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.
Der Hund von Blackwood Castle/The Hound of Blackwood Castle (1968) was Rialto’s 25th Edgar Wallace production and is a total hoot and pure unadulterated fun.
It wasn’t based on any actual book by Wallace himself but - as a quick look at the title alone will tell - instead clearly inspired by at least elements of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Several killings are courtesy of a vicious Doberman with poisonous fangs that roams the Moors which in a roundabout way does bring us back to Wallace again. After all in 1931 he had written the screenplay for the first sound version of this Sherlock Holmes novel.
Mysterious inheritances have also always been a popular trope for this writer and especially the idea of having a gang meet up again years later to finally get their hands on loot that the gang leader had absconded with bears quite a resemblance to Wallace’s play/novella The Terror that would subsequently be adapted by Rialto as Der unheimliche Mönch/The Sinister Monk (1965).
Hound begins with one of Peter Thomas’ most manic and crazed title songs so that right from the start the audience is aware that director Alfred Vohrer together with screen writer Herbert Reinecker (aka Alex Berg) have pulled no punches to deliver their own curious brand of cinematic Wallace madness.
The presence of reptiles in a Krimi was always something of a Vohrer trademark so it will come as no surprise that snakes feature prominently in this production, most notably when Karin Baal in her second Wallace production (after The Dead Eyes of London, 1961) gets threatened by one of them.
But we also get a brutish one eyed butler (Arthur Binder), a giant stuffed polar bear with a hidden telephone, dangling skeletons, paintings falling off the wall and cobwebs galore.
And quick sand! (Where would we ever be without quick sand?)
And a mysterious castle crypt with a remote controlled sarcophagus containing a vanishing corpse. The film is remarkable in that it for once does not feature a younger Scotland Yard investigator. Instead Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) takes the case over himself in his own inimitable style and with the help of Ilse Pagé as Miss Mabel Finley.
For the most part Hound relies on new or lesser known faces but we do still get Heinz Drache as an insurance inspector with a secret. His character is named Humphrey Connery (sic!) and writer Reinecker was further inspired (or should that read: uninspired) by classic film stars when Horst Tappert in his Wallace debut gets introduced as Douglas Fairbanks.
Tappert’s gang member when faced with the spooky shenanigans in the castle can often be seen in panic mode which makes for a welcome change of pace when compared to his usual hangdog expression in other films or series.
He is accompanied by Uta Levka. Her gangster moll was her third and final appearance in a Wallace film following Der unheimliche Mönch/The Sinister Monk (1965) and Der Bucklige von Soho/The Hunchback of Soho (1966).
One of the standout performances is courtesy of Mady Rahl who plays Captain Wilson’s divorced wife and Jane’s mother. When we first meet her she is a performer in the Red Rose Cabaret but still under delusions of grandeur and longing for the days of former glory. She sees her daughter’s inheritance as her final chance to regain the life status she clearly thinks she deserved.
Also look out for Hans Söhnker as the dubious lawyer who is trying to sell off the castle well under value. Söhnker had previously played Prof Moriarty in Terence Fisher’s Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) and was Sir Philip, the Head of Scotland Yard, in the Bryan Edgar Wallace production Das Phantom von Soho/The Phantom of Soho (1964).
Sieben Tage Frist is one of the few Krimis that is actually a bit more readily available. Under the title School of Fear a dubbed version can be found in some regions on Amazon Prime or Cultpix. Nevertheless, it is also one of the lesser known examples of the genre. Even on German TV it had only ever been shown once, yet a lot of people who have actually watched this often rate it as one of the best and favourite Krimis ever made.
The reason why the film may not automatically come to mind in discussions about the genre is that it’s not just not part of a series but indeed epitomises quite the opposite of classic Krimi as it’s generally known.
Shot in 1969 towards the end of the great Krimi era, this is a contemporary thriller based on the novel Sieben Tage Frist for Schramm [tr. “Seven Days Grace for Schramm”] by German author Paul Henricks.
In actual fact despite being directed by Alfred Vohrer and starring a couple of familiar Krimi faces, the film can easily be described as an anti-Wallace.
