Past Misdeeds: With Death On Your Back (1967)

Original title: Con la muerte a la espalda

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.


A gang of international evil-doers has invented a drug that can be used to provoke completely innocent members of the military into pushing the Big Red Button that would loose the Big One. Does it show I'm so old I even remember the Cold War?

Anyway, that drug may not sound all that useful to you or me (for what good is destroying the world, really, unless you're an insane cultist of some eldritch god?), but "the third power" we will certainly not call China (oops) is very interested in acquiring it.

Fortunately, our international evil-doers make a very public test run of their drug, giving one of those professors of every discipline you often find in these films enough data to develop an antidote against it. For once, the Americans and the Russians (as represented by agents called - I kid you not - Bill and Ivan) are of one mind, and are even willing to share the antidote with each other, if with gnashing teeth.

For some reason, the good guys ship the Professor and his assistant Monica (Vivi Bach) off to Hamburg, where he is supposed to give a suitcase containing the antidote and/or the formula for the antidote to the proper authorities during some rich woman's party. Of course, the international evil-doers get wind of this particularly useless plan – unless this takes place in a world without any telecommunications - and gun down the Professor. If not for the intervention of suave/smarmy thief Gary (George Martin) who just happens to be a sucker for beautiful women and suitcases containing valuables, they'd be able to kill Monica and steal the suitcase too.

Having acquired Monica and the suitcase, Gary isn't quite sure what to do with them - sell them on to the Chinese? The Russians? The Americans? Be a gentleman thief and protect Monica? Treat her like an actual human being? It would be nice if our hero (or not) had some time for further deliberation, but each and every faction who knows about Monica and the suitcase wants to capture, kill or buy him, leaving the poor jerk hardly a second to breathe or put the (horrible) moves on women. What's a thief to do?

It has always been one of the pleasures of the Eurospy genre for me to encounter unexpectedly fun films like With Death On Your Back. Its director Alfredo Balcázar is one of those workhorses who spent much of their career during the 60s and 70s churning out films in the popular genres of the day, trying their best to craft fun movies out of clichés, pieces taken from other movies, and actual talent. In Balcázar's case, a lot of his work took place in the Spaghetti (or is it Paella in this case?) Western, but I have to admit I don't remember having seen a single one of them, which may either speak against their quality, my memory, or my knowledge of European genre films of the 60s and 70s.

Be that as it may, With Death On Your Back seems to be the director's only Eurospy film, which is a bit of a disappointment given how entertaining the film is. Sure, much of what happens on screen is the usual mixture of a suave/jerk-y (why do these words seem to be synonymous to me by now?) hero charming the ladies in improbable ways, punching goons in the face (or whatever other body parts look most punchable), and going through various chase sequences to acquire and keep a McGuffin, but Balcázar just as surely knows how to make the generic just pretty darn fun.

For me, the light variant of the Eurospy movie to which With Death certainly belongs has a lot in common with the comedy genre. Both don't thrive as much on originality as on an ability to make the well-known and expected feel new and exciting, and both genres often survive problematic plotting through the timing of their delivery. Balcázar's movie is nothing if not good at timing and pacing, letting hardly a second go by that doesn't have something exciting happen in it, never stopping for longer than a joke or a kiss until its hero stumbles into the next punch-up or the next chase, keeping the audience hooked through breathlessness and - always an important factor in a genre movie - a willingness to entertain that makes it easy to just overlook minor flaws like the fact that the scriptwriters don't always seem to realize Hamburg is situated in Northern Germany and not in Bavaria or the silliness of most everything going on.

Balcázar is helped in his endeavour of keeping the audience away from thinking about plots, plot holes and other dumb stuff like that by an ultra-generic - or archetypal - soundtrack by Claude Bolling that's just bound to swing things along, a cast - also featuring Rosalba Neri and a very unexpected Klausjürgen Wussow as mid-level baddies - that has no problems at all to go with the silliness instead of against it (there is, as you probably know, not much worse than an actor trying to be all thespian-like in what is basically an adventurous romp), and some very decent stunt work.


Plus, there's a scene documenting the eternal struggle between earthbound human and small plane (hello, Mister Hitchcock), guest starring machine pistols, so what's not to like?

Der Rote Kreis (1960)

aka The Red Circle

The rich people of London and surroundings are plagued by a particularly violent blackmailer calling himself the Red Circle. If his targets don't pay or contact the police, the Red Circle murders them without remorse, leaving behind his symbol. By the beginning of the movie, the criminal mastermind has already killed nineteen times. Even the patience of Scotland Yard boss Sir Archibald (Ernst Fritz Fürbringer) with the responsible detective, veteran Inspector Parr (Karl-Georg Saebisch), has worn rather thin, not to speak of the displeased public who can't help but use words like "incompetent" to describe the Inspector.

Sir Archibald thinks it best to improve the situation by consulting private detective Derrick Yale (Klausjürgen Wussow), a man whose smugness will turn out to be by far larger than the results he produces. Working in tandem, Parr and Yale still don't manage to protect anyone targeted by the Red Circle, but their investigations do at least lead them towards various suspects, which seems to be further than Parr managed on his own or with the help of subordinates like the rather peculiar Sergeant Haggett (the inevitable - not that I'm complaining - Eddi Arent).

Among these suspects are female thief and part-time secretary Thalia Drummond (Renate Ewert), young, Thalia-loving Jack Beardmore (Thomas Alder), shady investment lawyer Osborne (Ulrich Beiger), and so on, and so forth. This being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, it's surely just a question of time until enough members of the herd of suspects have been pruned for the police to catch the Red Circle.

