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.
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