Der rote Rausch (1962)

When Josef Stief (Klaus Kinski) escapes from the mental clinic he is held in after killing four women wearing red coral necklaces, he finds refuge in a little village near an Eastern European border. There he calls himself Martin and is mistaken as a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain. The shy “Martin”, prone to wildly erratic behaviour, is subjected to the suspicions of the locals but manages to befriend a woman (Brigitte Grothum) whose husband, also called Martin, has gone missing for years after operating near the border and is presumed dead, forcing her to raise her daughter (Christine Ratej) on her own. “Martin” has no recollection of the killings he had committed but a trip to the nearby city reveals the truth of his past to him and results in a full blown manhunt in which emotional villagers decide to take the law into their own hand. 

The best and most important Kinski role you (likely) haven’t seen. 

 Filmed at the height of the Edgar Wallace boom in Germany, Der rote Rausch (tr. “The Red Rage”, a term used by a psychologist to describe Martin’s temporary murderous impulses) is as far removed from the Rialto series as a contemporary German language crime drama can be. Yet, despite (or maybe: because) of this, the film is highly fascinating for a variety of different reasons.

• This is Klaus Kinski’s first leading role. 
• The film dispenses of any gimmicky effects and plot twists. It’s a serious drama, more M (1931) than Edgar Wallace. 
• Rather than being set in an imaginary London, the film takes place in a very real contemporary Germany/Austria. Just a year after the Berlin Wall was begun, this production uses the plight of refugees from East Germany as part of its narrative.
• Der rote Rausch was not a commercial success and after its cinematic release had only once been shown on German television in 1967 and subsequently been considered lost until its rediscovery in 2002 when the original negative was found in a mislabeled can.
• It features a number of supporting players that will be familiar from other more typical Krimis.
• For a Krimi this is also a fairly bloodless affair. The only murders take place off screen and prior to the beginning of this plot. The focus is much more on the drama between the characters and yet always with a constant threat of possible lurking danger. 

 The original serialised magazine novel this has been adapted from is from 1952 and featured Martin as a possible war returnee. Filmed in 1962, this was updated for the film. 

Shot in rural Austria and Vienna, it is never explicitly stated what border area this film is exactly set in. Instead we get constant references to “von drüben” (=“from over there”), a popular catch phrase to describe East Germany in particular but also neighbouring Eastern European countries in general. 

Very likely it is the Hungarian/Austrian border that is depicted, a popular area at the time for East German residents trying to escape into the West though it may just as well have been similar looking border areas in Germany itself. 

 Though by then he had already appeared in a handful of supporting roles in Edgar Wallace Krimis, Rialto itself would not avail of Klaus Kinski as the leading man until later in the 1960s. 

In 1961, a year before production to Der rote Rausch began, the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel had featured him in a very prominent 14-page lead article and cover story. The focus of this piece was very much on Kinski’s theatrical performances and recitations of classic authors. Far from being hero-worshipping, the tone was often quite derogatory and highly critical in its appraisal of Kinski as a performer. 

And yet unsurprisingly having such a prominent piece in a major magazine, was the best possible PR for him and ensured that his profile was instantly raised so a move to a lead role in a movie was the next logical step. 

And true to form this film cleverly played with both facets of Kinski’s public persona at the time as we get Kinski, the resident madman, as well as Kinski, the reciter of classic works of fiction. 

His Martin is a major tour-de-force mixing moments of bug eyed intensity with subtle shy cues full of sadness and desperation. The truth of Martin’s violent past is only gradually revealed in full to both the character and the audience. Martin, despite his obvious anguish and mental difficulties and fits of violence, always remains a sympathetic though tragically doomed character. 

In one scene we see Kinski performing the tale of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant in a puppet theatre for a young girl. This was one of his popular recitations and is a piece that is available in whole on Spoken Word collections. 

Der rote Rausch stands and falls by Kinski’s performance. All the other actors are highly capable but some of their scenes sans-Kinski can drag a little bit. 

By far the weakest part of this production is the relationship between quasi-widow Katrin (Brigitte Grothum) and Martin. Her sympathy and borderline romantic feelings for him just don’t appear realistic even given the fact that his assumed name and his fate reminds her of her long lost husband. He is just way too unhinged to ultimately make this relationship believable. 