Set in a wintery landscape in the German Federal State of Schleswig-Holstein, the plot takes place in a boarding school for boys as opposed to all the various Rialto institutions for girls. Urban London is replaced by a barren coastal seaside that also features a solitary brothel with a somewhat blasphemous and political wall painting.
Students read underground magazines and use swear words. Bullying and animal cruelty is part of life for the school’s pupils.
Homosexuality was only fully decriminalised in Germany in 1994 but gay acts between adults above the age of 21 were already made legal in 1969, the year this film was shot, and a gay subtext clearly permeates this movie. We even get a glimpse of some brief full frontal male nudity.
And if that wasn’t enough at some stage we even get a Nazi war crime reveal.
For the most part Krimis were part of the German entertainment establishment of the 1960s and as such remained staunchly apolitical. Barring some mild references to the Third Reich in some of the earlier Mabuse films of the 1960s (small wonder given their pedigree), it is genuinely difficult to come up with other contemporary samples of the genre that contain elements of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (= coming to terms with the country’s past).
The student revolts of 1968 changed all that and left a big impact on German culture and society and this film is a reflection of this and an attempt to create a mélange of a traditional Krimi with a social awareness.
The link that ties those two spheres together is the employment of old school talent in front of and behind the camera.
Rather than use an up and coming director of the New German Cinema who had declared that “"Opas Kino ist tot” (Grandad’s cinema is dead), Luggi Waldleitner, the producer, wisely chose Alfred Vohrer to direct this production. Vohrer together with cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke (another established Krimi-routinier) captured the bleak winter landscape remarkably well but also - typical for similar productions of the time - overdid the zooms.
This is Joachim Fuchsberger’s seventh and final collaboration with Vohrer and given the context of this production it is symptomatic that he no longer plays the dashing young hero but instead a teacher at the school, ie an older authority figure to the younger generation (albeit one that is most interested in solving the crimes).
Horst Tappert is the constantly (to the point of comical annoyance for the viewer) cigar-chomping-and-spitting investigating officer. Given that in real life Tappert a few years after his death was outed as having been a member of the SS, it is ironic that in this film he is one of the men responsible for revealing war crimes. One wonders what must have gone through his head when he shot this film. Did he ever ponder what would happen if his own involvement in Nazi atrocities became public knowledge?
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The only one of the younger actors with anything resembling a film career was Frithjof Vierock who was mainly known as a comedy actor and at this stage had been in the business for close to a decade. For Arthur Richelman who plays Kurrat, the main pupil, however, this would remain his only feature film.
There is no debate: School of Fear is a highly unusual and more contemporary classic Krimi than anything else we have come to know from this genre. It is much more political, radical and socially conscious than the other series and for that reason alone it is worth a rediscovery.
And yet, I also can’t help but feel that it is this very contemporariness that also dates it more than its better known predecessors.
Nobody would accuse the Edgar Wallace Krimis to still be super current in 2024. They clearly have developed various sheets of patina but as they are set in an entirely fictitious universe that never really existed in the real world, they also contain a timelessness that School of Fear, a production clearly routed in 1969, lacks.
The German trailer has comments from the three leading actors that despite their lengthy résumés, none of them had ever been in a film that "hits the nerve" as much as this one.
The German PAL Region 2 DVD appears to also contain the English track and is available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon DE. It is, however, very pricey at this stage.
Other than that it was published more than ten years ago in April 2013 I have no further info about this. It was clearly a one-off and I don't think there were even any other issues of this magazine created. The only thing I found online about this is this French language blog post that had also provided a download link (long since expired).
To the best of my knowledge this zine had only ever existed as a free PDF for fans of this subgenre.
I have now uploaded this fanzine to archive.org to make this wonderful publication more easily accessible again. Even if you don't speak French, it is well worth exploring and an utter joy.
I enjoyed creating my first Krimi related slideshow on YouTube so much that I decided to do a second one, this time dedicated to DIE TOTEN AUGEN VON LONDON/DEAD EYES OF LONDON (1961), Alfred Vohrer's Edgar Wallace-debut featuring a very experimental track by composer Heinz Funk.
