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.”

Pan’s People: Two Wests (both 1958)

We continue our look at some recently acquired Pans with these two splendidly atmospheric covers by Pat Owen, both illustrating works by the insanely prolific John Creasey, whose 40+ Inspector West novels comprise a mere single figure fraction of his literary output.

Pre-War Thrills: Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939)

Until recently, I’d tended to accept the received wisdom that the few, scattered, horror films made in the UK during the 1930s were pretty creaky and timid affairs, their ambition stymied both by the era’s censorious climate and by the British film industry’s steadfast refusal to treat the nascent genre with anything approaching acknowledgement or respect.

Like viral infection or rock n’ roll though, horror will always find a way, and as such, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, rather than the mere historical curiosity I was expecting, ‘Dark Eyes of London’, shot in the less than palatial surroundings of Welwyn Garden City over eleven days in April 1939, is actually pretty damned great.

Headlined by imported star Bela Lugosi - who seemingly undertook a journey across the Atlantic by ship solely to appear in the film - this adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s 1924 novel is in fact fairly strong stuff for its era, conveying a morbid, decidedly unsavoury atmosphere and including some moments of sadism grim enough to provoke comment even in the more open-minded United States (where the film played in 1940 as ‘The Human Monster’, having been picked up for distribution by Lugosi’s regular employers at Monogram).

Whilst the film’s violence never reaches a level which viewers alive today would deem ‘graphic’, there is a certain, base level nastiness to the depredations of Lugosi’s villainous Dr Orloff which remain disturbing. From the steel water tank in which it is implied the good doctor drowns his victims before dumping them, pre-deceased, into the Thames, to the scene in which he uses an electrical current to deafen a bed-ridden, blind-mute beggar, there is some nasty business going on here and no mistake.

In view of all this, it difficult to believe the film was produced at all, given that the UK’s censors had effectively banned all horror films just four years earlier, having thrown their toys out of the proverbial pram when confronted with the comic book excesses of Universal’s ‘The Raven’ (Lew Landers, 1935). I’d certainly be interested to learn how ‘Dark Eyes..’s domestic release played out under such circumstances, although it was, I note, the first film to be awarded the short-lived “H” (for “horror”) classification by the BBFC, meaning that persons under sixteen would theoretically be refused admittance.

It is telling that, between 1939 and 1950, when the ‘H’ certificate was more or less phased out in favour of the more iconic ‘X’, only one other domestic production achieved the dubious distinction of being “rated H” (Ivan Barnett’s little seen 1950 take on ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’). Instead, the dreaded ‘H’ was reserved exclusively for imported American horror pictures, leading me to surmise that its introduction in 1939 must have reflected the censor caving in to pressure from representatives of the American studios, particularly Universal, who had of course returned to making horror films in earnest at around the same time, and presumably needed a way to get their product onto UK screens. Beyond noting the unique position in which this leaves ‘Dark Eyes of London’ though, perhaps that’s a subject best left for another day.

It is possible, I suppose, that ‘Dark Eyes..’ journey to the screen may have been further aided by the fact that it sprung from the pen of a phenomenally popular, household name author, celebrated (if not exactly respected) for his mystery and crime - as opposed to horror - fiction.

Indeed, for all its unpleasantness, the movie is framed as a police procedural rather than a gothic horror, with the approach taken by director/co-screenwriter Walter Summers reminding me, not so much of the Universal-derived horror you might have expected from a production which went to trouble of luring Bela Lugosi across an ocean, but of Alfred Hitchcock’s then-recent series of ground-breaking contemporary thrillers.

In particular, 1934’s ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ shares this film’s down-at-heel East London setting, its diabolical Hungarian-accented villain, and even the idea of a charitable/religious institute being used as a front for criminal activity. More importantly though, ‘Dark Eyes..’, like Hitchcock’s British films, has the decency to remain fast-paced, modernistic and ingeniously plotted, imbuing its convoluted storyline with a strong, character-driven through-line to keep us hooked.

