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.
St Pauli is a well known suburb of Hamburg and home to Germany’s most (in)famous red light district, the Reeperbahn.
The locals are fiercely proud and protective of St Pauli. The rivalry between the two local football clubs FC St. Pauli and HSV is legendary and on a level with Celtic and Rangers or Man Utd and Man City. Its port has been a meeting place for sailors from all four corners of the globe for generations.
St Pauli is also the home of a veritable ragtag of local artists and musicians and like so many other places worldwide has over the last few decades been affected by gentrification that makes it more difficult for locals who were born and raised there to actually afford to live there.
With all that in mind, it’s little wonder that St Pauli has inspired many songs and films, ranging from comedies to shanty musicals, crime and sex films (or a mix of either).
One director who has arguably done more than anyone else to bring St Pauli into the cinematic limelight is Rolf Olsen.
Wenn es Nacht wird auf der Reeperbahn/Uneasy Summer (1967) was his first film set in that location.
Then from 1968-1971 he shot a series of five St Pauli films with Curd Jürgens.
Despite featuring similar titles, being directed by the same man and starring the same actor as well as a number of regular supporting stars, they are not a series in the traditional sense of the word as Jürgens portrays different characters in each of its entries and the plots are not connected.
None of those films are Krimis proper but they all are to varying degrees Krimi adjacent with elements of murder and crime. Hence I feel a quick (well, not quite so quick from the look of things) rundown of those movies may also be of interest to the readers of this blog.
Olsen has acquired a bit of a fanbase amongst German Trash film aficionados though if you come to his films always expecting a veritable trash fest like in the case of Jess Franco you will frequently be disappointed. Even though some of his work is Primo Trasho, he also shot a good few films that were decidedly mainstream or only featured a couple of exploitation elements here or there.
He was born in Vienna and began his career in the 1940s as a stage actor.
In the 1950s he continued acting but also started to include writing screenplays for light hearted German comedies to his résumé.
His directing career started in the 1960s, first with a couple of musical comedies and rip offs of Charley's Aunt, featuring popular male actors in drag to the utter nudge nudge wink wink delight of contemporary audiences.
He gradually changed over to a range of other popular genres. He was one of the screenwriters for the Sartana Western 1000 dollari sul nero/$1,000 on the Black (1966) and the Euro-Crime anthology Killer's Carnival (1966).
Filmed in black and white, In Frankfurt sind die Nächte heiss/Call Girls of Frankfurt (1966) was Olsen’s first step into exploitation cinema and clearly a precursor to his St Pauli films as it’s set in Frankfurt’s red light district.
Frankfurt is a genuine contemporary Krimi that is worth a wider awareness. It was inspired by the killing of Helga Matura on January 27, 1966, a murder that to his day has never been solved but that at the time was fodder for the German yellow press.
When a prostitute (Vera Tschechowa) ends up the latest victim in a series of killings, her fiancé from Vienna (Claus Ringer), previously unaware of her activities, becomes a suspect, and is introduced to the sleazy underbelly of the city.
The film has voice over narration by the investigating police inspector (Konrad Georg) that attempts to give the production the sheen of a socially critical documentary but I doubt anyone was fooled by that.
For a film from 1966 this is scandalous fare and features murder, blackmail, nudity, sex and violence, homosexuality, gang warfare, and in one dialogue scene that had me genuinely gasp even references organised child prostitution. Oh, and let’s not forget casual racism against Spanish “guest workers”… even though one of them comes across more like a cliché Italian.
In its finale local pimps take the law into their own hands and capture and torture potential suspects until they finally identify the real culprit and chase him to his gruesome death. (Yep, Olsen clearly got inspired by Fritz Lang’s M).
Frankfurt is credited as being an Austrian production, and some flashback scenes bring us to Vienna where Tschechowa’s character meets her fiancé and experiences happier times.
Erik Schumann shines as the victim’s pimp turned vigilante and two of his ladies of the night are played by Christiane Rücker and Barbara Valentin.
Seriously, where was this film all my life?
In its first reel this production is a Women in Prison flick that would have made Jess Franco proud who himself took another two years before he shot 99 Women (1969).
Olsen’s film already features lesbian sex, (mild) nudity and a sadistic female warden (Ellen Schwiers) whose outfit seems to have come right out of a BDSM catalogue.
When five girls under the leadership of Betty Williams (Essy Persson) break out of the prison and take refuge in a guest house in Scotland, this is the beginning of an insane ever escalating avalanche of violence, mayhem and murder that pretty much goes to the edges of what was allowed to be shown at the time. Even nowadays it is rare to see a young disabled girl being that casually tossed around and threatened with violence.
Erik Schumann again appears (and he will frequently show up in this series of films). This time he plays Betty’s former accomplice and the reason she was thrown into prison. During a robbery gone wrong he had mercilessly killed a policeman by squashing his body against a wall with his getaway car. He is now well respected and helps out in the guesthouse but when the girls arrive, his character doesn’t take long to revert back to his scrupulous old ways.
Margot Trooger (who had previously played the Hexer’s wife Cora Milton), here plays a neurotic lady who still talks to her dead son as if he was still alive. The girls decide to kidnap her character in the hope of a ransom from her rich husband without counting on the fact that dear old hubby is quite happy without her and has other plans.
Olsen’s most critically acclaimed movie was Blutiger Freitag/Bloody Friday (1972).
When a bank robbery under the leadership of violent Heinz Klett (Raimund Harmstorf) doesn’t go as planned, the gang takes the bank customers and management as hostages.
Inspired by real events, this is raw, violent and even gory and socially conscious, not the kind of stuff you'd expect from a German movie of the time. It's more reminiscent of something Italians like Fernando Di Leo would direct (or two years later Mario Bava with Rabid Dogs).
In one scene we watch a little boy carry around a hand grenade; a violent sex scene is cut with flashes of scenes from slaughter houses and contemporary porn movies.
Bloody Friday is a little exploitation masterpiece and arguably the highpoint of Olsen’s career.
Olsen can often be seen in supporting roles or cameos in his own films.
Under the pseudonym Emerson Fox, Olsen also directed the mondo shockumentaries Shocking Asia (1981) and Shocking Asia II: The Last Taboos (1985), arguably his most notorious productions. He also directed the occult-pseudo-doc Reise ins Jenseits/Journey into the Beyond (1977) that featured John Carradine’s voice in the English version. In one scene Olsen himself is briefly shown to have an aptitude for psychokinesis. (Yeah, right…)
Also look out for the satanic-trial exploitation film Ekstase – Der Prozeß gegen die Satansmädchen (tr: Ecstasy - The Process against the Satanic Girls) from 1979.
In later years he also directed for German TV.
To be continued…
(The following blog posts will have a little closer look at his six St Pauli films, five of which were starring Curd Jürgens.)
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