So just did a thing and uploaded a slideshow to YouTube with posters, lobby cards and promotional images for the Rialto Edgar Wallace Krimi DER HEXER aka THE MYSTERIOUS MAGICIAN based on Wallace's novel THE RINGER.
Hope you like. I may do more along those lines sometime in the future.
Following the success of their Der unheimliche Mönch/The Sinister Monk (1965) just two years prior, Rialto decided to film yet another modern day movie featuring a strange monk only this time in full glorious colour. And rather than have Harald Reinl on the directing chair, Alfred Vohrer takes up the reins.
Rather than simply make this a remake as they had e.g. done with their Dead Eyes of London/Gorilla Gang combo, this production is not really based on Edgar Wallace’s The Terror like the previous film but only carries over a few elements but is otherwise a totally new story by Herbert Reinecker (aka Alex Berg).
In actual fact at one point in the film Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) and Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) reminisce about the similarities of these new events with the older case, thereby establishing a link within the Rialto Universe of Edgar Wallace films even though only Sir John had been a participant in the hunt for the Sinister Monk. Instead Harald Leipnitz as Inspector Bratt was in charge of the investigation then.
And speaking of that universe: Fuchsberger returns back to the Rialto Wallace Krimi fold after a three-year break and this is now the second time after Der Hexer/The Ringer (1964), his previous Wallace, that Joachim Fuchsberger plays Inspector Higgins though all references to his character in the earlier film are eradicated, most notably his fiancée (played by Sophie Hardy) and Higgins himself appears to be way less flirtatious than in the earlier production. In the interim he instead seems to have developed that somewhat irritating habit of constantly chewing on something. Chewing gum perhaps that is meant to show him as a “cool” representative of a younger generation?
In the following year’s Im Banne des Unheimlichen/The Zombie Walks (1968) Fuchsberger would for the third and last time play an Inspector Higgins though it’s safe to say that all his Inspectors regardless of the name are generally variations on a theme.
In terms of the relationship between Sir John and Higgins, it is the usual comical interplay between the older buffoon and the younger hero. Sir John in this movie has taken up a recent interest in psychology much to the dismay of his subordinate who tries to prevent him from getting too enraptured in Freudian analysis. Truth be told though, it is actually often Sir John who discovers important clues when questioning suspects in a way that had been dismissed by his younger colleague. It kinda makes me long for some fanfiction in which Sir John is portrayed as the true misunderstood hero of the series.
Ilse Pagé returns for the second time as Sir John’s secretary Mabel Finley, a part she would regularly play for both Schürenberg’s character as well his successor Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck).
Like many a Euro Cult film, this is a movie that was produced for maximum effect and not for anything requiring internal logic.
There are many aspects of the plot that just don’t make a hell of a lot of sense.
Why e.g. go to the trouble of creating a brand-new poison that can’t be detected by smell or taste when it then requires overly complicated contraptions that leave a clearly visible liquid mess behind on the faces of the victims, the kind of fluids than in certain scenes of the movie actually look more like thin threads of spiderwebs?
Just who actually produces all the poison after the mad scientist who developed it hands over the one and only sample at the beginning of the film just to subsequently be quickly offed as the first victim of the monk?
And why is poison needed at all if we also have a murdering monk on the rampage?
A prestigious boarding school seemingly consists entirely of teachers that all have a dubiously suspicious past with no apparent vetting ever being done. Where else can you find ex-convicts and murderers or former circus artists in such distinguished pillar-of-society roles?
When the true motive behind the killings is revealed - no spoilers here - it does appear to be ridiculously elaborated for the intended outcome.
And this is just the cream of the crop of head scratchers this film has to offer.
So if you need to make proper “sense” of a film, then The College Girl Murders is likely not for you.
But then you would also miss out on a glorious piece of cinematic madness.
In true Grand Guignol fashion the film begins with an image of lab rats hovering one on top of each other before being gassed by a typical wild-haired mad scientist (Wilhelm Vorwerg).
In the first five minutes of the film we already have two murders and the film never lets off pace.
The eponymous hooded monk, dressed in a crimson habit and armed with his whip is clearly one of the if not THE most iconic villain in the Wallace universe. His black and white predecessor was already an imposing idea but seeing him stalk the school-ground at night in flashy red colour makes for a truly outrageous image.
