Die Nylonschlinge/Nylon Noose (1963)

When a Scotland Yard detective gets killed with a nylon noose in a seedy nightclub after incorporating the victim of a blackmail attempt, the few hints point to a shareholder meeting of an oil consortium in Elford Manor. Inspektor Harvey (Dietmar Schönherr) goes to investigate and soon discovers that one by one all the share holders receive blackmail notices and anyone not paying up is faced with the same gruesome death. 

 There's something to be said about journeyman directors, directors who never really truly shine but keep showing up and regularly produce watchable fare. 

 I generally have nothing but the greatest respect for those cinematic work horses. The downside, however, is that this type of director tends to rise and fall with the material and supporting talent that is given to them. 

A true master may elevate average stories into something magnificent and even hide tremendous plot holes from the viewer. 

A hack on the other hand highlights all those faults and amplifies them to the nth degree and thereby may come up with some involuntary entertaining results. 

A journeyman? Well, they just plod along in that case and neither properly thrill nor entertain. 

Rudolf Zehetgruber is exactly one such director. 

In the two years of 1963/64 he shot a handful of standalone Krimis before directing two Kommissar X and other action movies and finally finding his calling in a series of Herbie clones about a VW superbug called Dudu in which he also played the leading role, a character called Jimmy Bondi. 

Two of his films I have reviewed on this blog - Die schwarze Kobra/The Black Cobra (1963) and Piccadilly Null Uhr Zwölf (1963) - and the overall impression for me was mainly a very decided "Meh!"

 Die Nylonschlinge/Nylon Noose (1963) in all its averageness is probably the best of the lot as it does successfully incorporate some of the much loved tropes like secret passageways, catacombs and eccentric scientists. 

 Nylon Noose is a standalone Krimi and not based on any novel. 

 Produced by Erwin C. Dietrich, who in the 1970s would be in charge of a range of German sex comedies, it’s fairly statically filmed with only two actors more widely known for an International Krimi audience: Dietmar Schönherr and Ady Berber. 

Dietmar Schönherr (Das Ungeheuer von London City/The Monster of London City) carries off the role of the charming Inspector well. 

 And Ady Berber’s already imposing features are further disfigured by having his face covered in gruesome scars from an accident. His character is told to always stay out off sight from all the guests in the manor so as not to frighten them which explains why he is always seen lurking about in the catacombs or climbing up the outside walls as opposed to just enter the place through the front door. Ultimately he is, however, more of a gentle giant type with a heart of gold. 

Individually there is a lot to be enjoyed in this production: We have an eccentric professor type (Gustav Kloster) who experiments on mummies for the secret to a prolonged life. We got creepy underground passageways and a bit more skin on show than normal for a film of its time. It is indeed the actresses that mainly remain in the viewers' memory: 

Helga Sommerfeld (who can also be spotted in the two Bryan Edgar Wallace Krimis Das Geheimnis der schwarzen Koffer/The Secret of the Black Trunk (1962) and Das Phantom von Soho/The Phantom of Soho (1964)) is the main female lead and love interest for Dietmar Schönherr’s character and one wishes she’d have more often been placed in prominent roles in those films. 

Real life dancing sensation Laya Raki brings an exotic touch to the story by… playing an exotic dancer. Whenever the lights quickly go off during her performance, either money changes hands or someone gets killed, though it is never quite clear a) why the nightclub doesn’t get closed down with such a death count at this very moment and b) why from all the places in good ol’ foggy London Town it is this sleazy establishment that gets chosen all the time for this transaction. (Well, there are some possible hints about this towards the end but I’ll be damned if I understood them.) 

And finally we have a wonderfully scheming pair of mother (Hedda Ippen) and daughter (Chris Van Loosen). The younger of the two even has no compunction about going after her mother’s Beau (Kurt Beck) who at one stage is being described as young, handsome and ruthless when to my mind he came across as middle-aged, bland and out of his wit. 

The soundtrack is also of interest as it combines traditional swinging Krimi tunes with experimental sound effects. 

So, it all sounds great. 

 And yet as a whole the film doesn’t really quite blend it all together all that well. Various of the narrative strands have little to nothing to do with the case and its solution which is indeed ultimately more than mundane and in contrast to some of the set pieces. 

The direction is quite flat and lifeless and at times it feels as if they’re just ticking off a check list of motions to go through. We even have a bowler hatted comic relief (Denys Seiler) who actually really does nothing remotely funny and for the most part plays everything straight. 

The remaining group of male supporting characters are all united in just being presented as being a very unpleasant bunch one and all that as a viewer one can’t ever hope that any one of them will remain alive. In one particularly head scratching and icky moment the uncle of Sommerfeld’s character (Gustav Knuth) is clearly hitting on his own niece which leaves Schönherr’s Inspector to comment that he really can’t blame him. As much as I am enamoured by Sommerfeld myself, I still draw a line at praising incest. 

All in all this is a good but not a great production. 

 Though one of the lesser known Krimis, in contrast to other similar films the English dubbed version of this film is easily available but that cut runs six minutes shorter than the original. 

