Past Misdeeds: Der Schwarze Abt (1963)

aka The Black Abbot

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The new owner of the hunting cabin (whose inside looks more like that of a bungalow to me, but what do I know about hunting cabins) on the estate of Lord Chelford (Dieter Borsche) is knifed in the back by a man dressed up as the legendary Black Abbot. Said Abbot is supposed to protect a mythical gold treasure hidden in the ruins of an abbey on Chelford's estate.

Scotland Yard sends Detective Puddler (Charles Regnier) and his comic relief assistant Horatio (Eddi Arent, of course) to deal with the problem by living in Chelford's estate for a time, which seems eminently reasonable once you've gotten to know Chelford's surroundings.

The Lord himself is clearly on the verge of some sort of breakdown, obsessing over finding the legendary treasure and charming his fiancée Leslie Gine (Grit Boettcher) with talk about "owning her". Leslie, you see, is the sister of Chelford's lawyer Arthur (Harry Wüstenhagen), who - as we will learn - is in the habit of selling his sister, a woman so pliable it's difficult to imagine a better argument for radical feminism, off to the highest bidder to help with his betting debts. Early in the movie, the bookmakers Arthur is indebted to will all turn out to be one single person, Arthur's office manager Fabian Gilder (Werner Peters). That villain will then proceed to blackmail the lawyer into selling his precious sister to him instead of Chelford. Gilder also would very much like to get his hands on the gold treasure and has planted a crook going by the delightful and totally believable nom de plum of Thomas Fortuna (Klaus "KINSKI!" Kinski) as a Butler with Chelford. Gilder too cooperates with Chelford's former secretary Mary Wenner (Eva Ingeborg Schulz). Wenner promises to lead Gilder to the treasure if he only somehow manages to stop the engagement between Chelford and Leslie so that she can have the Lord - and especially his title - for herself.

Having a headache already? Then you won't be pleased to hear of the existence of Dick Alford (Joachim Fuchsberger), Chelford's cousin and financial administrator. Dick is doing his best to protect Chelford from any suspicion the police may have against him, but his loyalties are torn between Chelford and the fact that he is also romantically interested in Leslie - and his interest, Leslie actually reciprocates. But Dick has other secrets too, secrets that may not be quite as innocent; or are they?

Clearly, this volatile mix of interests and shady people can only lead to violence, madness, and KINSKI! skulking through abbey ruins.

Der Schwarze Abt is another one of the half dozen krimis (all adaptations of either Edgar - like this one - or Bryan Edgar Wallace) director Franz Josef Gottlieb made in 1963 and 1964, all of which suggest a talent that doesn't show in anything the man directed before or after. If you told me these six films were made by Gottlieb's secret twin, or a mysterious masked director using his name for equally mysterious reasons, I'd believe you at once. It's a more satisfying, and obviously less boring, explanation than "he had a talent for this sort of film he never used before or after".

In the film at hand, Gottlieb's visual imagination doesn't get quite as bizarre as in the later Das Phantom von Soho, but that's mostly because he seems to have made the surprising choice of mirroring the slow increase of the plot's derangement and complexity (or is it mere complicatedness?) in his visuals. So the film starts off slowly, with a lot of scenes of nasty people being nasty to each other that are shot flatly, staged simply, and are lit too brightly for my tastes in black and white films. But the more the plot increases in bizarrery and density, the stranger Gottlieb's approach to the framing and staging of scenes becomes; the brightness is becoming less and less bright, the fog more artificial and the ruins ever more gothic and picturesque. A dialogue scene that would have been filmed in a very standard manner in the film's early parts is now shot from behind the swinging pendulum of a clock, and Richard Angst's camera becomes increasingly mobile. Despite their general visual superiority over other German post-war films (seeing as most German post-war films were absolutely allergic to anything that smelled of visual interest or elegance), this sort of ambitious set-up is uncommon even for the Wallace films, rather pointing towards the giallo, so I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear it were explicitly Gottlieb's films rather than those of his genre colleagues Reinl or Vohrer which influenced that genre visually.


Der Schwarze Abt is very proto-gialloesque in other aspects too, with its concentration on nasty people being nasty to each other, a plot that's even more complicated than usual for the krimi, and its relegating of the titular masked evil-doer to more of a normal murderer than the masked pulp super-villain of many of the other Wallace krimis. Often, the less pulpy Wallace adaptations are the less interesting to me too, but that's only because many of the lesser films of the cycle seem to relegate the villains to the side lines only because they seem ashamed of those villains' lurid pulpiness, exactly the part I find most enjoyable about them. Der Schwarze Abt just knows other places where it can also find that pulp feeling, namely in headache-inducing plot convolutions and some very well done melodramatics, and so decides to provide all the luridness and excitement its audience could ever wish for through them.