The main villain’s underground lair protected by crocodiles and set seemingly underwater though in reality within an enormous aquarium looks stunning and is clearly reminiscent of the James Bond movies, especially of the later The Spy Who Loved Me. The villain himself lurks Dr Mabuse-like with the back towards his henchmen and speaks in an electronically changed voice through a loudspeaker and at opportune moments switches off the lights in his reception area to be even more obscured.
Including reptiles in his movies was one of Vohrer’s identifiable traits and a love for the grotesque permeates this film, especially when one of the henchmen holds a squirming rat in his hand in order to feed it to a snake. (I am not entirely certain that no animals were harmed during the production of this movie.)
Especially the night scenes are beautifully and moodily lit for greatest effect courtesy of cinematographer Karl Löb who next to directors Reinl and Vohrer needs to be highlighted as one of the most important artists to define the typical Krimi look.
The first girl that gets killed in a church after being handed a specially prepared bible containing a gadget blasting out the poison is a heavily bespectacled Ewa Strömberg in her first small role in a Wallace Krimi. Strömberg in the early 1970s would become one of Jess Franco’s muses in a handful of his films shot in very short succession before retiring from the film industry completely at a fairly young age.
Everything is over the top and everyone sweats like a pig when under pressure. Pretty much every character has some dirt on them and is therefore suspicious and the dynamics are quite often highly outrageous, especially in the case of a pervy older teacher (Konrad Georg) with a crush for some of the younger girls (first the murder victim and then the character played by Grit Boettcher). He is also seen to spy on some of them via underwater windows in a swimming pool and through the kind of removable peepholes in the walls of a girls dormitory that were seemingly everywhere in Krimiland. And yet, despite all this extremely creepy carry-on the girls in question do seem to welcome his attention and reciprocate!
And all of this is underlined by Martin Böttcher’s gloriously madcap and over-the-top soundtrack.
Following an unrelated supporting role in The Sinister Monk and a star making performance in the Karl May film Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi/Winnetou and the Crossbreed (1966), The College Girl Murders was only Uschi Glas’ third feature film.
The following year she personified the ésprit of a confident independent young generation in the Nouvelle Vague inspired freewheeling cult classic Zur Sache Schätzchen/Go for It, Baby (1968) and “Schätzchen” would remain her well known nickname while she developed into the Nation’s Sweetheart over the years. Ultimately she would appear in a total of five later-day Rialto Wallaces.
In this film she plays the most prominent girl in the boarding school. Though it appears that together with the others she would clearly be too old to stay in one of those educational institutions, her character is meant to be 20 so it appears not to have been that unusual to have students remain until the age of 21.
Despite becoming most famous through a hip role, for the most part Glas through the course of her career became a representative of an inoffensive kind of conservative entertainment and even in this early role she appears quite precocious and despite her young age already very mumsy. She is maybe not the typical cheesecake one would expect in exploitation flicks around all-girls schools…. but then again surprisingly very few of the other actresses aren’t either.
Glas has her best parts here when interacting with Fuchsberger dressed up as the monk or while hanging captive in a cage over the crocodiles.
One of the most enjoyable, albeit head scratching aspects of The College Girl Murders is the entire prison subplot. Siegfried Rauch plays an inmate who regularly gets smuggled out of and then back into the prison in order to commit murders with the help of a futuristic looking gun containing that poison. Initially reluctant to go that far he gets coerced into it by his cellmate (Narziß Sokatscheff).
It appears that pretty much the entire prison, inmates as well as staff, are in on it.
With one seeming exception, a Reverend (Rudolf Schündler), who when visiting Scotland Yard starts slapping bums as he is indeed an undercover member of the vice squad!
Also look out for other familiar faces such as Harry Riebauer, Tilly Lauenstein, Claus Holm, Jan Hendriks and the always memorable Günter Meisner.
When an “Ende” sign gets dropped into the aquarium to signal the end of the film, we return back to the familiar breaking of the forth wall.
The Rialto colour productions are often “trashier” than its black and white predecessors and quite commonly revisit familiar well established tropes even if they’re not outright remakes and The College Girl Murders is no exception.
