Proud as punch that I got my first article into SENSATIONAL SIXTIES #10.
My contribution focuses on the five Dr Mabuse movies of the 1960s not directed by Fritz Lang.
The magazine is a beauty and looking at the contents I find myself in the illustrious company of the likes of Kim Newman, Bruce G. Hallenbeck and Rachael Nisbet.
The magazine can be ordered via Hemlock Books.
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.
Say Count Regula three times fast and see what that sounds like…..
Sumptuously filmed with stunning set design this is a gorgeous looking production reuniting director Harald Reinl again with his wife Karin Dor. It is one of only a very few German horror productions from the 1960s.
Pilfered from a number of different classic tropes (Dracula, Edgar Allan Poe, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday to name but a few), this production was aimed at a family audience and as such is more a Fantasy Adventure film rather than an outright horror movie, bearing certain similarities in style with Reinl’s own Karl May movies and the Gothic elements of the Wallace films.
Christopher Lee and Lex Barker provide the international star power and are aided by a number of excellent German performers, most notably Carl Lange as Count Regula’s creepy trusted servant. Lange can also be seen in Der Frosch mit der Maske/Fellowship of the Frog (1959), Der Hexer/The Ringer (1964) and Die blaue Hand/Creature with the Blue Hand (1967).
