Die seltsame Gräfin/The Strange Countess (1961)

Margaret Reedle (Brigitte Grothum) accepts a position as companion to the eccentric - and unfortunately named - Countess Moron (Lil Dagover) at her remote castle, only to find herself surrounded by secrecy, hostility, and an atmosphere thick with unease. When a series of suspicious deaths and disappearances occur, Scotland Yard inspector Mike Dorn (Joachim Fuchsberger) begins investigating the household, where the enigmatic Dr. Tappat (Rudolf Fernau), head of a nearby psychiatric institution, exerts a troubling influence. 

 Die seltsame Gräfin/The Strange Countess was based on Edgar Wallace’s book by the same name from 1925. 

Some sources state that the novel had previously been adapted under the title The Jewel (1931). If not lost, then this version is currently at least not easily available, and it is difficult to examine whether this genuinely had indeed been a proper adaptation. 

It was Rialto’s eighth Edgar Wallace and the first they shot in Berlin and not Hamburg. That year they had already released four other Wallaces, a sign that the Krimiwave was running hot. Countess followed right on the heals of Der Fälscher von London/The Forger of London (1961). 

 It was the director’s first and only Wallace film. In actual fact Jürgen Roland had to finish the production when von Baky fell sick. Countess would ultimately be his final film. He died five years later in 1966. Hungarian born von Baky had a long and varied directorial career and is best known for his Münchhausen (1943) with Hans Albers. 

This film may feature typical Wallace tropes like orphans with a family secret, falsely accused innocents and mysterious inheritances, but it does forsake masked villains and instead is carried by bravura performances from Lil Dagover and Klaus Kinski. 

Dagover was one of Germany’s Grande Dames and as the titular Countess draws from all the registers of her acting nous. The entire movie often appears centred around her and this may arguably even constitute the best performance in an Edgar Wallace film ever.... provided you don't listen to her voice in the English dub.

 Kinski plays…. Kinski. 

 At his best. 

(Or is that: worst?) 

 Whatever one’s first thoughts are when the name Kinski comes up, in Countess he does just that as the seriously deranged Stuart Bresset who drives Margaret to the brink of madness with his phone calls warning her about her upcoming death. 

Countess marked a move away from the kind of masked villain drama that the viewer had become accustomed to and focused more on questions of sanity. The bulk of the characters are pure bonkers. No other word for it. 

In actual fact with an old school cast of talent in front of and behind the camera, the film often emulates old Weimar cinema (as well as, let’s not brush this under the table, the entertainment cinema of Hitler’s Third Reich). Apart from director von Baky and Lil Dagover, we also have again Fritz Rasp as Margaret’s benevolent but also somewhat creepy boss, Rudolf Fernau as the director of an insane asylum who is battier than his inmates, and Marianne Hoppe as a female convict with a mysterious interest in Margaret’s welfare. 

 Even screenwriter Robert A. Stemmle with his first Krimi credit had a writing and directing career going back three decades. As a writer he was responsible for the excellent Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war/The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (1937); as a director he also tended to be responsible for various popular comedies but also for the Hitler Youth Propaganda film Jungens (“Boys”, 1941). He also directed a very young and very skinny Gert Fröbe in Berliner Ballade/Ballad of Berlin (1948). In this satirical production Fröbe’s character was named Otto Normalverbraucher (“Otto Average-Consumer”), a name that is still in usage in Germany today as a term for the “Average Joe”. 

 Wallace films often employed older actors in crucial roles but with Countess this reached its pinnacle, giving the production a very special vibe that was unique within the series. 

It’s a wonder that Brigitte Grothum’s character would stay any longer than absolutely necessary in the castle and not do a runner to the remotest part of Scotland. Margaret Reedle is threatened pretty much everywhere she goes and survives bomb attacks and collapsing balconies. Her resilience reminds me a lot of Victoria Winters in the early seasons of Dark Shadows who just can’t seem to let go of a location that is obviously not suitable for her. Grothum would later return back to the series in Das Gasthaus an der Themse/The Inn on the River (1962). 