Depending on your stance towards this kind of style-over-substance film making, this film may be considered either one of the highlights or the low points of the series.
Me?
I love it and it certainly ticks all the right boxes with its mix of Wallace meets James Bond by way of Dr. Mabuse.
Smyrner is Adrian Hoven’s love interest in the Austrian standalone Krimi Die schwarze Kobra/The Black Cobra (1963). Directed by Rudolf Zehetgruber this film featured Hoven as an ex-con and also starred Klaus Kinski.
That same year Smyrner re-united again with Zehetgruber and Kinski for Piccadilly Null Uhr 12 [Piccadilly Zero Hour 12] (1963), another standalone Krimi, and again she plays the romantic interest for Helmut Wildt’s lead, yet another character who had spent time behind bars.
Both of those films are at best very middling productions and Smyrner ended up with her biggest and most interesting Krimi related role in Das siebente Opfer /The Racetrack Murders (1964), the final Bryan Edgar Wallace film of the 1960s. She quite literally played the lead role here as her character, part of a family of race horse owners who one by one get killed off, is revealed to become the seventh and final victim of this serial killer. In some of the scenes she is also clearly seen riding at one of the races.
Born in Denmark, Smyrner was raised in Aarhus where her parents were working at the theatre, her father as an actor, her mother a singer.
She started modelling as a teenager and visited the local drama school where she won an acting award at the age of 21 before moving to Munich.
Smyrner was chosen for the part after winning a highly publicised casting process and despite some fans of the character voicing concerns that such a German icon should not be played by a Danish actress with at the time just a rudimentary command of the German language.
Given that her voice was going to be dubbed, this didn’t seem to matter too much but regardless of it all, the film flopped. This, however, did not stop Smyrner featuring in a good number of lightweight fluffy German comedies in the subsequent years.
One of those comedies, Frühstück im Doppelbett/Breakfast in Bed (1963), first teamed her up with Lex Barker who played against type and in a supporting role in this star vehicle for German Dream Couple Liselotte Pulver and O.W. Fischer. Smyrner also appeared next to Barker in Das Todesauge von Ceylon/The Death Eye of Ceylon (1963) and Code 7, Victim 5 (1964).
Smyrner and Barker were often seen together and throughout the 1960s Smyrner appears to have also become quite infatuated with a number of her other male co-stars.
Denmark is not exactly known for their Science Fiction B-Movies but in the early 1960s the country produced two of those and Smyrner starred in both of them: Reptilicus (1961) was the country’s only Kaiju film. Poul Bang shot the Danish version, Sidney W. Pink the English language one and Pink, a year later, also directed Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) in Denmark.
During the 1960s Smyner moved away from the comedies and can be spotted in a range of different popular genres:
She featured in the second Kommissar X movie Drei gelbe Katzen/Death is Nimble, Death is Quick (1966), based on a German pulp series.
Another German pulp adaptation was …4 ...3 ...2 ...1 ...morte/Mission Stardust (1967), this time based on the immensely popular Perry Rhodan series that over the decades was going to become the longest running literary Science Fiction series of all times with currently more than 3200 issues and several spin offs to its name.
Smyrner can be seen in minor swashbuckler L'uomo di Toledo/The Captain from Toledo (1965), modern adventure film Jagd auf blaue Diamanten/Diamond Walkers (1965) or a Euro Spy comedy such as Un killer per sua maestà/The Killer Likes Candy (1968).
She also had a small part in Angelique et le roy/Angelique and the King (1966), the third part in an immensely popular series of adventure movies set in the time of Louis XIV and based on the novels of Anne Golon, and also featured in the Vincent Price movie House of 1,000 Dolls (1967).
Towards the end of the 60s and into the early 1970s, the quality roles stopped coming in and she was mainly asked to perform in soft sex films and bargain basement comedies in which she also occasionally appeared topless. The first of those was Das Go Go Girl vom Blow Up [The Go Go Girl from the Blow Up] (1969), also featuring Eddi Arent and Fritz Wepper.
Tante Trude aus Buxtehude [Aunt Trude from Buxtehude] (1971) reunited Smyrner with director Franz Josef Gottlieb who had previously already directed her for Das siebente Opfer/The Racetrack Murders (1964).
