Past Misdeeds: Der Mann mit dem Glasauge (1969)

aka The Man with the Glass Eye

Scotland Yard’s most boring best (well, at least fifth or sixth best) man Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert, who was always more lively in these films than in anything else he did, but still ends up rather on the somnambulistic side) has quite the case before him and his insufferable assistant Sgt. Pepper (Stefan Behrens) – yes, that’s the sort of joke you’ll have to suffer through in this one – when first a dubious rich man and then the man’s girlfriend are murdered by hands unknown. This being a Rialto Wallace cycle movie, these two murders won’t be the last, and quickly, Perkins is enmeshed in the dealings and murders of a masked glass-eye wearing knife-throwing avenger, a ring of girl traffickers and heroin traders with a particularly abstruse modus operandi (you see, they only traffick dance troupes, and smuggle their drugs in billiard cues). There is the usual horde of suspects and weird hangers-ons/future murder victims in form of figures like a heroin-addicted Lord named Bruce (Fritz Wepper – future assistant to Tappert in all 281 episodes of the painfully boring mystery show Derrick, by the way - doing his best Kinski, which alas is a mediocre Kinski at best), a dancer with a mysterious past (Karin Hübner), the owner of the most disturbing ventriloquist’s dummy ever to sprout a head nearly as large as its ventriloquist (seriously, that thing is soul sucking), a glass eyed bad guy only known as Boss (the wonderfully named Narziß Sokatscheff whom you won’t confuse with Bruce Springsteen) and so on, and so forth.

Der Mann mit dem Glasauge is veteran Wallace adaptation director Alfred Vohrer’s final film in the cycle, and, not surprisingly by film number fourteen for the series for him, it’s far from his best effort (which would either be the stylish Die Toten Augen von London or the insane Im Banne des Unheimlichen).

Obvious first point of criticism is how overboard Vohrer goes with the odious comic relief here, with way too many scenes of Scotland Yard boss Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck) being “funny”, or even worse “humorously obtuse”, bringing the film to a screeching halt whenever he appears – which is too often. And just don’t get me started on Sgt. Pepper (shudder), the connected long-hair jokes (because a guy with a mild Beatles-esque haircut is a hippy to a 55-year old director, and hippies are icky and oh so funny), or Sir Arthur’s brain-dead secretary. I’ve grown somewhat patient with the humour in the Wallace adaptations over the years, found myself even chuckling at the antics of Siegfried Schürenberg or Eddi Arent from time to time, but the second row of comic relief as embodied by von Meyerinck and co is too painful to endure for long even for me.

And of course, the quagmire of comedy here really hurts the film’s impact as the sort of stiff (we are German, after all) pulp crime movie I want from my Wallace adaptations, because it really takes away from the death traps, the curious contraptions and the grotesque flights of fancy of production design and script. There is still some – alright, quite a lot - of that to be found in Der Mann mit dem Glasauge to be sure, but where Vohrer’s better late-series films manage to integrate the pulp elements, the unfunny humour and his personal sense of the grotesque with each other in a way that doesn’t exactly cause them to make sense (because nothing in Wallace adaptations ever does, much) but that treats them as things that belong together and work with one another to produce the particular Vohrer mood of the strange, here every scene seems to stand (or fall) exclusively by itself.

So there are – particular in the film’s second half – still moments of joy to find here, but they never connect into an actual movie. Or, if you have no love for the German Wallace adaptations at all, you might even say they connect even less into an actual movie than usual.

But let’s not continue with the sour grapes, and let me instead list – like the Marquis de Sade with his hobbies I can’t talk about the Wallace adaptations without listing stuff, it seems – some of the film’s inspired and puzzling high points. There is, for one, a surprisingly fun billiard room brawl. If you don’t know about billiards, it seems to be a game exclusively played by people wearing suits in a smoky yet somewhat classy establishment that is of course a front for the heroin trade, a situation perfect to devolve into a brawl between two bunches of beefy guys in excellent late 60s suits, Sgt. Pepper (who knows billiard fu, it turns out), and Horst Tappert, who finally gets to use the little stick he’s been carrying around the whole film for no reason beyond it being the sort of visual detail Vohrer loves so dearly.