Along the way, Summers (along with co-writers Patrick Kirwen and producer John Argyle) give us plenty of interesting diversions, good-natured banter and running gags to break the tension / ghoulishness, and, whilst it’s probably fair to say that Summers lacks the touch of mastery we’d routinely assign to Hitch, the film is nonetheless very nicely done, with solid performances across the board and some impressively detailed production design, making for a rather charming, neatly turned out entertainment whose incongruously breezy tone must have further eased the censor’s worries.

For those who are neither keen readers of Edgar Wallace nor familiar with Alfred Vohrer’s excellent early ‘60s German quasi-remake of this film (of which more below), the plot of ‘Dark Eyes..’ concerns a number of suspicious corpses fished out of the Thames, all of whom turn out to have been customers of the Greenwich Insurance Company - a small-time outfit operated by one Dr Orloff, a seemingly kindly and well-meaning fellow with - AHEM - a murky past as a disgraced medical researcher, who also maintains close connections to The Dearborn Institute, a Limehouse-based home for the blind operated by his - AHEM - close personal friend, the sightless Rev John Dearborn.

As well he might, dashing young Inspector Holt of the Yard (a brisk and likeable Hugh Williams) smells a rat, and, given that Dr Orloff is clearly guilty as sin from the outset, the film’s subsequent ‘mystery’ largely consists of mapping out the precise size and shape of that rat. Less of a ‘whodunnit’ then, and more of a ‘what in god’s name is he doing!?’, if you will.

Of course, further complications arise across the film’s 76 minutes of densely-packed plottin’ and chattin’, not least the introduction of Norwegian actress Greta Gynt, providing a surprisingly strong and self-sufficient heroine as the daughter of one of Orloff’s earlier victims.

In this telling of the tale, Inspector Holt is also accompanied - presumably for reasons of transatlantic sales potential - by a hard-boiled, gun-toting Chicago cop - played for laughs by Edmun Brian - who is sticking around after delivering an extradited convict in order to learn something of Scotland Yard’s rather more genteel methods. It’s a testament to the film’s overall quality however that, rather than functioning as an insufferable comic relief goon, Brian is actually quite an appealing presence. Providing an effective foil for Holt, he even manages to achieve a few unforced laughs here and there, allowing the film to pioneer the ‘chills n’ chuckles’ formula which would later be repeatedly taken to the bank by Rialto Film’s post-war Wallace adaptations in West Germany. [Please consult the Krimi Casebook for further details.]

Jess Franco fans in the audience will no doubt be gesturing frantically and jumping up and down by this point, so yes, let’s briefly pause to acknowledge the fact that, given that the name ‘Orloff’ does not appear in Wallace’s source novel, Uncle Jess clearly must have been very fond of this movie, given the many and varied Dr Orloffs who abound throughout his mammoth filmography, beginning, of course, with Howard Vernon’s memorable portrayal in 1962’s The Awful Dr Orlof [sic].

Technically I suppose, this makes ‘Dark Eyes of London’ the inaugural entry in the Orloff saga, a loose accumulation of cinematic oddities which went on to include not only Franco’s numerous reiterations of the character, but also such mind-boggling spin-offs as Pierre Chevalier’s ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ (1970) and Santos Alcocer’s ‘El Enigma del Ataúd’ aka ‘Les Orgies du Docteur Orloff’ (1967). (1)

As such, Euro-horror fans may wish to pause to consider the fact that the screen’s very first Dr Orloff was in fact embodied by no less a personage than Bela Lugosi - and a pretty bang up job he does of it too, I must say. Gifted with a more ambiguous and multi-faceted role than he was generally called upon to play in Hollywood, and with his confidence presumably buoyed by both his top-billed status and (we must assume) a level of respect and financial recompense commensurate with his talents, Lugosi actually delivers what I’m inclined to consider one of the very best performances of his career here.