The previous year the two actors had first appeared alongside each other for Rialto-Wallace Die seltsame Gräfin/The Strange Countess and in 1962 they also acted together in Das Gasthaus an der Themse/The Inn on the River. The next year Grothum also played the female lead in the non Rialto-Wallace Der Fluch der gelben Schlange/The Curse of the Yellow Snake.

Grothum seems to have got on well with the notoriously difficult Kinski and says that a lot of his behaviour was just a publicity stunt. 

For Der rote Rausch he apparently spread the rumour that he was going back to nature and sleeping in a tent on the lake, causing paparazzi to try and capture some sneaky tabloid fodder while Kinski was indeed quietly staying in the crew hotel where he also had his regular breakfast in polite company with the rest of the cast and crew. 

 In the 1950s director Wolfgang Schleif was mainly known for a series of lighthearted comedies. Der rote Rausch was one of the last feature films he made before predominantly switching to a career in television.

 Schleif had directed Grothum already in her star making performance as Das Mädchen Marion (tr. “The Girl Marion”, 1956). 

For Der rote Rausch he together with cinematographer Walter Partsch successfully captured moody black and white reed fields in stark contrast to most of his usual films. This style of photography appears to have been inspired by some of the more realistic films coming out of Italy and Continental Europe at the time.

Dieter Borsche (Die toten Augen von London/Dead Eyes of London, Der schwarze Abt/The Black Abbot, Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse/Dr. Mabuse vs. Scotland Yard, Der Henker von London/The Mad Executioners, Das Phantom von Soho/The Phantom of Soho) is the director of the mental institution who treated Martin and his character spouts a lot of pseudo-scientific baloney while evaluating his patient’s mental state. 

Internationally Sieghardt Rupp is best known for his part in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). In this film he plays Katrin’s long suffering admirer and eventual leader of the mob against Martin. 

Born in 1919, Jochen Brockmann is one of those actors who only started appearing in films fairly late in life. He was around 40 when he began making an impact in mainly villainous roles and can be seen in the very first Rialto-Wallace Der Frosch mit der Maske/Fellowship of the Frog (1959) as well as maybe the quintessential Krimi Der Hexer/The Ringer (1964) and standalone non-Edgar Wallace Krimi Das Rätsel der grünen Spinne (tr. “The Mystery of the Green Spider”, 1960). In Der rote Rausch he can be seen in a more sympathetic but equally authoritarian role as Katrin’s father, desperately attempting to help his daughter overcome her feeling of loss over her missing husband. 

The interplay between all the characters, the sense of suspicion and paranoia surrounding Martin, the increasing levels of hostility towards him and his ultimate fate (no spoilers here), are as well presented and tragic as they are understandable. 

For all intends and purposes Der rote Rausch should feature in any Top 10 list of best or most important Kinski performances. It does feature all his typical mannerisms but way before they became routine and cliché and also serves as a cinematic reminder of his classic dramatic skills. 

And yet this is one production that is practically unheard of outside of Germany due to it not being available in an English friendly versions (a popular complaint for this blog) and even in Germany this film has been under appreciated and unduly forgotten for far too long. A flop at the time, the public obviously preferred their Krimis to be less realistic and instead demanded more Edgar Wallace type movies. It is, however, definitely a film in dire need of a reappraisal. 

Der Henker von London/The Mad Executioners (1963)

The Mad Executioners marks one of the few times when a Bryan Edgar Wallace movie featured mysterious villains in disguise. This time a bunch of hooded judges - who look remarkably similar to the baddies in later “proper” Wallace films such as The College Girl Murders - hold judgment over criminals who managed to escape the traditional justice system. Their verdict is invariably death by strangulation courtesy of the hangman’s rope that gets stolen in regular intervals from Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. Their court room is full of coffins and skulls just for added atmosphere. Their macabre success even spawns copycats: criminal gangs who use the imminent threat of execution to terrorise some straying gang members.

Half way through the film it switches focus to an apparent sexual predator who decapitates young girls, one of them the sister of Inspector John Hillier (Hansjörg Felmy). The killer needs those heads to perform Frankensteinian experiments.