While I’m being informative, I also need to enlighten my imaginary frequent readers (hi, Mum! Oh wait, she doesn’t speak English…) concerning the nature of heroin. Heroin, you see, is a white powder addicts carry around in little paper sugar bags, and which they exclusively ingest orally, preferably in public places, or just five seconds before they expect their mother to meet them. What’s shooting up?

I am also – for once - quite happy about the identity of our masked avenger in this particular film, because it goes very much against the deeply conservative grain (they are German, you understand) of these films. Even more peculiar, method and motivations of the avenger even make sense; well, sense for the kind of pulp United Kingdom the Wallace films take place in, where becoming a masked avenger is the thing to do when you’ve been horribly wronged and need to put things right.

Other joyful moments and elements are the pretty colourful and deeply late 60s - as seen through the eyes of middle-aged guys from Germany - set and production design with some really popping colours that would strike many a contemporary director of photography dead of colour shock; the excellent murder of the ventriloquist (of course committed by someone wearing the head of his dummy because it is that disturbing) that for one scene very suddenly suggests a proto-slasher of particular weirdness; and various Vohrer-isms in form of the whole glass eye stuff, objects circling, and a playful approach to close-ups.


However, as I said, to get at these very pleasant moments, one has to drudge through the horrors of multiple comic relief characters and not let oneself be put to sleep by the film’s disconnectedness (rather comparable to the amount of parentheses and digressions you find in this write-up here, curiously enough) so this is probably a film not meant for anyone but the krimi veteran who needs to have seen every single film Vohrer made in the genre whatever the quality. So, me.

Past Misdeeds: Der Todesrächer von Soho (1972)

aka The Corpse Packs His Bags

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 without any re-writes or 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 murderer with a very peculiar modus operandi haunts London. Concentrating on people visiting the fair city, he first packs his victims' bags, then kills them with an incredibly precise knife throw. As you do.

Inspector Ruppert Redford (Fred Williams) - oh, the hilarity! - of Scotland Yard has quite a bit of trouble solving the case. I'm sure his trouble has nothing at all to do with him being a typical early 70s smartass playboy who just loves to let civilians do his job for him, like the (weirdly competent, obviously odious) comic relief photographer Andy Pickwick (Luis Morris) or his personal friend, the crime writer Charles Barton (Horst Tappert).

To be fair to Redford, one has to admit the case is rather complicated, seeing as it not only involves the strange murders, but also a shady doctor (Siegfried Schürenberg) with more than just one secret, his lovely assistant (Elisa Montés) with another secret all her own, a drug ring peddling a drug thrice as potent as heroin, various bombings, one or more revenge plots, and Barton's secret. Not unlike Redford (who will solve his case by going where Pickwick tells him to, and being obnoxious), I lost track of the plot about halfway through the movie, and never was quite sure what was going on in some of the plot lines, so it's difficult to blame him.

Say what you will about German producer impresario Artur "Atze" Brauner's attempts at jumping on the successful Edgar Wallace adaptation wagon by making a contract with Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace that allowed him to use the younger Wallace's name and the often very fine titles of the man's books and make completely unrelated films out of them, but the man did show good taste when it came to the international co-operations late in his Wallace Junior cycle. After having co-produced Argento's Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Brauner hired beloved auteur Jess Franco for his next Bryan Wallace movie, Brauner's second version of Wallace's Death Packs A Suitcase.

Now, I have gone on record saying that I generally prefer Franco's more personal films - at least when we're talking about his work of the 60s and 70s - to his attempts at making more conventional genre movies, but Der Todesrächer von Soho (which translates as "the death-avenger of Soho", and no, the word "Todesrächer" does exist in German as little as "death-avenger" does in English - it's just a lovely case of the sort of random composite noun the German language loves so dearly) turns out to be an exception to the rule, and may in fact be one of my personal favourites among Franco's films. It's probably because Franco might not have been allowed to indulge in his erotic obsessions as heavily as his fans are used to - well, beyond a very short nightclub sequence and a lot of women wearing boots, anyway - but does indulge heavily in his love of pulp and a visual and narrative style that have come down through the serials (on the visual side of course combined with the man's usual tics and enthusiasms).