Oh, and of course Joachim Fuchsberger is the male lead and Eddi Arent the comic relief. 

No surprises there. 

Peter Thomas supplied his first score for a Rialto Wallace but had not yet reached the level of musical madness we would grow to be accustomed to in later entries of the series. 

Overall this is very much an actor driven affair with a special focus on insanity rather than the typical masked villains. Countess often gets treated as second-rate Wallace but I have quite a soft spot in my heart for it not despite of but because of its diversions from the familiar formula.

As always, the film is best available in the Edgar Wallace box set from Amazon DE where it is available with English subs and dubs.

Indian Scarf posters

Following my recent 7-part marathon series dedicated to Rolf Olsen's St Pauli films, I feared I may go on a blogging hiatus again (hey, I got new articles to write for Krimi! 2), but I just came across these wonderful Italian posters for Das indische Tuch/The Indian Scarf (1963) by Renato Casaro (first two images) and Mario Piovano and nothing wrong with occasionally just posting pretty pictures.

Käpt'n Rauhbein aus St. Pauli/Nurses for Sale (1971) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 7)

Continued (and concluded) from Part 6 

This is Olsen’s final St Pauli film and truth be told: Only the first few scenes of this movie play in Hamburg. For the rest of its running time this film was shot in Puerto Rico. 

But, hey, it stars Curd Jürgens and has St Pauli in its German title, so might as well include this for the blog. 

When Captain Markus Jolly (Curd Jürgens) unexpectedly arrives home early from a trip, he discovers his wife in bed with another man. During the subsequent argument where he threatens to leave, he accidentally kills her and from then on sails with his crew in a dilapidated ship to less desirable parts of the world. (It also soon becomes apparent that he himself had sweethearts in every port so maybe should not have lost his cool that much about being cuckolded.) 

When an urgently needed shipment of medicine gets robbed, he and his crew get accused of being drug pushers. A group of sexy young Red Cross nurses also get kidnapped and held hostage by the same gang.

 This could have been one hell of a trash extravaganza. Jess Franco would have turned the jungle settings into one of his Women in Prison style romps. Hell, this film even features Franco muse Janine Reynaud!!!!! 

Instead, however, this is a fairly sedate affair with only a few choice moments of madness: the obligatory nude shower scene, an acid burnt face and a pathetically fake tarantula on female skin. 

We also get to see Jürgens with a moustache as well as in drag when escaping from the police and also singing a song (badly… very badly) in a sailor’s bar. Overall there is too strong an emphasis on comedy rather than drama. 

Watch out for Elisabeth Flickenschildt (Das indische Tuch/The Indian Scarf, 1963) and Sieghardt Rupp (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964). 

Oh, and Rolf Olsen himself can also be seen as the local Police President Herculano in a fairly sizeable role!

Gert Wilden’s music is another one of the few highlights of this production. He would later become known as the composer of the soundtracks for the School Girl Report films. 

Al Adamson yet again saw enough of value here to release this film Stateside as Nurses for Sale. 

And here we are… 

 Six films based in St Pauli, directed by Rolf Olsen and starring Curd Jürgens in five of them. 

From an individual point of view, Wenn es Nacht wird auf der Reeperbahn/When Night Falls on the Reeperbahn, the first film of the series sans Jürgens, is by far the best and most consistent in its narrative approach. 

The following films are all to varying degrees perfectly watchable, however, they do have a habit of mixing in too many divergent genre tropes so that they can easily come across as a bit of a mess. They are often untidy, hybrid works, freely mixing trash cinema with melodrama, crime plotting with action elements, and fleeting gestures towards social critique. 

Taken together as a whole, though, those productions form a fascinating mini-cycle in late-1960s West German genre cinema. On the surface, the films appear repetitive. Jürgens plays a doctor, a priest, a sailor, in general a patriarchal figure (though often without family of its own), each with a different profession and slightly altered narrative context. Yet the underlying character type barely changes. 