Der Rote Kreis is only the second film in Rialto's cycle of Edgar Wallace adaptations, and much of the house style (if not quite the complete house cast) is already established, even though Jürgen Roland is quite a different type of director from Harald Reinl. For me as a German, Roland is usually quite an archetypal example of the peculiarity of German crime TV shows, a combination of blandness and conservatism that neither knows how to use realism inventively (they can't all be The Wire, but…), nor how to be stylish, nor how to entertain without wagging one's finger at one's audience.

Looking at Der Rote Kreis, it turns out Roland could have done much better under different circumstances (for example in a country whose TV landscape isn't quite as crap as the German one was and still is), for the film shows the director as someone who was visually inventive (though not quite as much as main Wallace krimi directors Reinl or Vohrer were), as well as perfectly able to throw as much pulp nonsense at his audience as possible without feeling the need to apologize for it.

Roland and his director of photography Heinz Pehlke do particularly fine work whenever scenes take place by night, with many a throwback to German Expressionism via the rain-wet streets of the urban gothic of US noir. At times, one could actually imagine Der Rote Kreis to have been made during the 40s (though certainly not in Germany - there's little here anyone would read as fascist), as part of some secret history of German pulp movies that never existed.

Of course, you have hardly imagined that particular mythical genre when you crash hard into Roland's weak spots, namely an inability to stage the film's more melodramatic scenes other than painfully stiffly and just horribly unconvincingly acted by thespians who really could do better (or at least less painfully bad), and the curiously inept humour. Not that Roland's efforts on the humour front are objectively worse than those of any of his international peers desperate to destroy their movies' tension through unfunny humour, but I do find Eddi Arent usually funny enough in these films, yet still could hardly bear his scenes here.

Plotwise, Der Rote Kreis manages to feel particularly convoluted (that's a compliment for Krimis, as it is for giallos, mind you), the sort of movie where one ill-timed loo visit will doom a viewer to never-ending, yet pleasant, confusion. The rest is Edgar Wallace by numbers, with all the character types you'd find in the later Rialto movies, with one exception: Renate Ewert's Thalia Drummond is quite different from the usual Wallace-heiresses typically played by Karin Dor. She is actually capable, clearly not prone to hysterics even in difficult situations, and possesses something close to an actual personality. I wish this kind of female role were more common in the Rialto movies, but then the written pulps weren't exactly full of Nita Van Sloans, either.

Be that as it may, Der Rote Kreis manages to be nearly as entertaining as Der Frosch mit der Maske, and did help to ring in the long and curious reign of Rialto's Wallace krimi cycle.

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On WTF: With Death On Your Back (1967)

Original title: Con la muerte a la espalda

Sometimes, I'm still positively surprised by the movies I stumble upon. Case in point is this fine, highly entertaining Eurospy movie by Alfonso Balcázar starring George Martin and Vivi Bach.

Read more about my encounter with it in my column on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,alfonso balcazar,george martin,vivi bach,klausjürgen wussow,rosalba neri,eurospy,spies,other places

In short: Der Grüne Bogenschütze (1961)

aka The Green Archer

While his boss is away, the secretary (Harry Wüstenhagen) of nasty rich guy Abel Bellamy (Gert Fröbe) is earning a bit of extra money by letting tourists have a tour of Bellamy's mansion. One of the guests, clearly up to no good, is shot by someone dressing up as the Green Archer whose legend is somehow connected with Bellamy's house. This being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, the Green Archer will go on to kill more people for mysterious reasons, but the larger part of the movie concerns the attempts of Bellamy's niece Valerie (Karin Dor) to find out what happened to her disappeared mother (spoiler: Bellamy has kidnapped her and hidden her in his house for years), while her uncle and his cronies - one of them going by the delightful name of Coldharbour Smith (Stanislav Ledinek) - try to get rid of her. Fortunately, disguise-mad Inspector Featherstone of Scotland Yard (Klausjürgen Wussow), his assistant, Sergeant Higgins (Wolfgang Völz), and comedic relief reporter Spike Holland (Eddi Arent), are there to save pretty young women. The Archer is really more of a guest in the movie named after him.

And there you already have my main problem with Der Grüne Bogenschütze. Although the film includes many of the sensational pulpy delights one has come to expect from any film that is part of Rialto's Edgar Wallace cycle, it does not seem to be all that interested in them. All the death traps, hidden passages, masked killers, metatextual humour and overly complicated evil plans are there and accounted for, yet the film spends just as much time on showing us scenes of cops searching various premises as on them, either not knowing what's so fun about the krimi, or wilfully ignoring it.

I blame director Jürgen Roland whose second and fortunately last Wallace film this is. At the time when Der Grüne Bogenschütze was made, Roland already had a few years of experience as a journalist and as director of German TV police procedurals - a career path he'd continue on for decades - and it's clear that his strengths lie in the sedate semi-realism of those pieces and not the excited and excitable thrill(or at least sight gag)-a-minute-joys and the glorious artificiality Alfred Vohrer and Harald Reinl brought to their Wallace films. Unfortunately, that rather static and sedate semi-realist style is of little use when adapting a Wallace plot, resulting in a movie that just doesn't feel at all secure in what it actually wants to be, a more conventional mystery or the pulp explosion all its single elements would promise it to be.

I could imagine Roland's rather bland style that works hard at making the awesome mundane and the Wallace-ness of the plot rubbing against each other and producing interesting sparks, some sort of grim and gritty version of Wallace reality. The film at hand, however, is as far from anything that interesting as possible. Instead, the film (or Roland) seems rather embarrassed by its own pulpier side yet has not much of an idea how to remove it, and so just circles around the silliness and the excitement the plot's set-up promises, ending up not showing much of interest at all.

If not for some rather entertaining acting, especially by Gert Fröbe and Karin Dor, there'd just be nothing much to keep one watching at all.

 

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