Der Arzt von St Pauli/Females for Hire (1968) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 3)

Continued from Part 2

Der Arzt von St Pauli/Females for Hire (1968) came out the year after Nacht. (In English the title translates as “The Doctor from St. Pauli”.) 

Those yearly releases would become the norm for Olsen’s St Pauli movies though he occasionally also managed to shoot some comedies in between. 

This is the first of those films starring Curd Jürgens. 

 The ployglot jet-setter was one of Germany’s only genuine international stars. 

The German press widely reported that during the filming of Et Dieu… créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), Brigitte Bardot had described him as “der normannische Kleiderschrank” (“armoire normande”), the Norman wardrobe. It’s a nickname that stuck and even made it into his autobiography even though I have yet to find an interview with BB in which she used that expression.

Apocryphal or not, it is a succinct description that acknowledges the ironic contrast between his bulk (1.92m with massive bulk and shoulders) and his cultivated, cosmopolitan demeanour. 

 Privately, his life was marked by excess and restlessness: multiple marriages, heavy drinking, health crises, and a reputation for living as grandly and recklessly as many of his screen characters. 

At the time of the St Pauli films, he was still nearly a decade away from his late career highlight as Bond-villain Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and stood at a career crossroads. 

Still massively popular in Germany, he had visibly aged (though he was never really young looking) and grown somewhat heavier, a fact that the St Pauli films acknowledge as they invariably cast him as a kind of compromised patriarch, a paternal but often ambiguous figure that stands between order and chaos. 

In Arzt Curd Jürgens plays an ex-convict/sailor turned doctor in St. Pauli in Hamburg. 

 He has an estranged brother (Horst Naumann), also a doctor, though more successful and involved in some shady dealings: He performs illegal abortions and helps to organise sex parties for his influential friends. 

When one of the female party guests threatens to expose those by publishing photos secretly taken there, the situation escalates when Hamburg’s High Society does not shy away from murder in order to mask their hidden perversions. 

The film contains: Sex parties, prostitution, botched abortions, nudity, “arty” dance performances, gynaecological exhibitions, blackmail, murder, fights, stag films, rape and date rape drugs, biker gangs, shootouts und torture scenes… and old bourgeois guys with young girls. (Did I forget anything?) 

Chances are that the average audience at the time consisted of exactly those types of old bourgeois guys as depicted in this production and Olsen was happy to give them a chance to indulge in some dirty fantasies while at the same time being able to condemn them by tut-tutting the amorality of the seedy side of St Pauli’s nightlife. 

 This is a film that is very much of its time - and only of its time! - and hard to imagine nowadays; at once somewhat sleazy and trashy, while also upholding traditional family values. 

It’s a Cain and Abel drama masking behind a Krimi framework. 

When a sailor (Fritz Wepper) asks Jürgens’ doctor for help locating his missing girl who had gone astray (Christina Rücker), he of course also gets some additional emotional support from a sympathetic priest (played by Dieter Borsche who genuinely is one of German Cult Cinema’s crown princes). 

Heinz Reincke for the first time plays Curd Jürgens’ down to Earth buddy, a part he would continue to play in subsequent films of this series. 

Al Adamson saw enough commercial value in this production that he released the film in the States ten years later in 1978 under the title Bedroom Stewardesses, recut and with some additional new footage to fit more in line with his other Stewardess films. 

 To be continued in Part 4

Wenn es Nacht wird auf der Reeperbahn/When Night Falls on the Reeperbahn (1967) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 2)

Continued from Part 1 

 Wenn es Nacht wird auf der Reeperbahn/When Night Falls on the Reeperbahn (1967, also known as Uneasy Summer) is Rolf Olsen’s first St Pauli film and his first exploitation film shot in colour. As a result it lacks some of the grittiness associated with his earlier black and white productions. 

 When a female high school student stumbles home from a party in a state of shock with the clothes half torn off her body, she gets driven over and accidentally killed by a hit and run driver. The subsequent investigations reveal that she had taken LSD. 

Danny Sonntag (Erik Schumann), a journalist covering the drug scene in Hamburg, gradually discovers that it’s run by a gang of spoilt rich kids from good homes who use the drug trade to get their kicks. They also use LSD to make young girls willing to feature in porn and also rent them out to some of the city’s most well respected businessmen. 

In contrast to his subsequent St Pauli films, this production does not yet star Curd Jürgens. It is also noticeably more action-driven than the following films that, though not devoid of action, frequently have a more melodramatic focus. 