This repetition is precisely what made the films effective for contemporary audiences. Jürgens functioned as a stabilising presence, especially for viewers far removed from Hamburg or its red-light district. He reassured by familiarity. Whatever the profession, his characters promised a level of security in a world facing societal restructuring and a change of traditional mores. 

By using a regular stock company of actors Olsen helped turn them into quasi-Jungian archetypes throughout the cycle. 

To name but two: 

Jürgens represents the archetype of The Father, acting as a bridge to the external world of St Pauli and instilling a sense of discipline, protection, and wisdom, a moral guide throughout a society going through changes, yet he is never a goody two shoes and often himself an ambivalent character. 

Heinz Reincke is The Companion and loyal sidekick with a dash of The Everyman and even The Jester, steadfast and reliably standing by the primary figure through thick and thin. 

For the contemporary viewers, no doubt often middle aged and middle class men, these films thrive on their fascination with the sleazier side of life while ultimately reinforcing traditional values and hierarchies. In that sense, they are deeply conservative products reinforcing traditional values, even as they revel in the spectacle of moral decay. 

 There is a quiet irony at the heart of this. An Austrian director, working repeatedly with a Bavarian-Austrian (but also very cosmopolitan) star, became one of the most influential cinematic interpreters of North German, specifically Hamburg, “character studies.” 

And even though the cycle frequently comes across a case of “same old, same old”, there are moments in Olsen’s oeuvre where he is a trendsetter introducing elements of trashy Women in Prison tropes before Jess Franco, or psychotic gangsters on the run before Mario Bava’s Rabid Dogs. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this trawl through a fairly unknown series of West German films with strong Krimi elements and have grown to become very fond of Olsen as a director. 

It also gave me a chance to experiment a bit with the format of this blog. (Crazy how in the space of one month, I managed to post half the number of blog posts that I did in all of 2025 combined!) 

I hope you also enjoyed reading about them and if anyone has any other suggestions for a similar mini series, please let me know. 

But in the meantime, you can let the night on the Reeperbahn fade slowly away.

Das Stunden-Hotel von St. Pauli/Hotel by the Hour (1970) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 6)

Continued from Part 5 

 A “Stundenhotel” is a hotel that can be rented by the hour, similar to the Japanese Love Hotels. The film Das Stunden-Hotel von St. Pauli is also known as Hotel by the Hour though, hand on heart, I am not sure if it actually ever saw an English language release. 

It was the last “proper” St Pauli film by Rolf Olsen with Curd Jürgens. (One more was to follow in that series but as we will see not a lot was actually set in St Pauli). 

It also was the only one in the series not to feature Heinz Reincke as the trusted side buddy. 

Surely, with a title like that what could go wrong? 

Also for once Jürgens would play a police commissioner so certainly there are promises galore of endless trash with strong Krimi connotations and a star who pledges to shake up the seedy streets of St Pauli.

 And it even starts with a razzia in a brothel and the killing of a policeman trying to stop an addict from breaking into a pharmacy. 

Alas…. 

Quickly afterwards we discover that Jürgens’ Kommissar Canisius is a widower living together with his adult son Peter (Manfred Tümmler) who unlike his uppity father is involved with the APO, the Außerparlamentarische Opposition, the extra-parliamentary opposition, a predecessor of the Antifa that originated out of the student movements of the late 1960s. 

They have a heated argument about Peter joining a protest march. Canisius believes that this protest is just organised by “Radaubrüder” (trouble makers) and Peter storms off proclaiming: “I was always quite proud of my father, but I'm afraid that now I only have an old granddad”…. just to then get seriously injured and taken to a hospital fighting for his life. 

 Cue: Drastic real life operation scenes! 

And poor old dad is not allowed to visit his son as he needs to also work the night shift even though he already had just finished an 18-hour work day. 

 Kurt Georg has a bigger role than usual and plays Canisius’ boss who reminds him that duty is more important than family obligations. He also is ignorant of the death of Canisius’ wife five years prior and intermittently throughout the production appears to be missing the good old times a wee bit too much. 