In short: Mister Dynamit – Morgen küßt euch der Tod (1967)

aka Die Slowly, You’ll Enjoy It More

A dastardly villain has somehow stolen a US nuclear bomb. For vague plot reasons, the CIA, despite having a spy among said villain’s men (excellently positioned as his chef), can’t take care of the situation themselves, so they do the most embarrassing thing and ask the German BND for help. The BND sends out its top agent, one Bob Urban (Lex Barker), also known – perhaps in the same way you call a big guy “Little” - as Mister Dynamite.

Bob’s investigation consists of the usual things Eurospy heroes get up to: sleep with every woman who can’t flee fast enough, walk into traps, get out of traps with his awesome powers of punching and ventriloquism (seriously), and shoot some people. Somewhere on the way, the CIA does send in one of their own, one Cliff (Brad Harris), also known as Cliff. Things don’t get terribly exciting.

Officially a German/Austrian/Italian/Spanish collaboration, this movie based on the popular series of German Men’s Adventure novels, is pretty German dominated behind the camera, which, despite its director Franz Josef Gottlieb usually being kind of okay when doing pulp action, does lead to exactly the result you’d fear, namely a curiously boring and anaemic film that lacks the feeling of crazy joy you can usually get out of Eurospy films. While there’s nothing about the film that exactly runs against the pleasurable parts of the genre’s formula, it all feels very bland and lifeless, with a few too many scenes of people in uniform sitting around in a grey room talking, and little excitement to be found around those scenes.

There are one or two pleasantly crazy moments, though: the film’s main villain is so much of a model railway nut his – tiny, unspectacular – lair is dominated by a model railway that if needed provides the usual monitors for henchpeople communications, as well as a lot of mysterious buttons. Oh, and for some reason, the guy likes to get drunk and roll himself up in a rug. Which is exactly the sort of nonsensical craziness I love in my Eurospy films, but is basically the only truly crazy thing about a film that seems to go out of its way not to provoke a heart attack – or even mild excitement – in anyone watching.

Most of the time, the film’s a series of scenes with Lex Barker being bland, Brad Harris being inexplicably bland and painfully underused, and bland blandness all around, with a veritable horde of German actors you’ll know from Rialto’s Edgar Wallace krimis popping up in tiny roles – with Joachim Fuchsberger as a random MP, and Eddi Arent as the BND Q, among others.

Three Films Make A Post: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT...FOREVER.

The Fighting O’Flynn (1949): I suspect Arthur Pierson’s swashbuckler featuring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as former Irish mercenary protecting Ireland (and the United Kingdom) from a Napoleonic plot, mostly doing so to woo Helena Carter, won’t be on anybody’s list of favourite swashbucklers, or even favourite swashbucklers with Fairbanks. It’s a bit slight even for a genre that doesn’t usually go for too much depth anyway, with nary a moment that actually feels dangerous for our hero and a tone that comes down slightly too much on the comedic side of the genre, undermining the melodrama and romance a little. The film is completely fluffy good fun, though, with Fairbanks giving an enthusiastic cliché Irishman that might even count as a racist stereotype, the plot zipping alone nicely, and boredom a faint memory while watching. So even though there’s little I’d call actually memorable about the film, it’s a very nice way to spend a lazy, too warm winter evening.

Der Fluch der gelben Schlange (1963): I probably should be all over Franz Joseph Gottlieb’s very pulpy Rialto Edgar Wallace krimi because of its pulpiness but it’s rather difficult to appreciate a film this unrelentingly racist. I know, it’s trying to shape itself after the Fu Manchu films and other Yellow Peril stuff but in a film made in 1963, this sort of thing just leaves a very bad aftertaste in the mouth particularly because the film doesn’t just use unexamined racist tropes like a lot of comparable material does, but seems really enthusiastic about its racial politics. That’s not much of a surprise in a German film, really, given the kind of racist wonderland Germany still is even 50 years later, with your typical German bourgeois losing all of the liberality he pretends to be so proud of when confronted with anybody who isn’t white, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be able (or willing) to enjoy it. It doesn’t help that Evil Eurasian™ Pinkas Braun’s yellowface is quite this egregiously bad, making even Christopher Lee’s version of Fu Manchu look authentic, that our heroine is a wet blanket even for a Wallace film, nor that our supposed hero Joachim Fuchsberger is as rude as he is racist. It’s all just so very unpleasant I really didn’t even found myself wanting to overlook the bullshit watching it.