At the time Ann Smyrner also appeared in roles for TV, most notably an episode of Robert Wagner vehicle “It Takes a Thief” (The Beautiful People, October 09, 1969) and the second episode of “Der Kommissar” (January 17, 1969), a series that was going to become one of Germany’s most famous TV Krimis and was developed and written by Herbert Reinecker who had also contributed scripts to several Krimis, most famously for Der Hexer/The Ringer (1964).Her last feature film appears to have been little seen Italian Euro-Crime Thriller Ore di Terrore [Hours of Terror] (1971) about three escaped prisoners on board of a luxury yacht.
When asked about her films later on in life she replied:
“You just went home and that was it. I'm also aware that a lot of the movies were just plain shit, but I was just a girl with a lust for life looking for fun, men and money. And I've enjoyed my life accordingly.”
Disappointed about the way her career was going and following a stint in a hospital Smyrner found religion and in 1973 started studying theology and subsequently penned books and articles and held lectures about a variety of esoteric matters.
In the latter part of her life she lived in Benalmádena in Spain and had a long distance relationship with Danish journalist Ole Hansen who visited her once a month.
It is there that she died on August 29, 2016 at the age of 82.
Though entire scenes and lines of dialogue are lifted almost verbatim and set design (e.g. the water tank) as well as certain directorial ideas (such as the reflections in a pair of dark glasses) look more than familiar, Der Gorilla von Soho/The Gorilla Gang (1968) eliminated the entire main plot line involving a gang of blind beggars. Instead of messages in Braille, the corpses now carry small dolls with African writing, leading Insp. David Perkins (Horst Tappert) and Sgt. Jim Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen) with the help of Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas) to The Gorilla Gang whose main henchman operates in a gorilla costume right in the middle of London.
Which admittedly is pretty ridiculous even within the Edgar Wallace universe that thrives on masked villains.
The film also features nudity and a workhouse for young women replaces the home for the blind in the original.
Whereas Dead Eyes of London is a classic within this genre, The Gorilla Gang lacks any of that movie’s moodiness and mystery and replaces it with a brightly coloured mix of silliness that makes it fun to watch even though one would be hard pressed to call it genuinely good.
The investigating team of Perkins and Pepper would return in the next Rialto Wallace, Der Mann mit dem Glasauge/The Man With the Glass Eye (1968), yet another remake (of sorts). In that film Sgt. Pepper would, however, be portrayed by Stefan Behrens.
The Man With the Glass Eye is one of those Wallace films that doesn’t even pretend to be based on any of his novels anymore. Its development, however, is probably way more interesting than a straight forward adaptation would have been as this is an example where a rival production from a different studio initially influenced by the success of the Rialto Wallaces in turn influenced a film in the original series back again.
Ladislas Fodor, an author who had been very influential in creating the 1960s series of Mabuse movies, had also provided a screenplay for Artur Brauner’s CCC Film production Das Phantom von Soho/The Phantom of Soho (1964), allegedly based on Bryan Edgar Wallace’s novel Murder by Proxy, a book that does not, however, seem to exist. In his screenplay Fodor focused on a string of knife murders in London’s red light district, committed by a masked killer in revenge for the actions of a gang of drug and girl smugglers.
Which kind of is the entire premise of The Man With the Glass Eye as well! (Right down to the exact nature of the reason for the revenge.)
For Rialto’s production Fodor supplied a treatment under the title “Die grausame Puppe” [The Cruel Doll]. His involvement went uncredited and his treatment was reworked by Paul Hengge whose name features in the credits of Rialto’s 28th Wallace movie.
There is speculation as to whether Phantom of Soho’s screenplay may have simply been sold over to Rialto at the time. Whatever exactly happened remains unknown but the similarities between both movies are striking (and possibly a subject for a future blog post).
The Man With the Glass Eye combines both the best and the worst of the latter day Rialto Edgar Wallace films.
Alfred Vohrer’s 14th and final Wallace production is often a feast for the eye with wonderful Bavaesque lightning being employed right from the start when we see the first hotel room murder filmed in eery red and blue hues.