So yes, this is clearly yet another production in which Olsen mixes melodrama and soap opera elements together with the trashier sides of the plot. 

And that melodramatic focus increases even more once we encounter the eponymous love hotel and the film turns into a bargain basement version of Grand Hotel. 

Do we get nudity and hookers in there with their clients? 

Of course… especially with the lovely Andrea Rau (from Daughters of Darkness) and her campy old git, a self proclaimed “aesthete”, who first insists on draping her with flowers before himself dressing up in a cheap devil’s costume. 

But for a seedy love hotel we also get all kinds of other guests and their problems including a family with little girl! 

There’s a married woman with her much younger lover being surprised by her husband, carrying a gun and reminding her of her responsibilities towards their children. 

A gay couple (“my nephew and I”) where the younger man resorts to blackmailing his older partner. 

The drug addict who killed the policeman also tries to find refuge and suffers cold turkey. 

A teenage couple tries their first time. 

A young woman attempts suicide after her very old looking student lover rejects her when she announces that she is pregnant. 

A young taxi driver and occasional pimp insists on being married before getting intimate with his hot Eastern European housekeeper girl friend but needs money for that so she resorts to robbing drunk johns.

A seemingly frigid woman occasionally checks in to the establishment in order to spy on couples getting laid. 

And through it all the receptionist in perfect livrée (Walter Buschhoff) has his hands in everything from selling drugs to sex magazines. 

Well, you get the drift. 

Lots of life stories that all take place in a single location. 

In fact for the first half of this film Curd Jürgens only features sparingly. 

It’s only when the gay rent boy gets stabbed to death in his bathroom (which strangely enough seems to have had an open connecting door to the public hotel hallway), that the police get involved. Secrets are being revealed. And Jürgens is never far from a sophisticated medicinal glass of cognac while staying in regular contact with his son’s hospital. 

This is a strange film, part trash jumping on the contemporary sex film wagon, part soap opera, part social drama. 

And truth be told, its political stance is just as all over the place. 

On the one hand we even have taxi drivers complaining about police violence during demonstrations, on the other hand demonstrators are presented as being young hotheads. Through it all Jürgens who, despite the initial argument with his son, is seen as the overall understanding centrist haven of peace who can understand both sides and attempts to navigate between them. 

He is the father figure who talks sense into a young man who abandoned his girlfriend when she got pregnant and the guy people can genuinely turn to for sympathetic advice. 

He is also driven by a strong sense of duty, order and an overarching belief into the benevolence of the Status Quo. 

The criminalisation of homosexuality in West Germany was only completely abolished in 1994. 1969, the year before this film was shot, however, saw a partial decriminalisation between consenting adults over the age of 21. 

And yet again, we see this represented in a strange mishmash. 

Yes, isn’t it great that gay adults can now be open about their sexual preferences? 

But aren’t they also all not just silly and sometimes dangerous pervs? 

As so often in a Rolf Olsen production it all culminates in a - literally - explosive finale with conveniently placed dynamite with added threats of violence against a child. (Seriously, what is it with Olsen and children?) 

One of the main highlights of this film is seeing the wonderful Brigitte Mira as a constantly interfering busybody and homophobic cleaning lady. I couldn’t help but see this role as a clear precursor to her part as an elderly cleaning lady in love with a young “guest worker” in Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf/Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974). 

 To be concluded in Part 7

Der Pfarrer von St Pauli (1970) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 5)

Continued from Part 4 

Der Pfarrer von St Pauli (tr. “The Priest of St. Pauli”, 1970) did not see an English language release and Curd Jürgens plays - yep, you guessed it - a Catholic priest. 

As a U Boat commander in WW2 during an apparently hopeless situation, he had pledged to dedicate his life to God should he survive it. 

And survive it he did and as a result he now runs a church in St Pauli. 

When a small gangster confesses to a murder he had committed, Jürgens’ character is forced to obey the seal of confession and is thrown between the local Italian Mafia, the police investigating the case and the ladies of the night. 

