘Traitor’s Gate’ – which remains one of the more obscure entries within the already obscure krimi canon - has been lost to history for good reason, relevant only to genre historians seeking an easy explanation for the reasons why the rich possibilities for Anglo-German krimi co-productions were never really followed up. (3)

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(1) According to IMDB, Rialto’s only production partner on ‘Traitor’s Gate’ was an outfit named “Summit”, and my assumption is that this must be said company’s only known venture into the film industry, given that IMDB lumps them in with a US distributor of the same name who have no credits prior to 1983.  (Actually, it’s a fair bet that the IMDB page in question amalgamates the credits of at least three different companies, but it’s scarcely our business to complain about that here.)

(2) Outside of central London, one particularly lovely establishing shot captures the riverside beer garden of the London Apprentice pub in Ilseworth, Middlesex, which remains largely unchanged to this day.

(3) In so far as I can tell, only other Rialto krimi to feature significant UK input was 1966’s The Trygon Factor, which was directed by Cyril Frankel (‘The Witches’, ‘Never Take Sweets From A Stranger’) and starred Stewert Granger and Robert Morley. Again, no actual UK production partner is listed, and I’m not aware of the film being much of a hit on either side of the channel.

Krimi Casebook: Der Schwarze Abt / ‘The Black Abbot’ (F.J. Gottlieb, 1963)

I don’t know whether or not anti-clerical sentiment played a role in Edgar Wallace’s writing, but it certainly seems to run rampant in Rialto Films’ series of 1960s Wallace adaptations, to an extent that goes above and beyond the blanket cynicism with which these films treat all forms of human endeavour. Even aside from the assorted crooked priests who tend to lurk around the corners of krimis as secondary characters, my own relatively small krimi library already includes such titles as ‘The Sinister Monk’, ‘Monk With A Whip’, and tonight’s feature presentation, ‘The Black Abbot’.

In contrast to the two ‘urban’ krimis we’ve looked at thus far in this review strand (#1, #2), ‘The Black Abbot’ provides an example of another major genre variant – the ‘country estate’ krimi. The estate in question on this occasion is Chelford Manor, wherein a casual visitor (assuming such a thing can possibly exist in krimi-world) could easily mistake the suave Dick Alford (Joachim Fuchsberger) for the house’s dashing young scion. Certainly, Dick seems to enjoy cultivating an aristocratic demeanor, sporting tweeds, plus-fours and an ever-present pipe as he spends a leisurely afternoon riding across the estate’s grounds in the company of – AHEM - Lord Chelford’s far younger fiancée (Grit Boettcher). Generally striding around as if he owns the place, Dick very much giving the impression that his inheritance is already ‘in the bag’, as it were, pending perhaps only one or two snags (of the living, breathing variety, natch).

As we soon learn though, the only position Mr. Alford actually holds within the estate than that of a humble ‘administrator’ (oh, the shame of it), hired by the still-very-much-alive-and-kicking Lord Chelford (Dieter Borsche) to attend to the day to day running of the house, whilst he concentrates upon his (apparently entirely obsessive) research into his family history.

In fact, far from the bed-ridden vegetable or weak-minded has-been common to this kind of “who’s got the will?” scenario, Lord Chelford is actually quite an intimidating figure, in spite of his preference for solitude – a bitter cynic whose approach to life epitomizes the old “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you” adage - thus making him perfectly adapted for survival in the back-stabbing world of the krimi.

In spite of Alford’s persistent attempts to convince Chelford that he is mentally unbalanced, insisting the old boy avoids undue excitement and trying to dull his senses via the dubious medicinal cocktails proffered by white-haired Dr Loxom (Friedrich Schoenfelder), the Lord wisely consigns these concoctions to the wastepaper basket as soon as his would-be ‘keepers’ are out of sight, before returning immediately to his painstaking investigations into the precise nature – and, more to the point, location – of (you knew it was coming) the legendary horde of treasure said to exist somewhere within the walls of the estate.

