Harald-Leipnitz-Strasse in Wuppertal

 

Harald Leipnitz features in the Rialto Wallace Krimis Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloss/The Curse of the Hidden Vault (1964), Der unheimliche Mönch/The Sinister Monk (1965) and Die blaue Hand/Creature with the Blue Hand (1967).

He can also be seen in the Francis Durbridge TV-Mini Series Der Schlüssel (1965) and in other productions such as the Karl May Western Der Ölprinz/The Oil Prince (1965) and Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand/Winnetou: Thunder at the Border (1966) as well as The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) and a plethora of other popular German movies and TV series.

He was born on April 22, 1922 in Wuppertal, the same city that Horst Tappert was also born in. A while ago I discovered that this city in North Rhine Westfalia named a street after him in his honour in the Elberfeld suburb that he originally came from.

Once I heard this I started developing this crazy idea that maybe some day I should venture there but a quick look at Google Maps reveals that realistically other than the street sign there is very little to explore there so will remain an armchair tourist in this regard but thought it would be cool to share this find with the rest of the world.

Der Hund von Blackwood Castle/The Hound of Blackwood Castle (1968) - Lobby Cards

 Am planning to post a review of this movie soon but in the meantime enjoy this collection of German lobby cards for this production.

Operation St. Peter’s (1967)

If you read Krimi! 0 (and if you haven’t: What’s stopping you?), you'd have learnt that the commercially most successful Krimi in Germany was surprisingly not one of the Rialto Wallace’s but the GK Chesterton Father Brown adaption Das schwarze Schaf (tr. “The Black Sheep”, 1960), a film that never saw an English language release but that proved so popular with the audience that a follow-up was shot two years later: Er kanns nicht lassen (tr. “He can’t help it”, 1962). 

Father Brown was played by Heinz Rühmann, one of the most popular German actors ever with a career ranging over more than 5 decades. He was a quiet comedian, usually playing a kind-hearted Average Joe. 

Those two films were the only two adaptations that can genuinely be considered classic Krimis, however, they generated one last footnote: the Italian comedy Operazione San Pietro/Operation St. Peter’s (1967), directed by none other than Lucio Fulci. In Germany this film was marketed as Die Abenteuer des Kardinal Braun (tr. “The Adventures of Cardinal Brown”). 

Father Brown has now been promoted from small English priest to a Vatican based Cardinal and the film unfortunately is a complete mess and really for completists only. 

 One of the main issues is that it can’t decide whether it wants to be a standalone film or whether it wants to act as a continuation of the earlier two films. 

The trouble is that as a continuation of the series, the film is very badly written with the Brown character appearing first after more than 40 minutes. Even subsequently he has very little to do, does practically no detecting work of any kind other than ordering each and every Italian priest on a wild goose chase after the thieves of Michelangelo’s Pietà. 

That chase makes up at least 20 minutes of the final movie and as such may be considered overdone, though it has some effective scenes of entire religious orders storming out of their monasteries in their different frocks running up and down the country in various formations. Some of those scenes look quite stunning, I must admit. 

E.G. Robertson has one of his final parts as a babbling mafia don in fear of the vicious beating he once received from his peers. Cue: Black and white flashback à la introductory sequence of The Beyond. 

Uta Levka of Edgar Wallace fame as well as of Scream and Scream Again and The Oblong Box has a much bigger and more talkative part than usual and does look quite dishy. Thanks to the crystal clear pause function of modern DVDs you can also catch a nice topless glimpse of her that could otherwise be missed. (God forbid!) 

The comedy of the film is of a very daft Italian kind. It’s not even ludicrous enough to make you cringe, very harmless and predictable overall, not enough that it’ll have you slapping your laps with laughter. 

The film is only really available on a purely German language DVD without English subtitles or dubbing. Internationally, even amongst Fulci fans, this production is hardly known at all. 

Stephen Thrower is one of the few scholars who wrote about this production in his excellent book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci but even he seems to miss the connection to the earlier movies. Instead he focuses on the radical Fulci critique of the Catholic Church in films like The Eroticist and considers Operazione flawed as the humour against the Church is only very superficial and not deep enough. Rühmann’s character really never gets a proper mention other than in a small part of his synopsis. For all intents and purposes Rühmann, however, was one of THE main characters and reason why the film managed to get the green light at all. Admittedly, this was a very badly written Father Brown entry, but a Father Brown entry nonetheless and as such there is no way that anyone would have wanted to even make it an anti-Church pamphlet. Father Brown films are by their nature pro-religious.

Krimi on TV: Das Halstuch (1962)

When actress and model Faye Collins is found murdered in a village near London, a silk scarf proves to be the most crucial lead to the identification of her killer. 

What Edgar Wallace was for the cinematic Krimi genre, Francis Durbridge (1912-1998) was for TV. 

In contrast to Wallace, English writer Durbridge was still an active writer of crime thrillers and mysteries in the 1960s. But just like Wallace, Durbridge was also equally as popular (if not more so!) in Germany as he was in his home country. 