Heinz Reincke by now is a familiar sight in those films and Dieter Borsche appears in a small supporting role yet again as a benevolent priest. (What is it with Olsen’s fascination with Borsche as a Man of the Lord? Did he watch Dead Eyes of London too often?) 

Jürgens’ persona is that of a good uncle that everyone turns to but also as a person of respect who can hold himself in a bar fight. 

This is again more of a drama than a full on Krimi though it does feature strong Krimi elements throughout a good portion of its running time. 

As a film overall it is, however, too much of a disjointed affair. Starting off as a war time drama, it soon turns to trash cinema when the priest visits some drop out stoners (cue: topless dancing and posters of Mao and Susan Denberg). References to pregnancies and forced abortions hint at a social drama whereas the murder and occasionally sadistic thriller elements bring us into Krimi territory. 

And then the film does a 180 degree turnaround: When the priest gets transferred to a remote island where he is openly not wanted by locals who are set in their ways, he needs to fight for acceptance. The film subsequently turns a) preachy and b) comical (or at least attempts to). Only a life boat rescue mission earns him the respect he deserves. 

Overall enjoyable but too much of a mess that tries to please everyone in the audience by throwing nuggets of various unrelated genre tropes around its plot. 

To be continued in Part 6

Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins/The Bedroom (1969) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 4)

Continued from Part 3 

This is in some ways Olsen’s most “prestigious” St Pauli film as it comes with a lot of baggage based on the title alone. 

“Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins” (tr. “On the Reeperbahn at half past midnight”), about a night out on the Reeperbahn, is one of Germany’s most popular songs ever since it was composed for a musical revue in 1912. 

The song had previously served as the basis for two German movies with the very same title, in 1929 (ironically one of Germany’s last silent movies) and the Hans Albers classic from 1954. 

Hans Albers is one of the singers most popularly identified with the tune. Prior to the eponymous 1954 film he had also sung it in Große Freiheit Nr. 7/Port of Freedom (1944), a Third Reich production that has stood the test of time and is still admired by international audiences as it cleverly managed to subvert its attempts to turn this into a propaganda vehicle. 

Albers was born in Hamburg and became a local legend who frequently acted in films based in Hamburg or St Pauli. In actual fact he is the actor Curd Jürgens (a jet setting playboy with few connections to Hamburg’s coastline) clearly emulated in all these Olsen productions. Jürgens and Albers shared certain physical features which I suspect was one of the key factors in being chosen by Olsen as the star of his films. 

The 1969 film is a loose remake of the 1954 film, copying over some of its plot points but then adding various new elements as well as injecting it with some more salacious T&A and violence. The song features throughout the film in various instrumental versions and is also “sung” by Jürgens and the ever reliable Heinz Reincke during a boisterous night out. (A subsequent single was also released with Jürgens singing that song together with another similar one on the B-Side.)

Jürgens plays Hannes Teversen, an ex-captain, who had lost his licence and served eight years in prison for the murder of his lover, the wife of his best friend, while in a drunken stupor. He always denied the allegations and upon release seeks to clear his name and swears revenge. 

Once back in freedom, he is confused about the onslaught of sex shops and magazines and the number of foreigners who have now made their home in Hamburg. He crosses paths with an old flame just to discover that she is now a street hooker. 

He finds refuge with his friend Pitter (Heinz Reincke… of course) who runs a strange melange of bar and horse menagerie and who needs to deal with gangsters asking for protection money. (One of those ne'er-do-wells is my fave du jour Eric Schumann.)

Pitter’s daughter Antje (Jutta d’Arcy) always had a childhood crush on “Uncle” Hannes, a crush that with her now being a young, attractive woman seems likely to become consumed. 

If only Teversen, unbeknownst to himself, wasn’t her real father! 

Meanwhile one of Antje’s admirers (Klaus-Hagen Latwesen) gets mixed up with a biker gang and requires Teversen’s help to get him back on the straight and narrow. 

Olsen’s St Pauli is again a society dominated by brutal day-time violence, murder and organised crime, topless ladies and prostitution. And even though the film ends in an action packed finale, for a considerable part of its running time it focuses on the relationship between Jürgens and his old buddies…. and the imminent threat of incest with his own daughter. 