Though Lugosi clearly makes little effort to try to convince the audience of the innocence his scripted character pleads during the film’s early scenes, he instead builds Orloff into an exquisitely loathsome, duplicitous, scene-stealing villain, the like of which old Bela was born to play, but so rarely actually did. The way he can switch from acting the soft-spoken philanthropist one moment to turning on his EVIL STARE and revealing himself as a diabolical mesmerist the next is truly remarkable.

Rivalling Lugosi’s hold over the imagination of the movie’s original viewers meanwhile is the more literally monstrous figure of ‘Jake’ (played here by Wilfrid Walter), the hulking, blind stooge whom Orloff uses to carry out his dirty work (somewhat pre-empting the character of Morpho in Franco’s Dr Orloff films).

Monogram’s publicity materials and re-titling certainly made Jake the star of the show upon the film’s American release, and, although the character was portrayed in more naturalistic, and more terrifying, fashion as ‘Blind Jack’ (Addy Berber) in Alfred Vohrer’s Die Toten Augen von London (‘The Dead Eyes of London’, 1961), Walter makes an impression here nonetheless; if not for his acting, then at least for the absolutely extraordinary make up job achieved by the film’s technicians.

Framing this unfortunate brute as a full-on monster, complete with pointed ears, protruding jaw and bulbous, orc-like fangs, Jake’s utterly fantastical visage provides another wonderfully diversion from the stultifying rules of ‘good taste’ which confined the ambition of so much British cinema in this era.

Speaking of Vohrer’s film meanwhile, that’s certainly another matter we’ve got to discuss here. Going into ‘Dark Eyes..’, I was worried that that it might pale in comparison to the more stylish, more sensational quasi-remake which hit screens over two decades later. And indeed, there is a lot of crossover between the two films, with at least some scenes and visual motifs in ‘Dead Eyes..’ appearing to directly recreate material first seen here. But, there are also enough differences between the two in terms of character and storytelling for them to avoid treading on each other’s toes too much, allowing them to co-exist as equally enjoyable alternate versions of the same tale.

As is extensively discussed by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones on the special features accompanying Network’s new blu-ray edition of the movie, ‘Dark Eyes of London’ feels in many ways like a bit of a cursed film; if not exactly an unheralded classic, then certainly a solid and historically significant effort which has never really gotten its due.

Being released in the UK six weeks after Britain’s declaration of war with Germany probably didn’t exactly help ‘Dark Eyes..’ prospects at the domestic box office - and, sadly, this same historical circumstance made the prospect of Lugosi returning to the country to promote the film, or to work again with the its producers, an impossibility. (2)

Slipped out with little fanfare by Monogram in the U.S. a year later amid a glut of creatively and financially impoverished Lugosi vehicles, it was all too easy for ‘The Human Monster’ to fall through the cracks, filed away between the likes of ‘The Devil Bat’ and ‘Spooks Run Wild’ in the memory of young audiences ill-equipped to appreciate the movie’s rather different cultural context.

With the majority of extant prints comprising blurry, severely degraded copies of this U.S. release version, the film has subsequently languished in Public Domain hell (see this version for a representative example). As a result, it has failed to gain much traction even amongst die-hard classic horror buffs, whilst Vohrer’s 1961 version has meanwhile been (justifiably) enshrined as something of a cult classic.

It is only really with this year’s pristine restoration (see link above) in fact that ‘Dark Eyes of London’ has finally, over eighty years later, been given another chance to find its audience. If you’re still reading this far down the screen, I’d bet that you’re a potential member of that audience, and as such, I’d urge you to take the plunge.

Ok, so the sight of Bela Lugosi lurching around claustrophobic faux-London sets menacing blind people whilst some bantering cops close in on his tail probably won't exactly change your life, but for fans of pulp mystery fiction or classic horror cinema alike, it will at least prove an absolute hoot, if not something of a minor revelation. It seems strange to retrospectively crown such a marginal and unbeloved production as probably THE best British horror film of the pre-war era, but, such is the dearth of competition that I’m damned if I can think of a better one.