While Der Todesrächer doesn't work at all as a straight pulpy narrative (what with it having a plot so byzantine my first viewing didn't even leave me with an understanding of the knife-thrower's motives, even though I guessed his identity without much trouble with his first appearance on screen), it's a virtual feast of classic pulp, serial, and krimi clichés as seen through the slightly skewed but loving perspective of Franco. The whole film is basically Franco shooting classic poses of the genres he's working in from his favourite weird perspectives and through glass tables while a pretty hip soundtrack by Rolf Kühn (with some contributions by Franco himself, apparently) plays, pretty obviously having a lot of fun with it and for once not even trying to achieve transcendence through boredom. In fact (and genre-appropriately), Der Todesrächer is as fast-paced and sprightly as a Franco movie gets, with nary a minute where nothing exciting or at least interesting is happening on screen, making this one a Franco movie that's much easier to appreciate for the amateur than his more self-indulgent films. How could I not appreciate Franco having fun in this way?

As much as I love the director, I usually do not use the word "exciting" to describe any of his films, but Der Todesrächer von Soho is an exception to that rule too, working as a timely reminder that Franco could be versatile if a given project interested him enough.


German viewers will probably have another reason to look fondly, or even with mild astonishment, at the film, for its use of Horst Tappert is quite an eye-opener. Here in Germany, Tappert is primarily known today as the star of the long-running (I thought about eighty years, Internet sources speak of only twenty-four) cop show Derrick. The show's complete run of 281 episodes was written by Herbert Reinecker whom you also might know as one of the core writers of Rialto Film's Edgar Wallace cycle (and yes, Tappert was in some of those too, and quite lively at that). Unfortunately, Reinecker's attempts at a more psychological crime show only resulted in a show as visually dead, emotionally and intellectually dull, and politically conservative as anything I'd care - or rather not care - to imagine, and drove Tappert to performances that would be cruel to call "wooden", for even pieces of wood have feelings that can be hurt. Having grown up with Derrick, and somewhat forgotten Tappert's part in the earlier Wallace movies, it came as a real shock to watch the actor here, about two years before he started on the show that was to make/end him, smiling, acting, even over-acting, and possessing an actual physical presence like, well, an actual human being, outplaying the film's cop character with effortless charisma. It's quite a thing to behold, though not enough for me to ever want to revisit Derrick.

On ExB: Der Mann mit dem Glasauge (1969)

They can’t all be hits, and so Alfred Vohrer’s final Edgar Wallace adaptation isn’t exactly his best work.
Yet, despite some major flaws, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the film, as you will see when you click on through to the sugar-ingesting Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,alfred vohrer,horst tappert,karin hübner,fritz wepper,stefan behrens

Hairy Beasts: Der Hund von Blackwood Castle (1968)

aka The Monster of Blackwood Castle

aka The Horror of Blackwood Castle

Warning: there will be spoilers.

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may resurrect the dead as mid-tempo zombies) toward everything hairy and beastly: King Kong, cuddly little dogs and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

Der Hund von Blackwood Castle, despite a title that translates to "the hound of Blackwood Castle", only barely qualifies for the "Hairy Beasts" theme, because it may contain an evil dog, but it's really treating the poor thing strictly as a murder weapon that could be replaced by just about anything.

When Jane Wilson's (Karin Baal) estranged father, Captain Wilson (Otto Stern), dies, he leaves her run-down old Blackwood Castle and a bunch of problems she surely didn't expect.

For one, there's Wilson's shady lawyer's (Hans Söhnker) heavy insistence on Jane selling the castle as soon as possible (but only to the people he chooses, which would be him), there's a cellar full of snakes, and there's the Captain's former factotum Grimsby (Arthur Binder), all dress-sense a few centuries out of fashion and threatening demeanour, and these are just the problems Jane learns about early on in her stay.