Apart from Jürgens and Reincke, this production also stars Fritz Wepper, Konrad Georg and Fritz Tillmann, all actors who would frequently show up in this series, adding to a general sense of familiarity and Deja Vu. 

It also features Diana Körner in one of her first roles as the daughter of Jürgens’ alleged murder victim. Körner in future years would become a very popular German TV actress. 

Al Adamson released this film Stateside under its alternative title Shock Treatment (not to be confused with the Alain Delon film from 1973 or the 1981 Rocky Horror Picture Show followup and musical comedy).

 To be continued in Part 5

Der Arzt von St Pauli/Females for Hire (1968) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 3)

Continued from Part 2

Der Arzt von St Pauli/Females for Hire (1968) came out the year after Nacht. (In English the title translates as “The Doctor from St. Pauli”.) 

Those yearly releases would become the norm for Olsen’s St Pauli movies though he occasionally also managed to shoot some comedies in between. 

This is the first of those films starring Curd Jürgens. 

 The ployglot jet-setter was one of Germany’s only genuine international stars. 

The German press widely reported that during the filming of Et Dieu… créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), Brigitte Bardot had described him as “der normannische Kleiderschrank” (“armoire normande”), the Norman wardrobe. It’s a nickname that stuck and even made it into his autobiography even though I have yet to find an interview with BB in which she used that expression.

Apocryphal or not, it is a succinct description that acknowledges the ironic contrast between his bulk (1.92m with massive bulk and shoulders) and his cultivated, cosmopolitan demeanour. 

 Privately, his life was marked by excess and restlessness: multiple marriages, heavy drinking, health crises, and a reputation for living as grandly and recklessly as many of his screen characters. 

At the time of the St Pauli films, he was still nearly a decade away from his late career highlight as Bond-villain Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and stood at a career crossroads. 

Still massively popular in Germany, he had visibly aged (though he was never really young looking) and grown somewhat heavier, a fact that the St Pauli films acknowledge as they invariably cast him as a kind of compromised patriarch, a paternal but often ambiguous figure that stands between order and chaos. 

In Arzt Curd Jürgens plays an ex-convict/sailor turned doctor in St. Pauli in Hamburg. 

 He has an estranged brother (Horst Naumann), also a doctor, though more successful and involved in some shady dealings: He performs illegal abortions and helps to organise sex parties for his influential friends. 

When one of the female party guests threatens to expose those by publishing photos secretly taken there, the situation escalates when Hamburg’s High Society does not shy away from murder in order to mask their hidden perversions. 

The film contains: Sex parties, prostitution, botched abortions, nudity, “arty” dance performances, gynaecological exhibitions, blackmail, murder, fights, stag films, rape and date rape drugs, biker gangs, shootouts und torture scenes… and old bourgeois guys with young girls. (Did I forget anything?) 

Chances are that the average audience at the time consisted of exactly those types of old bourgeois guys as depicted in this production and Olsen was happy to give them a chance to indulge in some dirty fantasies while at the same time being able to condemn them by tut-tutting the amorality of the seedy side of St Pauli’s nightlife. 

 This is a film that is very much of its time - and only of its time! - and hard to imagine nowadays; at once somewhat sleazy and trashy, while also upholding traditional family values. 

It’s a Cain and Abel drama masking behind a Krimi framework. 

When a sailor (Fritz Wepper) asks Jürgens’ doctor for help locating his missing girl who had gone astray (Christina Rücker), he of course also gets some additional emotional support from a sympathetic priest (played by Dieter Borsche who genuinely is one of German Cult Cinema’s crown princes). 

Heinz Reincke for the first time plays Curd Jürgens’ down to Earth buddy, a part he would continue to play in subsequent films of this series. 

Al Adamson saw enough commercial value in this production that he released the film in the States ten years later in 1978 under the title Bedroom Stewardesses, recut and with some additional new footage to fit more in line with his other Stewardess films. 

 To be continued in Part 4