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(1)In the commentary track included on Network’s blu-ray, Kim Newman puts forward the theory that ‘The Dark Eyes of London’ influence on Jess Franco’s work goes far beyond merely repurposing the villain’s name for his own purposes. Newman suggests in fact that Franco scattered references and homages to the film throughout his filmography - an idea that, as a Franco fan, I find fascinating, but can’t immediately dredge up much evidence for. Certainly, there are similarities here to Franco’s script for ‘The Awful Dr Orloff’ (1962) - particularly re: cross-cutting between the villain’s crimes and the police investigation thereof - and Franco did indeed obsessively return to the same narrative framework across his subsequent career. But beyond that..? I’m not so sure. In an ideal world, I’d love to discuss this idea at length with the esteemed Mr Newman, perhaps over a few drinks and a slap-up supper, but I’d imagine he probably has more pressing matters to attend to (not least his new novel, which sounds great).

(2) As also observed by Newman & Jones, it is notable that ‘Dark Eyes..’ producer/co-writer John Argyle’s next project was another Wallace adaptation, ‘The Door With Seven Locks’ (aka ‘Chamber of Horrors’), which debuted in October 1940 with Leslie Banks, who had of course beautifully cribbed Lugosi’s style in ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ (1932), in the leading role. We may surmise therefore that that pesky war may perhaps have deprived us of the pleasures of an entire series of Lugosi-starring, UK-produced Wallace pictures.

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: 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.)

Krimi Casebook: Der Frosch mit der Maske / ‘The Face of the Frog’ (Harald Reinl, 1959)

The phenomenal popularity in Germany of British mystery writer Edgar Wallace, which continued in spite of two apocalyptic world wars between the nations, is one of those odd twists of popular culture that seems to largely defy explanation. The truth is, I suppose, that whilst he had a more pronounced influence upon German culture than that of other countries, Wallace’s work was basically popular more or less everywhere it was published. Though rarely read these days, he was unquestionably one of the most successful authors of the early 20th century, with sales of his work reaching an oft-quoted estimate of 50 million copies worldwide.

Though he died in 1932 (whilst hard at work on the screenplay for ‘King Kong’), Wallace nonetheless maintained enough popularity to justify a huge number of film adaptations in his native land during the 1960s - The “Edgar Wallace Mysteries” series of b-pictures, shot at Merton Park studios by Anglo-Amalgamated, ran to 47 installments between 1960 and 1965, and numerous other adaptations were made around the same period, including a number produced by the ubiquitous Harry Alan Towers.(1)

Often though, these British Wallace films turned out to be quite dreary, uninspired affairs. Possibly this was simply due to the fact that, for those working in the film industry in the British Isles during the mid-20th century, Wallace’s writing evoked a landscape and culture as depressingly familiar as a cold cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. From the sampling I have taken of the British Wallace films, it seems that this familiarity resulted in scores of grimly utilitarian sixty minute murder mysteries, largely set within pebble-dashed suburban bungalows and Bayswater solicitors offices; the kind of films in which about the most exciting scenario you’re likely to encounter with is that of John Le Mesurier waiting for a malfunctioning lift, or someone who once played a supporting role in Dr. Who tampering with Her Majesty’s Mail.

Thankfully, the German film industry took an entirely different approach to adapting Wallace for the screen, with the very cultural barriers that separated them from the quote-unquote ‘Britishness’ of their source material ironically leading them to hit upon a far more exciting formula whose results remain thoroughly entertaining to this day.

To the Germans you see, the very same Wallace stories that seemed so dull to us Brits became rich with exotic, escapist possibility, offering them a springboard into a whole world of bizarre and fantastical adventure. With crowd-pleasing thrills and censor-baiting transgressions firmly in mind, scriptwriters and directors soon began forcing the lurid imagery of Victorian penny dreadfuls through the merciless meat-grinder of 20th century urban thrillers, wantonly mixing in elements pulled from noir and gangster films, gothic horror and Bond-style comic book action capers along the way, creating an entirely new genre of pulp cinema that went on to dominate the lower reaches of the European box office throughout the ‘60s – the hallowed ‘Krimi’ (a shortening of the self-explanatory ‘Kriminalfilm’).