Instead Nacht stars Erik Schumann… though “starring” is probably a weak choice of words as the plot steers clear of a single traditional hero figure and instead at various times focuses on a range of different characters: the journalist, law enforcement, different (often juvenile) members of the underworld or female high school students (clearly played by young adults). 

Schumann is, however, also the off screen narrator who gives the movie a semi-documentarian panache to its controversial topic. And Schumann, at least for yours truly, is ultimately THE main discovery of this film. 

I’ve always been somewhat aware of this actor without taking too much notice but it is through his involvement in some of the Olsen films that I started to become a fan. Though reasonably well known he never really hit the levels of stardom he would have deserved. Incredibly talented and oozing charisma, he was equally able to play romantic leads, comedic roles, heroes and villains. It’s just a pity that he never played in an Edgar Wallace film. 

For Olsen we had already met him playing delightful sleazeballs but here we have him as a bona fide proto-Dirty Harry action figure who in the course of his journalistic work can fight rough and hard but also is not afraid to take a beating and walk around with his face smashed in. 

Indeed, whatever else you may think of Olsen as a director, if there is one thing he deserves credit for, it is for creating a personal stock company of actors, either younger up and coming ones before they became truly popular or older talent who never quite hit the genuine big time. 

These performers were not interchangeable faces but carried clearly defined functions within his St. Pauli and Reeperbahn films. 

In Nacht we first meet Heinz Reincke, a popular local actor, who would become Curd Jürgens’ regular down to Earth buddy. In this film his character is still somewhat morally ambiguous given that he plays a pimp and a blackmailer who is not averse to using knuckle dusters but in the finale he clearly takes sides with Danny Sonntag and helps rid the area of the criminal scourge. 

In the St Pauli series taken as a whole, Reincke would ultimately embody nothing but the spirit of St Pauli itself. He’d play sailors, barkeepers, locals, men who belong to the district rather than rule it. In the German versions his voice has a strongly regional dialect. His characters would have an earthy realism and street level authenticity. He is the Everyman the hero can always count on. And he’d always be up for a drink or a joke. 

A young Fritz Wepper features as a volatile and unstable youth, someone who has not quite found the right path in life but is not beyond redemption and can turn to become an upstanding member of society once he learns the errors of his ways. 

In Nacht, Wepper plays a member of the gang and the one responsible for creating the LSD (seemingly with the help of a simple chemistry set). Traumatised by some of what’s been happening, he goes on a rampage and turns against his former buddies but may find salvation with the help of his young kid-sister.

 Konrad Georg had previously played German TV’s Kommissar Freytag, one of the country’s first serial TV investigators. When he shows up in an Olsen production, he invariably represents the fading official, police commissioners or inspectors, men who technically have power but lack real leverage in St Pauli.

Now that is all very interesting but tell me about the trash elements we can expect, Holger…. 

Glad you asked…. 

We literally have a melange of sex, drugs and violence. 

The film features nudity and brutal torture. One girl gets her face cut up with a knife and some of the gang members are clearly on the psychopathic side. There’s female mud wrestling and abuses of power on various levels. Girls get corrupted and driven into suicide. A father pays for sex with his son’s girlfriend.

 One particular party scene, shot with aggressive lighting effects, colour filters, and disorienting edits, also revels in showing close ups of lustily leering sweating older men’s faces on top of beautiful young girls. 

Throughout the whole film, it is made clear that the real threat to society does not lie with individual villains but in compromised systems. Crime is not an external threat to social order but instead it is woven into everyday life and not just supported but also ultimately created by pandering to the whims and demands of the upper classes and their bored and emotionally weak and immoral offspring. 

Oh, and though I am fairly certain that David Lynch never saw this film, I am equally convinced he took the snakeskin jacket worn by Feuer-Hotte (Jürgen Draeger), the gang’s dapper but devious leader, as inspiration for Nicolas Cage’s fashion choices in Wild at Heart. 

 To be continued in Part 3

Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films (Part 1)

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. 

A Typeface named "Edgar" aka: Art in the Blood

I came across this article today that celebrated a new typeface called “Edgar”. It was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones (*August 28, 1970) and named after Edgar Wallace who happens to be Frere-Jones’ great-grandfather. 

I did a double take when I read this as so far I had only considered Bryan Edgar Wallace and Penelope Wallace when it comes to Wallace offspring that left a creative mark. 