Whilst Lord Chelford is evidently very much on the ball vis-a-vis his assumption that these rumours of hidden riches will inevitably attract all manner of unwelcome and acquisitive interlopers toward his estate, his canny policy of universal suspicion has sadly been somewhat undermined by his poor staffing policy. Not only does he now have the unbridled ambition of Dick Alford to contend with, but Klaus Kinski, “fresh from a long stretch in Dartmoor Prison”, no less, has recently been appointed as the family butler, which can’t possibly be a good idea, let’s face it.

If you’re wondering where the titular Black Abbot fits into all this, well, naturally he is the ghostly spectre said to stand guard over the Chelford Treasure. If you were to guess at this point that the Abbot will turn out to be comprised of more solid flesh & blood than his ghostly rep would suggest, you’d be spot-on, and if you were to suggest that perhaps he might soon be returning to his old stomping ground to begin clobbering any suspicious characters found wandering around the estate after dark, you’d be doubly spot-on. And, this being a krimi, if you’ve got an inkling that by the end of the movie there will most likely be multiple Black Abbots running around contributing to the clobbering, you’d be, well - triply spot-on I suppose.

I’m unsure whether any real life Abbots ever wore the kind of identity-concealing black executioner’s hood favoured by the Black Abbot, but… who cares, frankly. It makes a perfectly sinister outfit for a movie heavy, especially with the addition of robes that, conveniently, remain sufficiently loose and voluminous to potentially hide the figures of just about any of our human cast members.

Predictably, our involvement in this whole mess begins at the moment the first body hits the ground. Do we ever get the back story on who the victim was? I’m not sure. Does it really matter? Point is, Lord Chelford, Dick and Klaus are all observed by each other furtively sneaking back to the house shortly after the deed is done, and so propriety demands that a call be placed to The Yard – much to the annoyance of all three of them, I should imagine.

Eagle-browed Detective Puddler (Charles Regnier) is soon on the scene, and it is with a sense of crushing inevitability that I must tell you he has also brought along one Horatio W. Smith (Eddi Arent), a bow-tied tosspot with a habit of constantly speaking about himself in the third person, thus insuring that ‘The Black Abbot’s allotted quota of comic relief is delivered with all the finesse of lumpy gravy from a college canteen.

As the plot proceeds to thicken quicker than the aforementioned gravy, the usual assortment of suspicious coves soon emerge from the woodwork to make their play for the loot – creepy-yet-pathetic Werner Peters and the spiv-ish Harry Wüstenhagen foremost amongst them – whilst Lord C’s gold-digging sister (Eva Ingeborg Scholz) simultaneously faces competition in the feminine wiles stakes from the mysteriously resurrected Lady Chelford (Alice Treff), who has seemly emerged from her tomb to wander the ground at night, as a somewhat less lethal counterpart to our hooded menace. Before long, fragments of a newly unearthed treasure map are in circulation amongst the cast, and, well… I hope you brought your hoods kids, for there is much clobbering to be done.

Thus far, we’ve lucky enough to have encountered two exceptionally good krimis (see links above), but to be honest, ‘The Black Abbot’ probably provides a more representative example of the genre’s wider successes and failures, as a wholly satisfactory but basically pretty routine ramble through the established conventions of the form.

Whilst the story as summarised above may sound like a hoot, ‘The Black Abbot’ suffers somewhat from plotting that swiftly becomes unnecessarily convoluted in a not terribly interesting fashion, as the scams and travails of various secondary characters are hashed out at length via static interior scenes that eventually consume a great deal of screen time, thus dragging things back toward the kind of dry tedium found in the British Edgar Wallace adaptations.

With the reliably charismatic Joachim Fuchsberger shifted across to a ‘suspect’ role here, ‘The Black Abbot’s obligatory police duo are also rather unengaging, with the combination of Regnier’s stern frowning and Arent’s senseless wittering never really making much of an impact on the way the story unfolds.

Speaking of which, the film’s ending (which I won’t spoil for you here) also proves a bit of a cop-out, relying as it does on the personalities and motivations of several key characters changing inexplicably, in a way that seems wholly out of keeping with their conduct during the film’s first half.