Though other studios and producers would go on to release their fair share of ‘Krimi’s later in the game, the genre’s aesthetic was initially defined and popularised entirely by the series of German language Wallace adaptations produced by a Denmark-based company named Rialto Film. Though Rialto’s loosely connected series of Wallace films rattled on in some form into the early ‘70s, it began in 1959 with the movie we’re looking at today – Krimi ground zero to all intents and purposes - Harald Reinl’s ‘Der Frosch mit der Maske’, which for the sake of argument we shall henceforth call ‘The Face of the Frog’.(2)

Often, retrospectively defined, time/place-specific movie genres such as the Krimi have a tendency to begin slowly, gradually coalescing over a number of years into what later generations of fans recognise as their ‘core form’, as formulas and clichés slowly solidify alongside audience expectation. By contrast though, what is so refreshing about ‘The Face of the Frog’ is that these Rialto cats apparently had their game-plan down right from the outset, as the movie explodes out of nowhere with a full set of the kind of ridiculous and lurid traits that would go on to define the Krimi.

Set within a “London” largely defined by shaky second unit footage of Westminster landmarks and Piccadilly Circus, life in Britain’s capital according to Reinl & his collaborators is a breathless whirl of everything a young German inexplicably raised on a diet of dusty Anglophone pulp might have hoped for: masked criminal master-minds skulking around abandoned Limehouse dockyards, cult-like fraternities of flat-capped henchmen, dogged Scotland Yard detectives getting hassled by their titled superiors, knife-throwing assassins lurking amid National Trust woodlands, aristocratic amateur sleuths and their kung-fu fighting butlers, seedy Soho nightclubs, daring jewel heists, poison gas canisters, tommy guns and trap doors.(3)

Needless to say, it’s a hoot. Do you really need to know the story? I hope not, because I certainly haven’t got the energy to bother coming up with a full synopsis, but let’s just say that events herein concern a master safe-breaker and criminal overlord known only as The Frog. The Frog preserves his anonymity by way of a neat diving suit/gas mask-styled outfit and accompanying croaky voice, whilst the distinctive seal that he brands upon the wrists of his henchmen and leaves prominently displayed at the scenes of his robberies also does wonders for his brand identity. For reasons that remain vague at best, a number of innocents (OR ARE THEY?) find themselves drawn into the web (or maybe, I dunno, frogspawn..?) of The Frog’s nefarious endeavors, with only playboy crimefighter Richard Gordon (Joachim Fuchsberger), his two-fisted butler James (Eddi Arent) and the shrewd Inspector Elk of Scotland Yard (Siegfried Lowitz) on hand to figure out what’s what and bring the assorted evil-doers to justice.

Beyond that, there’s not a great deal I can tell you that cannot be gleamed from the list of exciting elements featured in the preceding paragraphs, but needless to say the script here is slapdash, overly convoluted and frequently ridiculous, offering little in the way of actual ‘mystery’ beyond an inevitable Scooby-Doo style final reveal and generally refusing to cohere into anything that makes any more than the barest minimum of surface level ‘sense’… and, frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The great thing about the German Wallace films y’see is that they’re not so much interested in presenting logically coherent mystery stories as they are in simply reveling the more ghoulish and fantastic aspects of the ‘mystery’ genre – an approach that, as well as greatly appealing to me on a personal level, also gives the films a breezy, self-aware “fun for the sake of fun” kind of feel that allows them to remain quite engaging to us over-stimulated 21st century viewers, where so many other low budget ‘50s thrillers now seem plodding and tedious by comparison.