Among the mysterious occurrences surrounding her Jane doesn't yet know about is the start of a series of murders; various shady people taking residence in the nearby inn of Lady Agathy Beverton (Agnes Windeck) and her brother Henry (Tilo von Berlepsch) meet a horrible end when walking the moors by the fake (and pretty ridiculous looking) poison fangs of the titular hound. The hound's victims also have a tendency to disappear afterwards.

That is, until one of them finally re-appears right in Blackwood Castle's living room. Jane, being the heroine of the piece, calls Scotland Yard, but to the audience's disappointment, there's no inspector available, so Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) and his secretary Miss Finley (Ilse Pagé) take on the case personally. Poor Jane.

Sir John will for once actually have to use his own brain to cut through the mystery. And I haven't even mentioned the added complexity of the case provided by the not murdered shady residents of Lady Agathy's inn (Wallace inspector actors Heinz Drache and Horst Tappert, among others), or by the suspicious manner in which village doctor Doc Adams (Alexander Engel) and Sir Henry act. Only one thing is clear: there must be something quite valuable hidden in or around Blackwood Castle, and whoever knows of these valuables is willing to murder people with a hound.

I am tempted to call Alfred Vohrer's Hund von Blackwood Castle an archetypal example of the German Edgar Wallace Cycle that began in the 50s, but that would only be half true.

Sure, half the film's cast can also be found in about half of the other Wallace movies, and the film's plot is a variation on all the usual Wallace themes - there's the innocent woman inheriting money and a whole lot of trouble from a shady relation, the mysterious killer who murders other nasty people by bizarre means, the typical assortment of secret doors, threatening animals, and other signs of pulp cinema, and a plot that is so convoluted it becomes difficult to keep track of the cast and their motives (which isn't helped by the fact that people's actions only barely make sense even when you take their hidden agendas into account).

On the other hand, Herbert Reinecker's script puts some work into using some of these elements a bit differently than usual. Firstly, while using Siegfried Schürenberg as the main police detective gives the man a bit too much room for a comedy shtick that is generally more amusing when used sparingly, it also gives the movie the opportunity to eschew the whole "male hero romances the heroine" business that nearly always is a weak point in films of the series completely; it's just too bad that the script doesn't use this opportunity to make Karin Baal's character more active, but since this is a German movie and not one made in Hong Kong, that would be too much to hope for.

Secondly, Der Hund confuses the role of its hero even more by casting actors like Tappert (seriously playing a man called Donald Fairbanks) and especially Drache (his character name is Connery, Humphrey Connery) who would usually play the male hero as some of the film's bad guys. To make matters even more self-conscious, Drache does seem to play his usual inspector/private eye/etc working incognito part for large parts of the movie, only to finally be exposed to be just as evil as everyone else is.

Thanks to this twist, Der Hund has the rather curious distinction of being a movie in which every character apart from the heroine is either an idiot (hullo Sir John, hullo Lady Agathy), evil, a snake, or a dog with ridiculous fake teeth. Which would put Der Hund's world view right next to that of the more pessimistic noirs, if its inherent silliness and the self-conscious winking at the audience Vohrer so loved in his movies wouldn't suggest that to be an indulgence in over-interpretation.

On the directorial side, Vohrer seems most alive here when he can indulge in his love for silly gadgets (I still don't have a clue how that sarcophagus/chess set contraption is supposed to work - it's awesome anyhow) or slightly bizarre sight gags (Vohrer truly loves making jokes about monocles and eye patches). The director's treatment of the suspense scenes seems less enthusiastic this time around: while the scenes of dog attacks and people sneaking through the moors aren't done badly - Vohrer probably being too much of the professional for that - I couldn't help but think his heart wasn't really in them while I watched the movie.