From 1959 on several of his novels were adapted as TV mini series in Germany and so popular that they were nicknamed “Strassenfeger” (street sweepers) as they swept the streets clean of pedestrians whenever they were being transmitted. In their heyday they had a viewership of 90%. At times when not every household owned a television set yet, they were often community events where friends and family gathered to watch the episodes together. 

The most successful of those mini series was the third one: Das Halstuch, based on the Durbridge novel The Scarf which initially was a 1959 BBC 6-parter with Donald Pleasance before it was novelised in 1960. 

When Das Halstuch was shown in January 1962, German streets were literally deserted. Companies even changed their shift rotas to ensure that their staff was able to watch the new episodes. Absolutely everybody was speculating about the murder of Faye Collins, a phenomenon that was similar to the later “Who shot JR Ewing?” craze or to a lesser degree “Who killed Laura Palmer?”. 

But then it came to a scandal, a notorious éclat that would make national TV history. 

The day before the transmission of the final episode, the well known actor and cabaret artist Wolfgang Neuss placed an advert in a popular tabloid in which he revealed the name of the killer and encouraged everyone instead of staying in and watching the final reveal to leave their homes and visit the cinema again (where he - no doubt accidentally- also starred in a new film). 

The nation was up in arms. Neuss received death threats and Bild, the biggest tabloid, branded him a “Vaterlandsverräter” (traitor), a term that incidentally carried very nasty historical implications. 

I have attached a copy of that advert to this blog post but disguised the name so as not to spoil anything from my side.

Now I got a confession to make myself: Even though Das Halstuch was still much talked about and incredibly popular 15 years or so after its first transmission, ie. around the time when I finally reached the age where I could watch it myself, up to now I have never actually got around to checking it out myself.

 Yes, yes, I know: I need to get my membership to the Krimiclub revoked. 

But it’s never too late to make amends so I finally caved in and binged this on YouTube. 

True, if shown nowadays this 6-part series would hardly sweep the streets any longer given that the audience taste as well as TV production values have since changed but it is still easy to see why this production was so successful. 

Whereas other German TV films often remained very static for years to come (see e.g. Der Mieter from 1967 or the 1963 TV adaptation of Der Hexer/The Ringer), Das Halstuch is much more dynamic and not just studio bound but also features outdoor scenes and even quite an action packed finale. 

In contrast to the Rialto Wallace Krimis, the Durbridge adaptation is more a classic Whodunnit without Gothic or other bizarre elements and whereas a lot of the Wallaces have an urban setting, this mini series is more rural or small town based. 

Hans Quest directed not just this series but also three other Durbridge adaptations. 

The main reason for the tremendous success of this show is undoubtedly the preponderance of incredibly popular actors that were (or later would be) associated with the Krimi genre and that could now be appreciated on a smaller screen as well: 

 • Heinz Drache first featured in the non-Rialto Wallace Der Rächer/The Avenger (1960) before starring in six Rialto Wallaces as well as in one of the Sanders movies. In Das Halstuch he is a charmingly manipulative inspector who enjoys setting little traps like making a hames of his French when he actually speaks it rather well. 

 • Albert Lieven, a German actor with British passport, is the shady but elegant publisher Clifton Morris, the owner of the scarf and main suspect. Lieven would appear in three Rialto Wallaces and the Merton Park production Death Trap (1962). 

 • Horst Tappert plays a vicar. Tappert would for decades dominate the German TV screens as Chief Inspector Derrick and even though he was often cast as a policeman in the 1960s he also played one of the Great British Train robbers in a German mini series and featured in three Rialto Wallaces as well as Jess Franco’s Der Todesrächer von Soho/The Corpse Packs His Bags and Der Teufel kam aus Akasava/The Devil Came from Akasava (both from 1971). 

 • Margot Trooger would play Cora Ann Milton, the Hexer’s/Ringer’s wife. In this series she is the glamorous owner of a fashion salon. 

 • Dieter Borsche was one of the genre’s most versatile actors, be it the Reverend in Die Toten Augen von London/Dead Eyes of London (1961), parts in Der schwarze Abt/The Black Abbot (1963), Bryan Edgar Wallace Krimis Der Henker von London/The Mad Executioners (1963) and Das Phantom von Soho/The Phantom of Soho (1963) or Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse/Dr. Mabuse vs. Scotland Yard (1963). In Das Halstuch he portrays an artist who frequently strays from a life of marital bliss with some of his models. 

 • Hellmut Lange is the victim’s physically handicapped brother. Lange only appeared in one Wallace Krimi, Der Fälscher von London/The Forger of London (1961), but would later become the host of a popular German quiz show about cinema. 

 • Even the small part of Diana Winston was cast with Eva Pflug who also had a supporting role in the very first Rialto Wallace Der Frosch mit der Maske/Fellowship of the Frog (1959). 

Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge there is no English friendly version of this show around but with the advances in auto-translated subtitles it should gradually become easier now to appreciate foreign language productions like this one.