None of this would particularly bother me if the film instead had some measure of wildness, unpredictability or random fury to offer, but, despite apparently running into trouble with the German censors for some reason (if a trivia entry on the film’s IMDB page is to be believed), ‘The Black Abbot’ crucially lacks any of the moments of transgressive violence and sexuality that made ‘The Face of the Frog’ and ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ feel so bracing.

That said though, if you can keep your attention focused through the duller stretches, ‘The Black Abbot’ nonetheless eventually emerges as a pretty good time. As soon as the various parties concerned find themselves creeping around the dusty ruins and tangled undergrowth at night, pointing guns at each other, chasing sections of the treasure map and tangling with the Abbot, all of the aforementioned drawbacks are instantly forgotten, allowing the film to become what I believe I’m duty-bound to refer to as ‘a delightful romp’.

Directorially speaking too, ‘The Black Abbot’ feels a bit like a film of two halves. Whilst the interior scenes remain bland and workmanlike, things come to life as soon as we move to the shadowy ‘exteriors’ (strictly speaking a mixture of location shooting and sets I think), wherein director F.J. Gottlieb begins to make fine use of the film’s wide scope ratio, employing roving, airborne camera movements and even indulging in a few of the wacky compositional tricks and complex foreground shots seen in Alfred Vohrer’s krimis.

These sections of the film also benefit greatly from taking on a hefty dose of gothic horror imagery, as befits the crumbling scenery and the looming threat posed by the Abbot. The black & white photography is excellent throughout, and things become convincingly atmospheric as the characters begin to stumble around landscapes that could have come straight from a second division Italian gothic. The cut price back garden graveyard puts me very much in mind of the one seen in Terror Creatures From The Grave, and we even get to enjoy an eerie descent into a full on polystyrene-walled crypt set, complete with flickering torchlight and barred, cobweb-strewn grates tailor-made for a leading lady to cling to mid-scream. There are even a few supremely unconvincing fake bats on hand to add to the fun. Good times.

All of this, plus a generous helping of the gleefully cynicism one expects of a krimi and some fine turns from the cream of Rialto’s singular stock company, helps ‘The Black Abbot’ make it over the fence as a movie the majority of viewers will recall with a grin rather than a yawn. Whilst it’s certainly not going to change anyone’s understanding of life or cinema, it’s a pleasantly diverting bit of pulp hokum, somewhat reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13’ (which was shooting in Ireland at around the same time this hit cinemas, I believe), and as such gets a cautious-bordering-on-enthusiastic thumbs up from our panel here.

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Krimi Casebook: Die Toten Augen von London / ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ (Alfred Vohrer, 1961)

Amid the greasy cobbled streets of a “London” apparently stuck in some strange amalgam of the 1890s, 1920s and 1960s, a visiting Australian wool merchant loses his way in the obligitory peasouper smog. Accosted and beaten by parties unknown, we see him bundled into the back of a sinister white laundry van. “Accidents like this happen every time we have this fog”, remarks the coroner after the corpse is fished out of the Thames the next morning, having to all appearances died a natural death by drowning.

Dashing Inspector Larry Holt of Scotland Yard (Joachim Fuchsberger) is unconvinced by the coroner’s verdict however. “It looks like the blind killers of London are at work again!”, he announces after a torn piece of braille text found in the victim’s pocket is revealed to contain fragments of a threatening message, and the game is afoot in another rousing installment of Rialto Films’ Edgar Wallace ‘Krimi’ series.

Whilst ‘Die Toten Augen von London’ (released in West Germany in March 1961) may not be quite as action-packed as Harald Reinl’s Der Frosch mit der Maske, this first Wallace film by the series’ other key director Alfred Vohrer is nonetheless as an equally impressive achievement. Whilst Reinl’s film cruised by on a sense of pure, pulpy momentum, Reinl’s directorial style is slower and more static, but his trump card here is atmosphere, and, as its title rather demands, ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ (also known as ‘The Dark Eyes of London’) has it in spades.