To my shame I must admit that I had never heard of Tobias Frere-Jones who just happens to be one of most influential contemporary type designers and amongst other achievements had also created the “Gotham” typeface that was famously used by Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. 

Tobias’ brother is Sasha Frere-Jones (*1967), a music critic and essayist, best known for his long tenure at The New Yorker (2004–2015), where he wrote about pop, hip-hop, and indie music with a mix of cultural theory and personal reflection. (And yes, he too was a cultural black spot for me until now.) 

So then I started digging a little deeper and fell into a little genealogical rabbit hole… 

Their parents were Robin Carpenter Jones (April 01, 1933-March 7, 1997), an American writer for adverting agencies, and Elizabeth Frere who had moved from England to Brooklyn. 

Elizabeth Frere was the daughter of Alexander Stuart Frere-Reeves (November 23, 1892 – October 03, 1984). He was a highly influential English publisher who had been responsible for looking after the likes of Noel Coward and Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe and…. way too many other famous writers of the time. In 1939 he legally dropped the “Reeves” part of his surname. 

In 1927 Stuart Frere married Patricia Marion Caldecott Wallace (September, 07, 1907 –September 1995), a journalist and Edgar Wallace’s daughter from his first marriage to Ivy Maude Caldecott, which makes Patricia Bryan Edgar’s younger sister and Penelope’s half sister. 

Apart from Elizabeth they also had two sons: Alexander and Vice Admiral Sir Richard Tobias Frere KCB (June 04, 1938 – March 05, 2020) who had a distinguished naval career and served as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic in NATO, yet another illustrious descendant! 

Below a summary, of Edgar Wallace’s children and the Frere lineage in particular.

Please let me know if there are any corrections I need to make to this tree as at this stage my eyes are getting blurry from the dates and connections. 

Given how much of a focus we (read: I) usually place on Bryan Edgar and Penelope Wallace, it is refreshing to see just how successful the descendants of Wallace’s other child, daughter Patricia, had actually become. 

Super curious now to see if this tree cannot be expanded further in the future.

Louis Weinert-Wilton Book Covers

 

After having so far covered three of the four Louis Weinert-Wilton Krimis (and aiming to fill the last remaining gap shortly), I have started getting a bit more curious about him as an author.

None of his books have ever been translated into English but these are the eleven crime novels he wrote:

Die weiße Spinne ("The White Spider", 1929

Teppich des Grauens ("Carpet of Fear", 1929)

Die Panther ("The Panthers", 1930)

Die Königin der Nacht ("The Queen of the Night", 1930)

Der Drudenfuß ("The Druid's Foot", 1931)

Der betende Baum ("The Praying Tree", 1932)

Licht vom Strom ("Light from the Stream", 1933)

Der schwarze Meilenstein ("The Black Milestone", 1935)

Die chinesische Nelke ("The Chinese Carnation", 1936)

Spuk am See ("Haunting at the Lake", 1938)

Der Skorpion ("The Scorpion", 1939)

Most if not all of his books are currently available in Germany but I was curious about seeing some older book covers. Here are a choice that Google has offered me. Note that I have yet to find covers for some of his books, an indication that he is indeed an author who has somewhat fallen into obscurity but I am planning to change that a bit over time.

Also note that by and large these are covers from the iconic series of red Goldmann Krimi paperbacks published from the 1950s on and not from first editions.

Exciting upcoming projects

 The experimental issue of Krimi! 0 that Boris Brosowski and I created in record time last year was a resounding success. We got great feedback and sold way more than we had initially anticipated.

So next up: The official premiere issue that will come out at the end of this month.

That issue will have around 200 pages with a smaller font than the Number 0 so is chockfull with very in depth research: Check out the overview that Boris provided.

I personally provided about 35 pages for it, including a piece that I am super proud of: a biographical overview of writer Ladislas Fodor.

Up until now close to nothing was known about Fodor's life but with this piece we will now have a very solid basis for future research. It's no exaggeration to say that this will for quite a while remain the most complete biography about him available!

Krimi! 1 will be out on September 30 on Amazon and only available on print (again both soft- and hardcover). Unfortunately pre-orders are not possible for this one so keep your eyes peeled (and if I don't forget I will update this post with a link to it when it's out.

Das Geheimnis der schwarzen Witwe/The Secret of the Black Widow (1963)

A number of London business- and newspapermen get killed by poison via an airgun that propels an artificial Black Widow spider. What those men all have in common is that they were all members of an expedition to Mexico that brought them riches but also united them over a dark secret. Reporter Wellby (O.W. Fischer) tries to solve the killings… much to the annoyance of his boss (Werner Peters) who was also a member of that expedition. 