Gallows Hill aka The Damned (2013): Victor García’s “stranded in an old house with a possessive witch” movie (that’s a sub-genre, right?) is perfectly fine entertainment for the 90 minutes or so it goes on. The acting’s fine all around, García knows how to pace this sort of thing, and the film does some neat things with the bilingual nature of some of its characters. Despite these virtues, I can’t say the film really grabbed me. The nature of its central evil is just a bit too played out right now, and the additional twist of a possessor who always hops into the body of the person who killed it doesn’t sit right with me, and feels more like a way to crank up the drama in easy ways than something that fits the monster’s background organically. I was also rather miffed by the film’s very clichéd hymns on family love even when it leads to Very Bad Things, and by the fact that the first act doesn’t do much work to actually prepare later character developments. It must have sounded like a good idea to have a monster that knows everyone’s dirty secrets, but it’s a wasted idea if a film never prepares these secrets but springs them on the audience with a “we needed a shocking plot twist here, so magic” gesture.

This doesn’t make Gallows Hill a bad film as much as one that wastes too many opportunities to be a great one.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,in short,adventure,romance,krimi,horror,douglas fairbanks jr.,helena carter,franz joseph gottlieb,joachim fuchsberger,pinkas braun,victor garcía,sophia myles

Das siebente Opfer (1964)

aka The Racetrack Murders

Former judge Lord John Mant (Walter Rilla) is sweetening his retired life breeding racehorses. His star animal has the cute and innocent name of "Satan", and is the favourite for what I assume to be the National Derby coming up soon. But curious and threatening things happen around the horse: first, evil-doers throw a snake right into Satan's way, costing a stableman his life. Then, a trumpet player on one of Mant's parties who clearly knows something about the dastardly happenings is shot. Scotland Yard sends a certain Inspector Bradley (Heinz Engelmann) to take care of the matter, but the poor man soon has his hands fuller than anyone could have expected, for the series of murders is not only continuing, but the number of shady people doing dubious things in and around Mant's castle is remarkable.

There is Mant's enemy Ed Ranova (Wolfgang Lukschy), large-style bookie, owner of a club called "The Silver Whip" (alas, with no whips in its decoration and no musical number featuring whips or not), a man who once was nearly sentenced to death by the Lord, and who is now willing to do just about anything to hinder Satan from winning the derby, like for example paying off Satan's veterinarian Howard Trent (Harry Riebauer, as wooden as always) to sabotage the poor animal. The Lord's son Gerald (Helmut Lohner) is a rather dubious character too, with betting debts with Ranova and being a bit of a jerk two of his most problematic character traits. And why does that Reverend (Hans Nielsen) seem so much more interested in a valuable painting than in saving souls? Isn't that butler (Peter Vogel in a rather funny turn) a bit too two-fisted? If that's not enough to make an Inspector's life difficult, what about Avril Mant (Ann Smyrner), a poor relation living with the rich Mants? Isn't she a bit too good to be true? And what of the sudden, eccentric houseguest Peter Brooks (Hansjörg Felmy) who appears just after the first (of many) murders? Sure, Avril has "romantic female lead" stamped onto her forehead, as Brooks has "some sort of detective working under cover", but that still leaves a bunch of suspects with various complicated relations and quite a few different evil plans to unravel.

The excellent Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptation Das Siebente Opfer (which translates to "The 7th Victim", though in this case the English title "The Racetrack Murders" seems rather more fitting to what's actually going on in the film at hand) is another - as far as I can make out the last - of the krimis director Franz Josef Gottlieb made in 1963 and 1964 before he'd only ever make bad films and disappear into the bottomless quality pit that is German TV.

Even though Das Siebente Opfer contains most of the elements I know and love from most Wallace (no matter Edgar or Bryan Edgar) adaptations, the film often mixes them up in a pleasantly different way. To just take one example, there is the usual evil mastermind, but he/she is neither wearing a snazzy, thematically appropriate costume, nor is he/she a super villain; in fact, her/his motivation is so normal I have to admit it makes as much sense as anything in a Wallace krimi ever does. This is rather typical for a film that is a bit more of an actual murder mystery than most of its genre brethren - though, to my delight, a very pulpy one - with a whiff of Dick Francis. Here, rather normal murder methods and more improbable ones go hand in hand, and the forces of the law use the most unbelievable methods to reach their goal (like the old "oh, let's wait until most of the cast has been killed off before we decide on a suspect" trick), without that aspect of the movie breaking out into complete silliness.

Usually, I prefer the outright insane krimis to the more murder mystery styled ones, but Das Siebente Opfer is so sprightly directed and written by Gottlieb I just have to make an exception to the rule. The director really has wonderful sense of pacing, jumping through the (of course slightly awkward, this is still a German production) action scenes, the snarky dialogue sequences, and the - often surprisingly funny as well as surprisingly well-placed - humorous scenes, like an excited child who just can't wait to tell his audience what happened next; breathlessness has always stood a pulpy tale in good stead. Visually, Gottlieb goes for a rather dynamic style, with more camera movement and tighter editing than German movie law actually allows, all the better to provide a sense of excitement.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,krimi,franz josef gottlieb,reviews,hansjörg felmy,ann smyrner,hans nielsen,anneli sauli

On WTF: Der Schwarze Abt (1963)

aka The Black Abbot

Apart from Alfred Vohrer and Harald Reinl, some other directors did work on Rialto's Edgar Wallace cycle too. One of my favourites among this number is Franz Josef Gottlieb, who directed six krimis in two years and did no direction work worth one's eyes before or since.

