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.

Das Geheimnis der grünen Stecknadel/What Have You Done to Solange? (1972) - Lobby Cards

 A set of German lobby cards for Das Geheimnis der grünen Stecknadel (1972). 

This was the 31st and second last Rialto Wallace and is internationally better known as a giallo under the title What Have You Done to Solange? 

This international version is actually a longer cut to the German one and one of these days I'll need to compare the two versions properly.

Edwin Zbonek (March 28, 1928 - May 29, 2006)

(Edwin Zbonek to the right)

Though his career spanned from 1960-1982, the bulk of Edwin Zbonek's TV and movie work is from the 1960s. 

He is mainly known for his TV movies but also directed two of CCC’s Bryan Edgar Wallace films: Der Henker von London/The Mad Executioners (1963), a film that combines a plot about a group of vigilante henchmen in London with that of a sex fiend/mad scientist, and Das Ungeheuer von London City/The Monster of London City (1964), featuring a narrative about a modern day Jack the Ripper. 

With their splashes of grand guignol and smidgens of giallo-like elements, these are some of the best and most enjoyable Krimis outside the Rialto series. They are also remarkable in that they both somewhat dared to defy the classic idea of a Happy End that for the most part was prevalent in other films of this genre. They also presented suspects and villains that were able to elicit a certain kind of sympathy with the audience and operated in a grey area away from the traditional black and white scheme presented elsewhere. 

Zbonek had also been first choice for Das siebente Opfer/The Racetrack Murders (1964) but not been available.

His feature film Am Galgen hängt die Liebe [tr. Love Hangs on the Gallows] (1960) was also written by him. Set in wartime Greece it has been described as a “partisan spaghetti western with hard Heimatfilm contours”.

He again served as combined writer/director for Deutschland - deine Sternchen [tr. Germany - Your Starlets] (1962), an early film about how the yellow press pushes the career of starlets. 

Also worth of note is his action drama Die Flucht (Mensch und Bestie)/Man and Beast (1963) with Götz George as a concentration camp escapee chased by a vicious dog during a manhunt. Disillusioned by the cuts imposed on what he considered his most personal work so far, Zbonek subsequently for the most part decided to focus on more commercial productions. 

Prior to becoming a director, Zbonek was one of Austria’s best known movie critics for radio and newspaper. 

 Parallel to his work for cinema and TV he was also a well known stage director in prestigious theatres and opera houses such as the Burgtheater and the Volksoper in Vienna and  for a while even was the festival director of the Viennale. He also directed an impressive list of radio plays.

Sieben Tage Frist/School of Fear (1969)

A slap given by one of the teachers (Konrad Georg) in a boarding school for boys is the catalyst for an escalating series of mysterious disappearances and murders and far reaching revelations. 

 Sieben Tage Frist is one of the few Krimis that is actually a bit more readily available. Under the title School of Fear a dubbed version can be found in some regions on Amazon Prime or Cultpix. Nevertheless, it is also one of the lesser known examples of the genre. Even on German TV it had only ever been shown once, yet a lot of people who have actually watched this often rate it as one of the best and favourite Krimis ever made. 

The reason why the film may not automatically come to mind in discussions about the genre is that it’s not just not part of a series but indeed epitomises quite the opposite of classic Krimi as it’s generally known.

 Shot in 1969 towards the end of the great Krimi era, this is a contemporary thriller based on the novel Sieben Tage Frist for Schramm [tr. “Seven Days Grace for Schramm”] by German author Paul Henricks. 

In actual fact despite being directed by Alfred Vohrer and starring a couple of familiar Krimi faces, the film can easily be described as an anti-Wallace. 

Set in a wintery landscape in the German Federal State of Schleswig-Holstein, the plot takes place in a boarding school for boys as opposed to all the various Rialto institutions for girls. Urban London is replaced by a barren coastal seaside that also features a solitary brothel with a somewhat blasphemous and political wall painting. 

Students read underground magazines and use swear words. Bullying and animal cruelty is part of life for the school’s pupils. 

 Homosexuality was only fully decriminalised in Germany in 1994 but gay acts between adults above the age of 21 were already made legal in 1969, the year this film was shot, and a gay subtext clearly permeates this movie. We even get a glimpse of some brief full frontal male nudity. 