Prior to that the mood was already set when the initial credits announced cast and crew members’ names in flashing lights on top of images of Piccadilly’s and Soho’s neon lights.
The film oozes a sense for the bizarre and the off kilter and whereas earlier Krimis clearly influenced Italy’s own burgeoning Giallo genre, those Gialli now in turn appear to exert their own influence back to the Rialto films (until they would ultimately begin to totally merge for their last couple of entries).
Glass eyes - let’s face it: not the most common of sights in real life - are everywhere: the killer wears one; they’re left behind on crime scenes: “Glasauge” is the name of a billiard club whose membership card is a glass eye and whose villainous owner (Narziss Sokatscheff) also wears one; they can also be seen in a variety of dolls in an eccentric curio shop (that also incidentally contains a cuckoo clock with the head of a small dragon popping out on the hour, an item that I now really need to have).
A ventriloquist with an outrageously designed doll featuring an oversized egg shaped head, gets seemingly killed by his own puppet by a man bizarrely dressed up in a life-sized costume even when on the run and in a shootout with the police.
Plenty of memorable characters even in smallest roles. Burly twins (or at least lookalikes) are e.g. engaged in a bar room brawl. A performer wears an Old Shatterhand outfit. And of course we also have an iconic killer wearing an impressive combination of mask, glass eye, black gloves, cape and hat, the kind of vision you just want to see stalk London’s foggy streets.
And of course there are gimmicks galore. Realistically most of those are highly unpractical but a lot of fun to observe regardless: radio senders stored in shoe heels; a hidden machine gun behind a wooden panel; entire databanks of Interpol and other police force members in a rotating filing cabinet in a billiard club that also contains enough surveillance equipment to make a Mabuse proud; elaborate remote control mechanisms at the home of a wannabe playboy including a seated glass compartment on train tracks for the convenience of visitors that is so painfully slow that it would be much faster to simply walk the few steps rather than make yourself comfortable in there.
Oh, and did I mention Peter Thomas being in top form yet again with a stellar musical score?
Despite all this, what does drag this film down considerably is an over abundance of silly humour.
True, the Rialto Wallaces always had some humoristic elements in them but even though one would be hard pressed to call them subtle, for this production the comedy is at its crassest and worst.
Stefan Behrens (in his one and only Wallace film and at the beginning of his career) plays Sgt. Pepper [sic!] as an irritatingly squeaky voiced comic relief. The character of Sgt. Pepper was carried over from the previous production, Der Gorilla von Soho/The Gorilla of Soho (aka The Gorilla Gang), where he was played in a straight fashion as a regular sidekick again next to Horst Tappert’s Insp. Perkins.
What Behrens is to Eddi Arent, Hubert von Meyerinck’s Sir Arthur is to Siegfried Schürenberg’s Sir John. Both actors took over the batons from comedic actors that left an indelible mark in the Rialto Wallace series and then cranked the format up to Level 11 where it became utterly unbearable.
This is von Meyerinck’s third performance as Sir Arthur (and his 5th and final one in the series overall) and he is as loud and unpleasantly pervy as expected from him. He is both a bombastic and ignorant caricature of a Prussian General as well as a grotesque poster child for harassing bosses everywhere. His constant (but very willing!) object of attraction is Ilse Pagé (also in her 5th and final appearance in that series) as his secretary Mabel. Pagé’s Mabel was always ditzy but during the course of her films morphed into the most obnoxious stereotype of the Dumb Female.
And if those characters alone weren’t enough: The film is chockfull of the lowest kind of gutter humour with added over-the-top effeminate camp gay displays. At one stage a barkeep explains to Sir Arthur how to create a cocktail by telling him to “blow hard, else it won’t get stiff”. That kind of line makes the Carry On series look like the epitome of sophistication.
There is exactly one scene where the humour works and that ironically is one that may have gone right over the heads of a lot of the original German audience at the time: When the girls get locked into the back of a van, a sign on it in English states that it contains “fresh meat”.
Another drawback is that there is not a single character, male or female, who could genuinely serve as a protagonist or even hero or heroine that the audience could root for. The closest The Man with the Glass Eye comes in this regard is Horst Tappert’s Scotland Yard inspector who is ultimately, however, way too charmless and dull to genuinely engage with.