Der Schwarze Abt features KINSKI!, a particularly convoluted plot, and lots of shots of people looking through holes. My column on WTF-Film takes a peek at the movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,krimi,franz josef gottlieb,joachim fuchsberger,grit boettcher,dieter borsche,klaus kinski,charles regnier,eddi arent,other places

Das Phantom von Soho (1964)

aka The Phantom of Soho

A shadowy figure wearing a skull mask and what looks a lot like silver oven mitts stalks the streets of Soho to start a charming little series of murders. Curiously, the killer doesn't steal from his victims, but leaves manila envelopes with money and little gifts with them; if it were Christmas, you'd probably think him to be a Santa Claus themed serial killer. Chief Inspector Patton (Dieter Borsche) and sort of comic relief Sergeant Hallam (Peter Vogel) are investigating the case, but after the first success of realizing that the murders have something to do with a bar cum bordello named the Zanzibar, it's slow going.

There are just too many suspects - most of whom will soon enough turn into victims of the murderer - and unlike the audience, the policemen don't even know these suspects share a dark secret that may very well be the motive for the murder. Among the dubious people Patton and Hallam encounter are the wheelchair-bound and scarred owner of the Zanzibar, Joanna Filiati (Elisabeth Flickenschild), the gangster who manages the place for her (Stanislav Ledinek), a member of parliament (Hans Nielsen), a peculiar masseur (Werner Peters), a sea captain (Hans W. Hamacher), and the young club photographer (Helga Sommerfeld). Really, the policemen can thank the murderer for slowly whittling down the number of suspects.

However, there are other problems troubling Patton, too. The head of Scotland Yard, Sir Phillip (Hans Söhnker), takes a personal interest in the case, and acts increasingly like a good suspect himself, while Sir Philip's girlfriend, crime writer Clarinda Smith (Barbara Rütting) does her damndest to be part of the investigation.

Das Phantom's director Franz Josef Gottlieb is another filmmaker whose stint in the krimi genre hints at a talent neither his later nor his earlier films would suggest. By now, my working hypothesis explaining this singularly strange - for post-war German filmmaking - tendency is that the krimi was the only genre where either producers allowed the directors to do more than point and shoot, or one of the few genres that actually interested them enough to put some effort in. Looking at the horrible TV shows Gottlieb worked for at the end of his career (45 episodes of a show starring a chimpanzee as its most talented cast member will kill anyone's creativity, I suppose) I'd tend to the latter explanation.

Be that as it may, fact is that the Franz Josef Gottlieb who directed this Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptation for Artur Brauner's CCC Filmkunst, was quite a different director from the director he would all too soon turn into. There's hardly a second in The Phantom where the director isn't setting up a creative shot, letting his camera glide from a room's ceiling to a more normal position, positioning his camera in a cabinet, or letting it swirl nearly psychedelically in a knife throwing sequence. Somehow, Gottlieb still manages to keep his stylistic excesses at least so much in check the film they dominate doesn't fall apart; it's just a bit more surreal than one would expect of one the actually more sanely plotted krimis.

I was a bit surprised, even slightly shocked, by how much of an exploitation movie - for something made in Germany in 1964 - Das Phantom is: there aren't just the comparatively intense knife murders, but also more weird nightclub scenes than in a Jess Franco production (and I'm sure if the great man saw this one, he must have approved of it heartily as made by a kindred spirit), and two striptease numbers that actually show bare breasts, completely going against the spirit of a prudishness that was at its most obvious when a given film was trying to be risqué that always haunted the Wallace adaptations, be they based on Edgar or Bryan.

Gottlieb's visual oomph and the distractions of bloods and breasts and pretty people (well, pretty women - the men here are all of the sort of stiff-necked middle-age that makes girls cry and boys never want to grow old for sheer terror of what they might become) are very helpful as a distraction from the weaknesses of its script, or rather, the script's love for long, pointless dialogue scenes that always threaten to overwhelm the awesome bits with their sheer length; fortunately, unnecessary scenes of characters talking can be made quite bearable through a distracting execution Alfred Vohrer would be proud of.

So, if you want to venture into the weird, sometimes wild, sometimes hilariously conservative not-England of the krimi, you could find far worse films than Das Phantom von Soho.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,franz josef gottlieb,dieter borsche,barbara rütting,hans söhnker,peter vogel,helga sommerfeld,krimi