Indeed, the comic book unreality of the film’s world allows for a fast-paced yarn that moves from one suspense / action sequence to another (together with a few comedy asides and saucy night-club sequences for good measure) with only a bare minimum of expositional connecting tissue, demonstrating a dedication to pure entertainment value that it is hard not to applaud. It helps of course that the film is very well made – in fact it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that we’re looking here as a Germanic equivalent of the kind of craftsmanship & professionalism mustered by Hammer in the same period.

In between all the whiz-bang good times, a certain amount of stuffy drawing room chit-chat and weak family/romantic sub-plotting inevitable remains, but Reinl’s roving camera is almost always on the move around the lavishly appointed sets, with smooth tracking shots keeping things visually interesting even through the story’s duller passages. The B&W photography is top notch too, full of rich, deep shadow, and the densely cluttered mise en scene seems designed to compliment the rambling baroque madness of the storyline, never missing a chance to throw a wrought-iron railing, dusty lampshade or suit of armour into the foreground.

The cast meanwhile comprises a small army of what I assume to be West Germany’s finest character players, featuring a delightful variety of heavies, weirdos and misfits, many of whom look like they could have walked straight out of a Warner Bros gangster flick, including numerous ‘faces’ who would go on to carve out a niche as regulars in subsequent Krimis.

Even the film’s imitation of an English setting isn’t too bad, relatively speaking. There are a few details that will almost certainly seem a little ‘off’ to British viewers (a reference to somebody being taken to “central prison”, the misspelling of ‘Salisbury’ on a sign-post, etc), but no absolute howlers are in evidence, whilst bowler hats, hook-handled umbrellas and police helmets were clearly in plentiful supply from the costume department, lending a nice, pre-Avengers sort of feel to the more outré events portrayed.

My guess is that some second unit stuff WAS actually filmed in London (rather than just relying on stock footage), and I enjoyed the way that the mixture of authentic London locales with (presumably) German sets and locations serves to create weird, non-existent landscapes for the characters to rampage around in, thus further aiding the film’s distance from reality. The fog-shrouded ‘abandoned cement factory’ where The Frog has his HQ, looming upon some desolate vision of the Limehouse docks adjacent to a riverbank that really doesn’t look very much like the Thames, provides a good example, as did the somewhat Bavarian looking thatched cottage sitting neatly at the side of a road junction “exactly eight and a half miles from London”, and the German-themed ‘Lolita Club’ lurking in the middle of a particularly shadow-haunted Soho Square.

‘The Face of the Frog’s already slightly murky cultural heritage is muddied further when the name of no lesser personage than HARRY LIME suddenly pops up mid-way through the story, almost prompting a comedy double-take from yours truly. As in ‘The Third Man’, Mr Lime is introduced as a reclusive and infamous villain whose whereabouts are unknown even as his name is whispered in hushed tones. I tied my mind in knots trying to figure out the hows and whys that led to Graham Greene’s shadowy avatar of post-war corruption and black market cynicism suddenly popping up in the middle of a German Edgar Wallace adaptation at the dawn of the ‘60s, but as it turns out, it’s probably just the result of a particularly uncanny coincidence.

The name “Harry Lime” appeared in Wallace’s original story, published in 1925, and, according to ‘The Face of the Frog’s Wikipedia page, the film’s producers actually changed it to avoid confusion with the character in ‘The Third Man’. For reasons unknown, the name seems to have been subsequently changed back to ‘Harry Lime’ in the dubbed American version of the film I watched, and, well - there ya go, another potentially intriguing bit of pop culture symbiosis scrubbed forever from the blackboard.(4)

Yet another thing that stands out about ‘The Face of the Frog’ in comparison to its contemporaries in the thriller market is the sheer level of violence. The movie is big on enthusiastically rendered fist-fights and gun blasts throughout, with a couple of gleefully bloody murders that sit just about at the limit of what a British or American horror film might have gotten away with in 1959, but all of this is blown out of the water by one absolutely staggering moment of brutality that occurs during the film’s finale. Herein, a provocatively dressed showgirl, already looking battered and bruised as she is tied to a chair in the villains’ lair, is graphically machine-gunned to death by the now-thoroughly-crazed Frog, in full-on Peckinpah blood-squib style. I tell you friends, as an amateur historian of early on-screen nastiness, my jaw just about hit the floor.

