Hilton’s former lawyer Sir Reginald Cunningham (Pinkas Braun) and the sadistic albino “Whitey” Skipper (Klaus Kinski) play a crucial role in Hilton’s thirst for revenge.
And then we also have a large inheritance, a client suffering a heart attack while visiting a callgirl, some dodgy mask play and a few confusing narrative strands more.
A German Noir…. kind of
Francis Durbridge (1912-1998) was for German TV what Edgar Wallace was to the cinema.
Wallace’s Krimis were incredibly successful at the box office but also saw a few less impressive TV adaptations at the time. And where Durbridge had resounding success on German TV screens, his oeuvre also inspired a lesser known German cinematic feature film.
Durbridge was one of the prime source authors for a series of incredibly popular TV mini series that were widely known as “Strassenfeger”, i.e. “street sweepers”, productions that when they were broadcast quite literally emptied the streets as practically everyone with a television set ended up watching it.
The most famous as well as notorious of those was Das Halstuch (1962), starring past and future Wallace veterans like Heinz Drache, Dieter Borsche, Horst Tapper, Albert Lieven and Margot Trooger, and based on Durbridge’s novel The Scarf.
This series was involved in a famous scandal when just the day before its eagerly anticipated final episode, comedian Wolfgang Neuss posted a large size newspaper advert in which he revealed the identity of the main culprit, a stunt that shook up the nation and resulted in him getting death threats and being branded a traitor to the country by the yellow press.
Though some sources claim that Piccadilly Null Uhr Zwölf (1963, translation: “Piccadilly, Zero Hour 12”) was based on a novel or story by Durbridge called 12 Past 12, nothing under that title seems to exist and, similarly to the Bryan Edgar Wallace series, only the name of the author was employed to drum up interest in this production. The closest Durbridge came to being involved in this film was a discussion in London with producer Eberhard Meichsner at the height of the Profumo affair in which the two of them were throwing around some story ideas for a possible movie.
Piccadilly Null Uhr Zwölf is in many ways an anti-Wallace.
Rather than focus on outrageously masked super villains, bizarre angles and Gothic moods, this production is much more realistic and in many ways even somewhat Noir with its classic tale of a man seeking revenge in gritty urban streets and its depiction of a policeman haunted by his past and reverting to alcoholism.
On paper (or: celluloid) this film has so much going for it. It’s very rare e.g, to see one of the leads being financially supported by their escort-girlfriend and then, when she is being threatened, forgetting about their promise to protect her in favour of some more booze in a local bar and thereby carrying some responsibility for her brutal murder.
And yet there is a total lack of tension. Director Rudolf Zehetgruber proves yet again that even though his main cinematic output at the time were Krimis and thrillers, he missed more than he managed to hit. The film just plots along without a genuine main, central mystery. Despite a variety of narrative threads there is a distinct loss of focus. It never even becomes quite clear what exactly happened eight years prior that led to Hilton’s incarceration and Bellamy’s descent into alcoholism. Indeed everybody and their mother seems to know that Hilton was innocent, so why did he need to spend that much time in prison?
All the other individual plot elements (the corpse of a man who hasn’t really died, several murders, an inheritance) just get listlessly thrown around and for the most part we never even get to see when yet another character gets killed. Instead, in its one single bit of comic relief we see a young boy (Ilja Richter, later to become presenter of Disco, Germany’s equivalent to Top of the Pops) discovering the bodies floating in the water and meticulously describing their state to a Bobby.
Oh, and the boy’s name? Edgar Wallace. (Har har!)
Though a lot of the advertisement for this production focussed on Klaus Kinski and Pinkas Braun, the actual lead actors, Helmut Wildt and Hanns Lothar, are virtual unknowns within the Krimi genre and not really able to carry the emotional weight and charisma required for what are essentially tragic and hardboiled roles. Especially Lothar as the alcoholic ex-cop looks genuinely out of his depth and is too dull and chinless to elicit any kind of interest in the viewer.
As such it is up to Kinski and Braun to instil any kind of interest in the production, a task they aimlessly master as usual.
Other more familiar faces in supporting roles include Ann Smyrner (The Black Cobra, The Racetrack Murders, Kommissar X: Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick) as a photographer and Hilton’s love interest and Rudolf Fernau (e.g. The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle, The Mad Executioners) as Inspector Craddock as well as Dieter Eppler and Albert Bessler.
Needless to say none of the scenes filmed in Berlin looks like anything resembling Piccadilly and the music by Russell Garcia (another person not genuinely associated with this genre) also just tootles along with little impact.
All in all there probably is a reason why this production never appears to have had an English language release. Kinski and Braun alone make this essential viewing but other than that this production could have been so very promising but ultimately just disappoints.
TRAILER (in German)
FULL FILM (in German)
No comments:
Post a Comment