Apparently owing less to Wallace’s 1924 source novel than to an earlier British movie adaptation from 1939 (with which I’m entirely unfamiliar), ‘Dead Eyes..’ seems, like many Krimis, to fall into that peculiar category of movies that seem to embrace all of the aesthetic trappings of horror film, whilst not actually being horror films.(1)

Certainly, great effort has been taken here to create a feeling of claustrophobic, Jack-the-Ripper-haunted London as rich and indigestible as that of any film ever made in a similar vein. Dark, overhanging streets, canes tapping on cobbled pavements, squalid slums that seem to hide every conceivable variation on grinding poverty and moral degradation, sinister, elongated shadows stretching across each soot-blackened brick wall as misshapen proletarians cringe in fear - you name it, this movie’s got it (well, minus the top hats and horse-drawn coaches at least), all swathed in enough dry ice to put your average Italian gothic moldering in the shade.

Apparently, this particular ‘London’ houses a notorious brethren of blind criminals, who emerge to commit their misdeeds upon foggy nights when, quoth Inspector Larry, “they can more easily take advantage of their victims”. The coldly oppressive atmosphere of the poverty-stricken religious mission from which at least some of these ne’erdowells operate could have come straight from one of Pete Walker’s unsettling ‘70s horrors, and it is within a vast Victorian drainage duct beneath this institution that we find the lair of the film’s chief representative of this loose ensemble of visually-impaired villainy – a hulking, white-eyed ogre named ‘Blind Jack’, as portrayed by an actor (Ady Berber) whom I can only assume was Germany’s equivalent of Tor Johnson or Milton Reid. (Oh, for the days when each national film industry had a gigantic, lumbering brute on call 24/7.)

Although ‘Blind Jack’ provides the closest thing this quasi-horror film has to a monster, handling stalking, stomping, strangling and gurning duties with admirable aplomb, the cynical nature of Krimi plotting of course demands that he and his sightless cohorts are merely pawns in a game beyond their control, as the net of guilt eventually spreads itself far more widely across the film’s more outwardly respectable characters.

It is this side of the story that allows Vohrer to deepen the film’s sense of seedy urban degradation even further, drawing on a well of comic book noir imagery that mix strangely with the quasi-Victoriana of the ‘London’ setting. This feeling hangs particularly heavily over the scenes that take place within the supremely down-market casino / nightclub where many of our gentlemen of ill-repute congregate – a joint where it perpetually seems to be closing time, and the occupants perpetually exhausted; you can almost smell the stale beer and cigar smoke hanging in the air.

It is here, predictably enough, that we’re introduced to the film’s obligatory ‘bad girl’ (Finnish actress Ann Savo), who once again is violently punished for her floozy-ish ways in cheerily misogynistic fashion, assailed by a faceless, black-gloved assassin amid the classic “neon sign outside bedroom window” ambience of her ‘Soho’ bed-sit, in a highly fetishised murder sequence that, whilst not explicitly gory, couldn’t have anticipated the MO of the Italian giallo any more clearly if it had cut to a shot of Mario Bava and Dario Argento crouching outside the window taking notes.(2)

On the side of law and order meanwhile, ‘Die Toten Augen von London’ sees the duo of Fuchsberger and Eddi Arent reunited, but sadly the good feeling that their partnership generated in ‘Fellowship of the Frog’ is rather squandered here. When left to his own devices, Fuchsberger is just fine of course, delivering a mixture of Roger Moore smarm and Stanley Baker-esque determination that makes him the perfect leading man for this kind of movie, but Arent proves more troublesome, having already settled into the persona that he would go on to embody through the majority of his appearances in the Rialto Krimis – namely, that of a comic relief goofball straight from the pits of movie fans’ very own hell.

Whilst ‘Der Frocsh..’ proved that Arent could be a somewhat charming screen presence when gifted with a moderately interesting character to flesh out, here, as Fuchsberger’s perpetually clowning partner, he’s simply a lead weight dragging against the film’s momentum. Veteran comic relief haters in the audience will already feel a shudder down their spines when his character is introduced as ‘Sunny’ (“a nickname that reflects his disposition”), and it’s all downhill from there I’m afraid, as Eddi does his level best to reinforce every unfair stereotype you might have heard about the German sense of humour.