And if that wasn’t enough at some stage we even get a Nazi war crime reveal. 

For the most part Krimis were part of the German entertainment establishment of the 1960s and as such remained staunchly apolitical. Barring some mild references to the Third Reich in some of the earlier Mabuse films of the 1960s (small wonder given their pedigree), it is genuinely difficult to come up with other contemporary samples of the genre that contain elements of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (= coming to terms with the country’s past). 

The student revolts of 1968 changed all that and left a big impact on German culture and society and this film is a reflection of this and an attempt to create a mélange of a traditional Krimi with a social awareness. 

The link that ties those two spheres together is the employment of old school talent in front of and behind the camera. 

Rather than use an up and coming director of the New German Cinema who had declared that “"Opas Kino ist tot” (Grandad’s cinema is dead), Luggi Waldleitner, the producer, wisely chose Alfred Vohrer to direct this production. Vohrer together with cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke (another established Krimi-routinier) captured the bleak winter landscape remarkably well but also - typical for similar productions of the time - overdid the zooms. 

This is Joachim Fuchsberger’s seventh and final collaboration with Vohrer and given the context of this production it is symptomatic that he no longer plays the dashing young hero but instead a teacher at the school, ie an older authority figure to the younger generation (albeit one that is most interested in solving the crimes). 

Horst Tappert is the constantly (to the point of comical annoyance for the viewer) cigar-chomping-and-spitting investigating officer. Given that in real life Tappert a few years after his death was outed as having been a member of the SS, it is ironic that in this film he is one of the men responsible for revealing war crimes. One wonders what must have gone through his head when he shot this film. Did he ever ponder what would happen if his own involvement in Nazi atrocities became public knowledge?

 The only one of the younger actors with anything resembling a film career was Frithjof Vierock who was mainly known as a comedy actor and at this stage had been in the business for close to a decade. For Arthur Richelman who plays Kurrat, the main pupil, however, this would remain his only feature film.

 There is no debate: School of Fear is a highly unusual and more contemporary classic Krimi than anything else we have come to know from this genre. It is much more political, radical and socially conscious than the other series and for that reason alone it is worth a rediscovery. 

And yet, I also can’t help but feel that it is this very contemporariness that also dates it more than its better known predecessors. 

Nobody would accuse the Edgar Wallace Krimis to still be super current in 2024. They clearly have developed various sheets of patina but as they are set in an entirely fictitious universe that never really existed in the real world, they also contain a timelessness that School of Fear, a production clearly routed in 1969, lacks.

The German trailer has comments from the three leading actors that despite their lengthy résumés, none of them had ever been in a film that "hits the nerve" as much as this one.

The German PAL Region 2 DVD appears to also contain the English track and is available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon DE. It is, however, very pricey at this stage.

KRIMI! #0 out today

 

It's an exciting day for me today as the first (experimental) issue of the new Krimi! magazine is out today. 

It is the brainchild of Boris Brosowski from the Death at the Grindhouse blog. He had contacted me with the idea and in early September we met in person when I was visiting Germany again and hit it off instantly, chatted for hours about all things Krimi and Cult movie related over a few bevvies and then at the end of an amazing meeting when we realised we hadn't even properly discussed the magazine we just briefly asked ourselves: "So, are we going to do this?" and answered it with a "Hell yeah!"

And now less than three months later the inaugural issue is ready for sale. It is first English language magazine dedicated to this genre and we're in it for the long time. Exclusively available in print, it can be ordered via Amazon UK, Amazon US or through any of the other Amazon channels worldwide.

The reason why we numbered this as 0 is because we wanted to first of all learn to come to grips with the minutiae of physical publishing as well of course as figuring out how well we can work together. 

From next year on we will start with a proper Number 1 - even bigger, even better - and have also already assembled a little line up of established genre writers so exciting days ahead.

Boris has set up a blog exclusively for the magazine as well as a YouTube channel.

Der Mörder mit dem Seidenschal/Killer with a Silk Scarf (1966)

A young girl (Susanne Uhlen) witnesses the murder of her mother (Helga Liné) and subsequently gets chased by her killer (Carl Möhner) who is afraid of being identified by her. 

 Killer with a Silk Scarf is one of those productions that has so much going for it and then shoots off most of its ammunition in the first quarter of an hour before meandering along for the rest of its running time. 