Chris Howland is a crime reporter in various disguises. He sings… badly. He cross dresses... badly. Dieter Borsche is a pervy old man who still manages to get the gals with the help of some incredibly bad chat up lines. A veritable lady killer.

Also starring Wolfgang Preiss as Hillier’s superior in Scotland Yard, Harry Riebauer as Hillier’s friend and police surgeon and Maria Perschy as the token blonde love interest and decoy to help catch the decapitating mad doctor. Rudolf Fernau is a butler with a wonderfully fixed gaze.

Director Edwin Zbonek would return to Bryan Edgar Wallace with Das Ungeheuer von London City/The Monster of London City (1964)

Die toten Augen von London/Dead Eyes of London (1961)

A gang of blind peddlers terrorise London under cover of night and fog and kill rich visitors from overseas who all had insurances with the same company. Messages left behind in Braille give Scotland Yard the first clues as to the identity of the killers. 

  Dead Eyes of London was Alfred Vohrer’s Wallace debut. With 14 Krimis he was soon to turn into Rialto’s most proficient director.

 In this movie he already established a lot of his typical cinematic quirks that were often reminiscent of Dario Argento’s ideas a decade later: The camera films a mouth wash from behind a set of teeth; Kinski’s dark sun glasses clearly reflect a roulette table and Harry Wüstenhagen’s image; a victim’s eyes are shown approaching through a little spy hole in a wall shortly before he’s being shot.

 Vohrer’s most ingenious directorial ideas, however, were in the use of classical music. In contrast to most of the other Wallace movies which generally relied on specially composed, often jazzy, tracks, Vohrer opted to have Beethoven’s 5th symphony played to accompany scenes of torture, murder and general mayhem, a device which predates Kubrick’s similar use of the composer’s music for A Clockwork Orange by more than a decade.

 Although this was also Klaus Kinski’s Rialto debut he had his first Wallace outing a year earlier in Kurt Ulrich Film’s rival production Der Rächer/The Avenger (1960).Though his character can see, he is constantly wearing large, dark sun glasses that obscure his eyes and underline his involvement with the gang of blind men. Any time he removes his glasses, he goes into widely staring overdrive.

 Joachim Fuchsberger unsurprisingly plays the lead, a Scotland Yard inspector. What else?

 Eddi Arent is his colleague and comic side kick who knits woollen jumpers incessantly in order to calm his nerves and is nicknamed “Sunny” on account of his cheerful disposition.

 Dieter Borsche is a blind Reverend who runs a soup kitchen for blind down and outs. Or is he?

 Karin Baal is a young girl who reads Braille and helps Scotland Yard by going undercover in Borsche’s church community.

 Franz Schaftheitlin introduces the character of Scotland Yard’s Sir John who was subsequently played by a couple of different actors until finally finding his quintessential interpretation with Siegfried Schürenberg from Die Tür mit den 7 Schlössern/The Door With Seven Locks (1962) on.

 The film’s most memorable part, however, is cast with Ady Berber. His Blind Jack, a big, blind brute of a man, is the kind of iconic role that would otherwise have been cast with Tor Johnson or Milton Reid and like these two he also was a professional wrestler before going into films. His hulking, threatening presence is emphasised by the fact that he never seems to utter a word and just looms quietly. His massive, hairy hands that he uses to choke his victims are genuinely frightening. When we finally hear him talk, he begs for his life in incomplete baby-ish kind of German, just to emphasise the childlike mind set that is hidden behind his murderous persona.

  Dead Eyes of London is a relatively violent Wallace production for its time. We see a torture chamber complete with specially designed drowning tanks and attacks by Bunsen burner. We also have smoky gambling joints, a happy hooker with strong Eastern European accent, a death through an elevator shaft, a TV set that shoots bullets and a skull that doubles as a cigarette dispenser.

 This is the first Wallace Krimi that presents the title sequence blood red on top of the otherwise black and white images - a gimmick that was soon copied by other Krimis outside the Rialto series - and is overall one of the best of the early Wallace series.

  Dead Eyes of London was previously filmed in 1939 with Bela Lugosi and Rialto themselves subsequently made an unofficial remake of sorts with Der Gorilla von Soho/Gorilla Gang in 1968 again directed by Vohrer.