Then again, it seems that the German audience does enjoy charmless and dull when it comes to their fictional detectives as just a few years later Tappert started to feature in Derrick, a TV crime series that ran over 25 seasons from 1974-1998. Derrick also sold well abroad (in places such as Italy, the Netherlands and Scandinavia). His portrayal was not too far removed from his Inspector Perkins and it also featured Fritz Wepper as his assistant Harry Klein.
The two actors first met on The Man with the Glass Eye where Wepper plays Bruce Sharringham, a drug addicted member of an aristocratic family, in love with Karin Hübner’s dancing girl Yvonne Duval much to the dismay of his wonderfully snobbish and domineering mother (Friedel Schuster).
A lot is packed into the plot of this film, probably too much for its own good, so in the end it is often drowned in a plethora of different plot points without giving the right amount of focus to all those varied strands. The doomed love affair between those two characters e.g. for the longest time often feels totally out of place and just fizzles out among all the other plot strands and yet it is only towards the end that its true implications are revealed and one wishes it had been built up much stronger.
[WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD - SKIP UNTIL THE END OF SPOILERS NOTICE IF NEEDED]
The Man With the Glass Eye has a tragic ending that similarly to Room 13 managed to pull at the heart strings in a way that very few others in the series with more conventional endings ever managed to succeed in doing.
Karin Hübner’s Yvonne is revealed as being a girl who had previously been abducted and forced into prostitution. She now seeks revenge on her former tormentors, most of all her lover’s mother who had been acting as the true eminence grise behind the gang and ends up killing Yvonne shortly before Scotland Yard and her fiancé can come to the rescue, leaving Fritz Wepper’s character both in mourning over the death of his true love and the betrayal of the mother he had always worshipped.
Rather than being a regular Wallace super villain, Yvonne had been a benevolent vigilante who saved hundreds of girls from the kind of fate that she had had to endure herself.
[END OF SPOILERS]
Apart from this love affair we have the knife killings of the glass eyed killer, a separate string of killings amongst the dance crew, a gang of girl smuggling white slave traders and drug deals taking place with the help of specially prepared billiard queues.
All of those do somewhat come together at the finale which, however, does not prevent a feeling of at times being overburdened by way too many diverse elements that don’t all join together as a consistent unity.
The fact that Rialto is clearly a representative of “Grandfather’s cinema” despite attempting to go with the times in their depiction of nudity, violence and drug use is very obvious when we see that every single one of the heroin users in this film just greedily gulps it down. Just a few short years away from the scenes depicted in Christiane F. here are film makers that don’t seem to comprehend the idea that the vast majority of heroin users would either inject, smoke or sniff and snort it but never really eat it.
Some choreographed dance scenes in this production were lifted from the film Scala - Total Verrückt (1958, translates as: "Scala - Totally Crazy"), a CCC variety show comedy directed by and featuring Eric Ode who late become one of Germany’s most popular TV detectives in Der Kommissar.
All in all The Man With the Glass Eye is a stunning looking swan song for Alfred Vohrer’s time with Rialto. Containing a Giallo flair, this is quite bloody at times with occasional glimpses of nudity and a wonderfully tragic ending that is only marred by an overabundance of cheap humour and a confusion of too many divergent plot elements.
AVAILABILITY
The Man With the Glass Eye is available as an English friendly standalone DVD with English subtitles and dubs but also featured in the final set (Edition 8) of the Edgar Wallace Edition together with the last four films of the series and of course also in the complete Rialto Wallace DVD Edition.
These are PAL Region 2 releases and can best be ordered via Amazon DE. Usually if bought from outside the EU ordering from there may be subject to customs charges but they may also show up as import discs on Amazon UK or Amazon US.
The film is also available in the same English friendly format on a German Blu Ray. Whereas the DVD Box releases were chronological for the Blu Ray box sets the films were published in a more random order and this movie appears on Blu-Ray Edition 9 with two other films. Just like on DVD there is also a boxset with the complete Rialto Wallace Blu Rays.
For anyone splashing out on the complete sets (either on DVD or Blu Ray): Only about two thirds of those are English friendly.