A wholly shameless moment of unhinged, sexually charged sadism, this ‘shock’ moment provides a clear pointer toward the increasingly salacious and blood-thirsty content that would come to dominate the Rialto Krimis as the cycle went on. Indeed, as has been noted by the few English language critics who have written on the genre, the bold, style-over-content approach pioneered by the Wallace films, in combination with their increasing fixation on gruesome and often misogynistic violence, exerted a powerful influence upon the parallel development of the giallo aesthetic in Italy.(5)

Beyond this, it could even be argued that films like ‘The Face of the Frog’ helped to cement the more visceral, thrill-packed style of filmmaking that went on to define the entire spectrum of exploitation movies in the 1970s, and that in fact remains the dominant mode for thrillers, action films and self-aware “cult movies” to this very day.

For this reason alone, the case could be made for ‘..Frog’ being a film of significant historical importance, and whose potential field of influence stretches way beyond anything its makers could possibly have imagined. But, even if you disregard such high-falutin’ claims entirely, what he have here is, at the very least, a movie that when viewed today seems refreshingly ahead of its time whilst still being very much OF it - a witty, smart and thrill-packed pulp time-bomb that easily transcends it’s b-picture programmer status, and a testament to the wisdom of a notion I believe all potential filmmakers could learn from.

Namely, if you’re working with source material that’s basically quite hackneyed and childish and have no particular drive to rework it into a great work of cinematic artistry, then just being all dour and boring about it certainly isn’t going to get you on the Oscars short-list. Instead, embrace the stupidity, keep things moving, give the people what they want, and who knows; ‘The Face of the Frog’ spawned over twenty-five follow-ups, countless imitations, and nearly 60 years later there are still rubes like me sitting here on the internet praising its virtues. We now cut to the image of a hoity-toity British film director circa 1960 looking all flustered and disgusted, and look forward to evaluating whatever these wacky Edgar Wallace-adaptin’ Germans bring us next.

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(1) Though their titles and casts may sound tempting, readers are advised that Towers/Wallace flicks like ‘Circus of Fear’ (’66) and ‘Coast of Skeletons’ (’65) rank amongst the most extraordinarily tedious motion pictures your correspondent has ever sat through.

(2) Literally translating as ‘The Frog with the Mask’ and based on a Wallace story entitled ‘The Fellowship of the Frog’, this film is known in English both by that name and also the slightly snappier ‘The Face of the Frog’, which I’ve gone with here.

(3) Actually, James the butler practices a novel form of callisthenic wrestling alongside his master, but let’s not split hairs.

(4) Of course, you COULD argue that perhaps Greene took the name “Harry Lime” from the broadly similar character in the earlier Wallace story, but I distinctly recall Greene describing, in his introduction to his prose treatment for ‘The Third Man’, how he and Carol Reed came up with the name by combining a deliberately prosaic first name with the surname redolent of (at the time) potentially dodgy importing of exotic fruit. I’ll leave you to decide whether or not you want to take Britain’s foremost 20th century novelist at his word, but to further stoke the fires of coincidence, I will needlessly point out that the aforementioned Harry Alan Towers, who produced a number of Edgar Wallace adaptations during the ‘60s, first name his name in radio, producing the Third Man-inspired series The Adventures of Harry Lime for the BBC in 1951-52. COINCIDENCE?

(5) At this point, it would be remiss of me not to point out that Mario Bava’s pivotal ‘Blood & Black Lace’ began life as an attempt to jump the Wallace/Krimi band-wagon, and indeed, the tangled bloodlines intersecting the krimi and giallo genres are more complex and varied than I could possibly expound upon in this already over-long review. Hopefully we’ll get around to looking at it in a bit more depth if this review strand continues as planned though.