A journey through Krimiland. Read all about the Teutonic fascination with Edgar Wallace, Bryan Edgar Wallace, Dr Mabuse, Jerry Cotton, Kommissar X, Father Brown or even Louis-Weinert Wilton and discover a world of hidden vaults, madmen in masks and bumbling butlers.
Hand on heart, I had never heard of the concept of an Italian style "barber calendar" or seen any of those before but from what I can tell these were traditional Italian pocket-sized (and often perfumed!) calendars distributed by barbers to customers, popular in the early-to-mid 20th century. They featured nostalgic, 1950s-style "girl next door" images, pin-up pics, scenes from operas or elegant illustrations.... or seemingly, as in my case, images of popular films of the time. They were a common gift, acting as a marketing tool and a holiday keepsake from a local barber.
This particular one was advertised as being from 1973, the year after the release of the last Rialto Edgar Wallace.
If this had ever been perfumed, the scent has long since gone. The photos below should give you an idea of what it looks like: various promotional photos (that also don't shy away from nudity), next to calendar overviews with the relevant Saints Days marked next to the date. They also have a synopsis of the film that - spoiler alert - gives away the ending!
Now I am wondering what other barber calendars may be out there for other films, Edgar Wallace or otherwise....
Just came across this trailer for The Rah Rah Girls which is in fact an alternate title for What Have You Done to Solange?and totally misrepresents the film as a raunchy sex comedy!
Just rewatched Das Rätsel des silbernen Halbmonds/Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972) in preparation for another article in the next Krimi! magazine. This Krimi/Giallo hybrid by Umberto Lenzi was (at least in Germany) marketed as the 32nd and final entry to the Rialto Edgar Wallace series, the end of an era.
Below a series of lobby cards for this production.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