 Das Geheimnis der schwarzen Witwe/The Secret of the Black Widow (1963) is the third of four Louis Weinert-Wilton adaptations that were shot with various different production companies. 

Black Widow is again a Spanish co-production by International Germania Film and based on Weinert-Wilton’s novel Die Königin der Nacht (tr. “The Queen of the Night”, 1930). 

The film follows the plot in broad strokes with one notable difference: The murders aren’t committed by a mysterious killer with an airgun shooting fake black widows carrying real poison - highly cinematic though also very impractical in real life - but by a female killer calling herself the “Queen of the Night” through a similarly puzzling killing method. 

In the book the victims also don’t receive missives that tell them to “Talk or Die!”. Instead they get lyrically whispered alerts that “the Queen of the Night from the Fountain of the Seven Palm Trees will wait to the day until the moon enters into its last quarter” that serve as warnings of impending doom. 

Book and film also differ in that characters often get redefined. 

Karin Dor’s character in Black Widow is… yet another typical Karin Dor character: the beautiful heroine who works in an antique shop for one of the potential victims and falls in love with the hero. 

In the novel Clarisse is a colleague of Wellby, a female wallflower who walks hunched over, does nothing to appeal to any of the male characters and on one side of her face is even disfigured by a large birthmark making her downright ugly from that angle. From the other angle, as the novel describes it, she may, however, appear as beautiful. 

Klaus Kinski’s character Boyd also does what Kinski does best. He stands threateningly in the background smiling maliciously while also on occasion helping Wellby out of a conundrum. 

 In the book Boyd is an elderly gentleman with a passion for fly fishing who even gave up a promising career in pursuit of his hobby. 

O.W. Fischer, the film’s lead, is a breath of fresh air for the Krimi genre. 

Austrian actor Fischer was one of the highest paid German language film stars in the 1950s next to Curd Jürgens. Black Widow would become his only classic Krimi and one of his final films. Even though he still occasionally appeared on German television, he effectively decided to retire at the height of his fame. 

His most famous parts were Bavarian King Ludwig II and the infamous clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen, two troubled and eccentric real life characters. 

And troubled and eccentric he is also in Black Widow… albeit in a very entertaining way. 

His Wellby is constantly besozzled, slovenly dressed, prone to grandiose gestures and hiding his intelligent reporter’s instincts behind a facade of befuddlement that would make a Columbo proud. Somewhat a coward and clearly not a fighter, if he lands a punch it is by pure luck. He lives on a house boat and at the start of the film is even seen wearing a Van Dyke beard! 

Eddi Arent plays an archivist who helps Welby uncover some crucial information, absolutely incorruptible … unless he is offered the right amount of money for his services. 

Werner Peters is the director of the newspaper, for all appearances on a power trip but in reality way over his head and in deep trouble. He can neither manage Wellby, nor the other members of the expedition nor indeed his wife (played by Doris Kirchner), who quietly sits amongst the group of powerful men and on occasion contributes a wise throwaway remark that always calms the waters. 

Kirchner in real life was married to director Franz Josef Gottlieb and had previously also appeared in his CCC Wallace Der Fluch der gelben Schlange/The Curse of the Yellow Snake (1963). 

It is all those German actors that mainly make this an enjoyable watch. The Spanish actors in comparison aren’t given that much chance to shine. 

The direction itself is workmanlike but not overly exciting. We do get a few interesting camera angles here or there but for the most part the production just plods along. 

Visually the most stunning part is a nightclub scene in which chanteuse Belina sings a song (music by Martin Böttcher, lyrics by Ute Just and F.J. Gottlieb) that perfectly reflects the film’s mystery. That performance is full of mirrored reflections, shadow work and closeups to hypnotically staring eyes. 

All in all, this is one production that - in line with the other three Louis Weinert-Wilton films - may not reach the heights of the Rialto Edgar Wallace series but is enjoyable enough that it is worthy of a proper rediscovery. 

AVAILABILITY 

Coming at no surprise for anyone reading this blog, Black Widow is easily available in Germany on DVD and Blu-ray though not in an English friendly version. 

The German version of the film with English subs can be viewed on YouTube. 

YouTube also has the English dub of the film, albeit in a horrendously looking upload.