WATCH IT IN GERMAN

WATCH IT IN ENGLISH

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Piccadilly Null Uhr Zwölf (1963)

When Mike Hilton (Helmut Wildt) gets released from prison after eight years behind bars, he swears revenge on those responsible for it and vows to prove his innocence. He teams up with Jack Bellamy (Hanns Lothar), the policeman responsible for his capture at the time, who has now become an alcoholic and left the service. Hilton learns that his previous landlady has since passed away but in no time at all starts flirting with her niece (Ann Smyrner). Bellamy on the other hand gets financial assistance from his lover Della (Marlene Warrlich), a happy hooker with a heart of gold who gets killed by her pimp Lee Costello (Karl Lieffen) when she wants to leave the business. 

Hilton’s former lawyer Sir Reginald Cunningham (Pinkas Braun) and the sadistic albino “Whitey” Skipper (Klaus Kinski) play a crucial role in Hilton’s thirst for revenge. 

And then we also have a large inheritance, a client suffering a heart attack while visiting a callgirl, some dodgy mask play and a few confusing narrative strands more. 

 A German Noir…. kind of 

 Francis Durbridge (1912-1998) was for German TV what Edgar Wallace was to the cinema. 

Wallace’s Krimis were incredibly successful at the box office but also saw a few less impressive TV adaptations at the time. And where Durbridge had resounding success on German TV screens, his oeuvre also inspired a lesser known German cinematic feature film. 

Durbridge was one of the prime source authors for a series of incredibly popular TV mini series that were widely known as “Strassenfeger”, i.e. “street sweepers”, productions that when they were broadcast quite literally emptied the streets as practically everyone with a television set ended up watching it. 

The most famous as well as notorious of those was Das Halstuch (1962), starring past and future Wallace veterans like Heinz Drache, Dieter Borsche, Horst Tapper, Albert Lieven and Margot Trooger, and based on Durbridge’s novel The Scarf. 

 This series was involved in a famous scandal when just the day before its eagerly anticipated final episode, comedian Wolfgang Neuss posted a large size newspaper advert in which he revealed the identity of the main culprit, a stunt that shook up the nation and resulted in him getting death threats and being branded a traitor to the country by the yellow press. 

 Though some sources claim that Piccadilly Null Uhr Zwölf (1963, translation: “Piccadilly, Zero Hour 12”) was based on a novel or story by Durbridge called 12 Past 12, nothing under that title seems to exist and, similarly to the Bryan Edgar Wallace series, only the name of the author was employed to drum up interest in this production. The closest Durbridge came to being involved in this film was a discussion in London with producer Eberhard Meichsner at the height of the Profumo affair in which the two of them were throwing around some story ideas for a possible movie. 

Piccadilly Null Uhr Zwölf is in many ways an anti-Wallace. 

 Rather than focus on outrageously masked super villains, bizarre angles and Gothic moods, this production is much more realistic and in many ways even somewhat Noir with its classic tale of a man seeking revenge in gritty urban streets and its depiction of a policeman haunted by his past and reverting to alcoholism. 

On paper (or: celluloid) this film has so much going for it. It’s very rare e.g, to see one of the leads being financially supported by their escort-girlfriend and then, when she is being threatened, forgetting about their promise to protect her in favour of some more booze in a local bar and thereby carrying some responsibility for her brutal murder. 

And yet there is a total lack of tension. Director Rudolf Zehetgruber proves yet again that even though his main cinematic output at the time were Krimis and thrillers, he missed more than he managed to hit. The film just plots along without a genuine main, central mystery. Despite a variety of narrative threads there is a distinct loss of focus. It never even becomes quite clear what exactly happened eight years prior that led to Hilton’s incarceration and Bellamy’s descent into alcoholism. Indeed everybody and their mother seems to know that Hilton was innocent, so why did he need to spend that much time in prison? 

All the other individual plot elements (the corpse of a man who hasn’t really died, several murders, an inheritance) just get listlessly thrown around and for the most part we never even get to see when yet another character gets killed. Instead, in its one single bit of comic relief we see a young boy (Ilja Richter, later to become presenter of Disco, Germany’s equivalent to Top of the Pops) discovering the bodies floating in the water and meticulously describing their state to a Bobby. 

 Oh, and the boy’s name? Edgar Wallace. (Har har!) 

 Though a lot of the advertisement for this production focussed on Klaus Kinski and Pinkas Braun, the actual lead actors, Helmut Wildt and Hanns Lothar, are virtual unknowns within the Krimi genre and not really able to carry the emotional weight and charisma required for what are essentially tragic and hardboiled roles. Especially Lothar as the alcoholic ex-cop looks genuinely out of his depth and is too dull and chinless to elicit any kind of interest in the viewer. 

As such it is up to Kinski and Braun to instil any kind of interest in the production, a task they aimlessly master as usual. 

Other more familiar faces in supporting roles include Ann Smyrner (The Black Cobra, The Racetrack Murders, Kommissar X: Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick) as a photographer and Hilton’s love interest and Rudolf Fernau (e.g. The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle, The Mad Executioners) as Inspector Craddock as well as Dieter Eppler and Albert Bessler. 

 Needless to say none of the scenes filmed in Berlin looks like anything resembling Piccadilly and the music by Russell Garcia (another person not genuinely associated with this genre) also just tootles along with little impact. 

All in all there probably is a reason why this production never appears to have had an English language release. Kinski and Braun alone make this essential viewing but other than that this production could have been so very promising but ultimately just disappoints.

TRAILER (in German)

FULL FILM (in German)