Altogether more pleasing – if equally predictable - is the appearance of a young Klaus Kinski, here essaying the first of a multitude of highly suspicious characters he brought to life whilst on Rialto’s payroll. This time around, Klaus plays a neurotic secretary at a crooked life insurance company, and is just as much of a fidgety, tormented wreck as you might anticipate, sporting gleaming mirror shades in most of his scenes and – dur dur dur! – a pair of black leather driving gloves that his character likes to take on and off all day long, despite exhibiting no particular inclination toward driving.

Naturally, I will refrain from spoiling things by revealing the precise extent to which Kinski’s character is guilty or not guilty of the film’s assorted outrages, but needless to say, I think an aphorism much in the spirit of Chekhov’s gun could well be proposed, stating that if your murder mystery movie features Klaus Kinski skulking around in a pair of Ray-Bans, you probably won’t be needing that ID parade when it comes to fingering the killer, however elaborate his “obvious red herring” alibi may seem.

Inevitably, ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ features it’s fair share of procedural drag in between these assorted highlights, but, as in all the best entries in this series, touches of visual imagination and black humour often are used to liven up duller moments, as exemplified early in the film when a potentially tedious and exposition-heavy visit to the aforementioned life insurance company is livened up by a flick-knife welding blackmailer and some amusing business with a skull-shaped cigarette holder.

Also keeping things interesting meanwhile is an intermittently hair-raising score, as provided by the supremely named Heinz Funk. Though used only sparingly, Herr Funk’s compositions offer a mixture of beat-inflected suspense jazz and dissonant, primitive electronics that sounds somewhat like the result of John Barry and Pierre Boulez getting their demo reels mixed up in one of “London”s dark alleyways.

As a director, Vohrer’s camera tends to remain fairly static, but he does seem to display a love for odd stylistic twists that tend to make his compositions stand out, including a few fun process shots utilising complex arrangements of mirrors and reflections. In what is perhaps the film’s most bizarre moment, Vohrer utilises a truly odd “inside of mouth” shot, complete with giant cardboard teeth in the foreground, to dramatise the entirely unimportant detail of an old geezer spraying his gob with breath freshener prior to leaving the bathroom.

The time and effort taken to create such a weird shot, with no apparent narrative justification, seems entirely inexplicable within the normal working methods of low budget commercial cinema, but its presence does perhaps go some way toward demonstrating the kind of freedom that Rialto’s directors were allowed in this period – a freedom that possibly helps explain why the best of the Krimis stand out as so much more fun and inventive than most of their competitors in the early ‘60s Euro b-movie stakes.

And, insofar as I am qualified to pass judgment at this relatively early stage in my immersion in the genre, ‘Die Toten Augen von London’ would indeed appear to be a truly exemplary example of Krimi style – a creaky, meandering potboiler enlivened, and indeed even twisted into entirely new shapes, by an admirable combination of cinematic craftsmanship, grisly gallows humour and a rogue’s gallery of strikingly memorable character players; the result being an exquisitely sinister time-waster, enriched with enough weird visual fibre to make it a keeper over half a century after everyone should have stopped caring.

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(1) Other black & white era examples of the not-quite-horror-film that immediately spring to mind include ‘Tower of London’ (1939), Vincent Price’s break-out picture ‘Dragonwyck’ (1946) and the truly peculiar Charles Laughton vehicle ‘The Strange Door’ (1951), amongst many others.

(2) Whilst it is foolish of course to try to assign any direct chains of influence when dealing with vague and general notions such of these, the this scene in ‘Dead Eyes of London’ could be seen as anticipating Bava’s pivotal ‘Blood & Black Lace’ (1964) on several levels - not only via the aestheticised sadism of the murder and the anonymous, black gloved killer, but even the strobing effect provided by the flickering neon sign outside the window seems a precursor to that film’s antique shop sequence. (If you want to stretch the point even further, could even make the case that a memorable death-by-lift-shaft sequence elsewhere in the film could have provided the inspiration for the conclusion of Argento’s somewhat Krimi-informed ‘Cat O’ Nine Tails’ (1972) as well.)