It is the directing debut of Adrian Hoven who also produced the film and appeared uncredited in the role of a sleazy gambler and would-be debonair member of the demi-monde. Hoven was a popular actor who can also be seen in the Rialto Wallace Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee/Secret of the Red Orchid (1962) and the non-Wallace Krimi Die schwarze Kobra/The Black Cobra (1963). He would later gain notoriety by producing the Mark of the Devil (1970) and then directing its notorious sequel.

 This is a modern and contemporary crime thriller set in Vienna based on a novel by female author Thea Tauentzien and distributed by Constantin Film. 

 We are clearly no longer in cosy Edgar Wallace territory when right at the start we are being introduced to a "bar singer" (Helga Line) arguing with her beau, Boris (Carl Möhner), while being observed by her illegitimate daughter (Susanne Uhlen) through the letter slot and subsequently strangled. 

 The daughter is living with a greedy foster family who only cares about the money they make of her. A neighbour comments that Lineés character was a good'un despite her disreputable profession as she otherwise would have simply got an abortion rather than give birth. 

All those topics bring us closer to a much more realistic approach to the thriller genre than what we would otherwise expect from a 1960s Krimi. 

Adi Berber is briefly shown as a police inspector, a very welcome change of pace for the actor who was often typecast as a threatening menace. It would have been welcome if his part could have been extended. Berber died of cancer before the film was released and his lines had to be dubbed by somebody else.

 

Berber is not the only actor to get short shrift. Liné is very prominently placed in the credits and yet her part may be crucial to the plot but she is also just on screen for a few short minutes. Again, quite shocking for black and white Krimis of the time, we see Boris put his hands down her blouse and over her braless breast as a forceful display of possessive behaviour. 

Silk Scarf further breaks with established traditions in that it is not a Whodunnit and that the main protagonist is a young girl physically threatened by the villain. The killer is clearly known right from the start and the focus is on the hunt for 10-year old Susanne Uhlen’s character. 

Uhlen is the true discovery of this film in which she gave her debut. She would subsequently become a very popular TV Star in Germany with a career lasting up until very recent years. 

 In the later part of the film Hoven is edging again by introducing some mild nudity and showing a chase sequence in the sewers of Vienna (clearly inspired by The Third Man) that culminates in seeing the corpse of a burning man surrounded by sewer rats. Little wonder that the sadistic Mark of the Devil was not far around the corner for him as he was clearly aiming to break some boundaries. 

 The trouble with this production is that despite a strong start and somewhat arresting finish, the plot dawdles aimlessly for a large part of its running time. 

With the killer being known it would have been important to create genuine tension yet even some of the chase sequences are lacklustre and a lot of time is spent with police interviews that for the viewer (who knows the culprit) just aren’t terribly involving. The one thing that positively sticks out in that part of the film are the scenes on contemporary Vienna, most notably of the amusement park Prater. 

Even introducing a further element of chasing a large sum of money that the victim had brought in from abroad is not majorly adding to the excitement. 

The main inspector is played by Folco Lulli, largely unknown in Germany, but obviously hired on behalf of the Italian co-financiers Sagittario Film. 

Lulli’s character is assisted by Herald Juhnke (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/The Terror of Dr. Mabuse, 1962) as a mild comic relief character. 

We are led to believe that no matter where she goes the girl just happens to stumble upon Boris and yet at the same time the police are incapable of locating her after a journalist revealed that she can identify her mother’s killer. 

From a distance of nearly 60 years watching how this girl gets treated by the authorities is an eye opener: being lied to about her mother’s death and told she’d just be in hospital is considered a blessing; even when she is aware of her mother’s death she is expected to show up in school (but doesn’t); the threat of an orphanage is always looming over her and her foster parents do not show the slightest bit of interest in her other than as seeing her as an extra source of income. 

 Upon release Silk Scarf flopped. On the list of the most successful German Krimis this production ranks as #82 and in 1966, the year of its release, with just 204,000 tickets sold in Germany it barely broke into the country’s Top 200. It appears that an English version may at one stage have been shown on US TV.

It is a film that showed a lot of promise and willingness to break established Krimi boundaries but ultimately wasted them with a stale execution.