Which, in combination with the high self-referentiality of its most interesting elements, makes Der Hund von Blackwood Castle quite typical of the decadent (colour) phase of the Rialto Wallace krimis. It's not exactly a film I'd recommend to people starting out with the series, but one that reserves its charms for an audience (pretty much like its contemporary German audience that had been eating these films up for a decade by then, and would continue to do so in TV broadcasts for decades to come) well versed in the ways of the Wallace cycle.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,hairy beasts,krimi,alfred vohrer,heinz drache,karin baal,horst tappert,siegfried schürenberg,agnes windeck

Der Gorilla von Soho (1968)

aka Gorilla Gang

A guy in a ruddy gorilla costume wanders through nightly London, killing rich foreigners and leaving their bodies floating in the Thames. Scotland Yard's Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck), the higher-up in charge in case Siegfried Schürenberg's Sir John is too competent, puts unpleasantly rude Inspector Perkins (a pre-zombification Horst Tappert) and his assistant Sgt Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen) - seriously - on the case. The policemen's only clue are little dolls with messages in some kind of African language written on them left with the dead bodies. Perkins and Pepper acquire the help of Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas) as a translator of these messages.

A true expert, Susan identifies the language used in the messages as "Tunisian" and translates them into some nonsense of dubious help about gorillas and murder. Still, it's enough to let the cops theorize that the gorilla gang (a gang known to - quite reasonably, I'm sure - dress up as gorillas for their murders and to only commit them during night and fog) has returned.

This being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, Susan will of course help the police out further and get into peril, there will be evil-doers disguised as benefactors running a home for criminal young women trying to get at an inheritance, and more shady characters than you can shake a stick at will try to blackmail and rob each other in a plot as complicated as it is absurd. The inspector's investigation will lead him to a foundation with the excellent name of "Peace and Love for People", and into one of the more peculiar nightclubs anyone will find outside of a Jess Franco movie.

With Der Gorilla von Soho, I again enter the decadent phase of Rialto's Edgar Wallace cycle. Quite unlike the earlier Der Bucklige von Soho, with whom the film at hand shares not only Soho (or rather "Soho") but more than just a few plot points, Der Gorilla is not collapsing under the weight of its own campiness, nor does it wink-wink, nudge-nudge at its audience so often said audience is bound to lose its patience. This time around, director Alfred Vohrer manages to find the right balance between the silly, the poppy, the ridiculous, and the sort of old-fashioned, pulpy thrills that belong into a film that not only features a killer in a gorilla costume, but a killer in a gorilla costume sticking his victims into a drown-o-mat.

The acting here is not quite as artificial and melodramatic as in some of Vohrer's other Wallace adaptations like Die Blaue Hand, but I suspect the director pushed for a slightly (and only slightly, this is still incredibly far from the Method and all it entails, for good and for ill) more naturalistic acting style than was his wont so that the not quite so artificial acting would contrast all the better with the particularly heavy artificiality of the film's sets. Especially the nightclub some of the films shadier characters (and Sir Arthur, of course) frequent is a thing to behold: stuffed with lots of mandatory red lights, and fashioned with a room where interested guests can photograph nude women and men (this time around, there's real  nudity - of both genders! - on screen) who are standing on pedestals "for artistic purposes". Obviously, this is not a club one could imagine to encounter anywhere outside of a movie, and therefore quite a perfect place to encounter inside of a movie.

The film's plot does of course work through the same elements and dramatic arcs as just about every other of the Wallace films. Der Gorilla, though, does its thing with what looks like real enthusiasm, even a willingness to provide as many cheap thrills as the basic conservatism of German filmmaking of its time and place allows, resulting in a film that not only duly presents these thrills, but actually dares to revel in them, as if Vohrer had gotten up one day and thought to himself "why not be earnest about all this silliness this time around". That's - and this will not come as a surprise to anyone reading this, I suspect - exactly the kind of attitude a film needs to show to win my heart. And who am I not to give my heart to a film working this hard for it?

 

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,alfred vohrer,horst tappert,uschi glas,uwe friedrichsen,herbert fux

On WTF: Der Todesrächer von Soho (1972)

aka The Corpse Packs His Bags

In my newly regained enthusiasm for watching Edgar Wallace adaptations, I've turned my eye to one of Artur Brauner's Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptations, in this particular case a Spanish co-production directed by the great, frightening Jess Franco.

It's Franco without the pubic hair zooms! What the great man put in their place, I'll relate over on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,spanish movies,jess franco,horst tappert,fred williams,elisa montes,reviews,krimi,other places