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.
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.
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).
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.
Wenn es Nacht wird auf der Reeperbahn/When Night Falls on the Reeperbahn (1967, also known as Uneasy Summer) is Rolf Olsen’s first St Pauli film and his first exploitation film shot in colour. As a result it lacks some of the grittiness associated with his earlier black and white productions.
When a female high school student stumbles home from a party in a state of shock with the clothes half torn off her body, she gets driven over and accidentally killed by a hit and run driver. The subsequent investigations reveal that she had taken LSD.
Danny Sonntag (Erik Schumann), a journalist covering the drug scene in Hamburg, gradually discovers that it’s run by a gang of spoilt rich kids from good homes who use the drug trade to get their kicks. They also use LSD to make young girls willing to feature in porn and also rent them out to some of the city’s most well respected businessmen.
In contrast to his subsequent St Pauli films, this production does not yet star Curd Jürgens. It is also noticeably more action-driven than the following films that, though not devoid of action, frequently have a more melodramatic focus.
Instead Nacht stars Erik Schumann… though “starring” is probably a weak choice of words as the plot steers clear of a single traditional hero figure and instead at various times focuses on a range of different characters: the journalist, law enforcement, different (often juvenile) members of the underworld or female high school students (clearly played by young adults).
Schumann is, however, also the off screen narrator who gives the movie a semi-documentarian panache to its controversial topic.
And Schumann, at least for yours truly, is ultimately THE main discovery of this film.
I’ve always been somewhat aware of this actor without taking too much notice but it is through his involvement in some of the Olsen films that I started to become a fan. Though reasonably well known he never really hit the levels of stardom he would have deserved. Incredibly talented and oozing charisma, he was equally able to play romantic leads, comedic roles, heroes and villains. It’s just a pity that he never played in an Edgar Wallace film.
For Olsen we had already met him playing delightful sleazeballs but here we have him as a bona fide proto-Dirty Harry action figure who in the course of his journalistic work can fight rough and hard but also is not afraid to take a beating and walk around with his face smashed in.
Indeed, whatever else you may think of Olsen as a director, if there is one thing he deserves credit for, it is for creating a personal stock company of actors, either younger up and coming ones before they became truly popular or older talent who never quite hit the genuine big time.
These performers were not interchangeable faces but carried clearly defined functions within his St. Pauli and Reeperbahn films.
In Nacht we first meet Heinz Reincke, a popular local actor, who would become Curd Jürgens’ regular down to Earth buddy. In this film his character is still somewhat morally ambiguous given that he plays a pimp and a blackmailer who is not averse to using knuckle dusters but in the finale he clearly takes sides with Danny Sonntag and helps rid the area of the criminal scourge.
In the St Pauli series taken as a whole, Reincke would ultimately embody nothing but the spirit of St Pauli itself. He’d play sailors, barkeepers, locals, men who belong to the district rather than rule it. In the German versions his voice has a strongly regional dialect. His characters would have an earthy realism and street level authenticity. He is the Everyman the hero can always count on. And he’d always be up for a drink or a joke.
A young Fritz Wepper features as a volatile and unstable youth, someone who has not quite found the right path in life but is not beyond redemption and can turn to become an upstanding member of society once he learns the errors of his ways.
In Nacht, Wepper plays a member of the gang and the one responsible for creating the LSD (seemingly with the help of a simple chemistry set). Traumatised by some of what’s been happening, he goes on a rampage and turns against his former buddies but may find salvation with the help of his young kid-sister.
Konrad Georg had previously played German TV’s Kommissar Freytag, one of the country’s first serial TV investigators. When he shows up in an Olsen production, he invariably represents the fading official, police commissioners or inspectors, men who technically have power but lack real leverage in St Pauli.
Now that is all very interesting but tell me about the trash elements we can expect, Holger….
Glad you asked….
We literally have a melange of sex, drugs and violence.
The film features nudity and brutal torture. One girl gets her face cut up with a knife and some of the gang members are clearly on the psychopathic side. There’s female mud wrestling and abuses of power on various levels. Girls get corrupted and driven into suicide. A father pays for sex with his son’s girlfriend.
One particular party scene, shot with aggressive lighting effects, colour filters, and disorienting edits, also revels in showing close ups of lustily leering sweating older men’s faces on top of beautiful young girls.
Throughout the whole film, it is made clear that the real threat to society does not lie with individual villains but in compromised systems. Crime is not an external threat to social order but instead it is woven into everyday life and not just supported but also ultimately created by pandering to the whims and demands of the upper classes and their bored and emotionally weak and immoral offspring.
Oh, and though I am fairly certain that David Lynch never saw this film, I am equally convinced he took the snakeskin jacket worn by Feuer-Hotte (Jürgen Draeger), the gang’s dapper but devious leader, as inspiration for Nicolas Cage’s fashion choices in Wild at Heart.
Initially I had planned to pen a short blog post about Rolf Olsen’s Krimi adjacent St Pauli films but over time this turned into a bit of a monster that quite frankly would have been too long for a single blog post so I have decided to publish the piece in a series of seven (if I count this correctly) separate posts that I will publish over the coming weeks. According to Letterboxd Olsen had been my most watched director 2025 and my first two watches for the New Year also were Olsen films.
