In short: Die Schwarze Kobra (1963)

aka The Black Cobra

Truck driver Peter Kramer (Adrian Hoven) is having a bad week: his latest cargo turns out to be drugs oh so cleverly disguised as washing powder, the owner of the cargo, a gangster known as The Corse, makes a very rude front-seat passenger, and then a competing gang working for the Syndicate kills the Corse right in front of Peter's eyes to boot. Which of course makes poor Peter a risk for the gangsters.

Soon enough, Peter finds himself alternately fleeing the Syndicate, the former gang of the Corse, and the police. Because this is that kind of movie, what ensues is mostly a series of kidnappings and re-kidnappings of Peter's girlfriend Alexa (Ann Smyrner) by the various factions, while Klaus Kinski betrays one gang to the other so he can snort that sweet, sweet coke. Also an appearance make Klaus Löwitsch as "Boogie", the violent pumped-up coke fiend to Kinski's snivelling one, a mysterious police undercover agent, a mute thug named Goba (Michel Ujevic), a knife-throwing Herbert Fux, mildly eccentric policemen (Paul Dahlke and Peter Vogel, the latter doing a milder version of the traditional Eddi Arent bit), Peter's former box champion now roadside rest stop animal show owner friend Punkti (Ady Berber), and a cobra (well, for one scene).

Obviously, Rudolf Zehetgruber's Die Schwarze Kobra is another non-Edgar Wallace krimi attempting to catch a bit of the commercial fire of the Rialto movies. Despite being shot in Vienna and at least nominally being an Austrian film, Zehetgruber's film features many of the usual faces in the more or less usual roles. The German language genre film world wasn't big after all, and really, when you can hire Kinski to do some snivelling, you do hire Kinski to do some snivelling.

Stylistically, this is - of course - much less intricately styled than the Rialto films were, with some okay sets and locations but also a handful of rather impoverished looking ones. The visual influences of and parallels to noir and gothic are mostly rather minor; moodiness, it seems did not stand high on Zehetgruber's list of things to include. Instead, the director does his best to make up for a very silly and often inappropriately melodramatic script (so one quite typical of German as well as Austrian genre writing), by getting as energetic as genre films of its place and era got. He's not quite as elegant at it as Harald Reinl was in comparable Wallace movies but the resulting film still is pleasantly fast-paced and action-filled. Sure, the fight choreography and quality of the stunt work (such as it is), isn't anything intricate, but the film had no problems convincing me that watching two big, slow man ponderously and very visibly not hitting each other in a fight was a rather fun thing, soon to be followed by other fun things, which is really all I expect of pulp-y krimis.

After having seen Die Schwarze Kobra I'm not at all surprised Zehetgruber would go on to direct a few of the Komissar X movies. While not being quite as enjoyable and pop as the later films, Die Schwarze Kobra is clearly the product of exactly the sort of sensibility best suited to bringing to live that particular series of cult film fan favourites, and therefore a fine way to spend ninety minutes.

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Das Wirtshaus von Dartmoor (1964)

aka The Inn On Dartmoor

Scotland Yard is confused by a series of twelve well-organized break-outs from Dartmoor Prison. It's not as if the prison has been completely without incidents like these in the past, but these earlier escapees have always been found quickly, often even before they could find their way out of the moors surrounding the place. The only trace the last twelve escapees have left is a single postcard with the text "Arrived safely" for one family member by each and every single one of them.

Inspector Cromwell (Paul Klinger) has its own theory what this strange business means. The policeman thinks that the twelve men are all dead by now, killed by an organization supposedly out to rescue them. Cromwell even has an idea which organization that might be - "Butterfly", openly a kind of legal costs insurance for members of the underworld. Butterfly's boss, the lawyer Gray (Dieter Eppler), does at least seem to have more than just one secret.

Cromwell isn't the only one looking for the escaped men. Australian Tony Nash (Heinz Drache) has a very personal interest in the last of the twelve escapees, in that he wants to either kiss or kill him for past sins. Both men's investigations independently point at Gray and at the Inn of former Dartmoor super-guard Mr. Simmons (Friedrich Joloff), who just might have secrets of his own.

After some time of working at odds with each other, Cromwell and Nash decide to put their heads together. Still, this isn't an easy case to crack, for someone working through the inn's waitress, local femme fatale Evelyn (Ingmar Zeisberg), uses Gray's former chauffeur to kill anyone who could point the police at him, leaving Nash with the desperate idea of letting himself be thrown into Dartmoor and try to escape the prison with the help of "Butterfly".

Das Wirtshaus von Dartmoor is one of five Krimis director Rudolf Zehetgruber made in 1963 and 1964, at the height of the Edgar Wallace mania in German cinema. So it will hardly come as a surprise that these five films are part of the wave of films by various German production houses out to catch some of that sweet Wallace adaptation money without actually having the rights to adapt any Wallace novels, nor useful property like the rights to Doctor Mabuse.

Fortunately, the UK did provide these German filmmakers with a slew of other mystery writers like Francis Durbridge, or, in the case of Das Wirtshaus, Victor Gunn, whose novels one could adapt as loosely as possible - after all, the point was to have the name of a British sounding writer in the credits, and nothing else. Once you had taken care of that part of business, you only needed to put a few Wallace movie mainstays (like Heinz Drache and Dieter Eppler in this case) in front of the camera, and make good use of other Wallace movie mainstays (like writer Egon Eis and composer Peter Thomas in this case) behind the camera - not a problem given how small the German film industry of the time was - and you had your own Krimi to bring to market. It's something to bring a tear into the eye of every fan of greedy exploitation movie hucksterism.

Zehetgruber's films are certainly some of the better of non-Wallace Wallace movies. They generally aren't as good as the best films Rialto's Harald Reinl and Alfred Vohrer directed, but they do fit snugly into the solid middle ground of these films. While Zehetgruber's Krimis don't climb the pulpy heights of something like Der Frosch mit der Maske, nor develop the sheer lunacy of efforts like Die Blaue Hand, they can still be an all-around pleasant time for friends of the genre, among whom I have found myself again these last few months.

As a director, Zehetgruber seems to reach for the intersection of the styles of Reinl and Vohrer in a mad science-like attempt to fuse Reinl's snap and Vohrer's eccentricity, only on a budget that must have been much lower than what the Rialto directors had to work with. The vagaries of working with little money mostly show in an overuse of library footage to demonstrate that the film's really taking place in the UK and somewhat hopeless yet charming attempts to present archetypically German countryside as a part of Britain. It would be churlish not to admit that Zehetgruber gets some very moody shots out of foggy, autumnal German country roads, though. In fact, all scenes not taking place on obvious sets are shot especially well, composed with an eye for atmosphere and even, from time to time, a certain sense of beauty.

The rest of the film is exactly like one would expect: the script is needlessly byzantine, the characters pulp novel clichés, the action fake but enthusiastic, the music groovy, Heinz Drache about as cool as German actors in this sort of role get, the film's idea of the UK is overexcited and a bit weird - you probably know the deal by now. It's the Krimi as the movie equivalent of a comfy chair, and I for one, always liked to sit comfortably.

 

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