Murder Most Stylish - Avant Garde Angles In German Krimi Films

 

It isn’t a subgenre of cinema with household name recognition or Tarantino-plagiarism-fanboy-adoration, but the crime thrillers — or krimis — produced by German film studios like Rialto, CCC and Constantin from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, provided a lot of cinematic style markers for other, more popular genre film staples to come. Yes they themselves borrowed from film noir and horror films that came before them, but repurposed those tropes with a heightened brutality and arguably, a sense of visual weirdness that makes even some of the more pedestrian entries cinematically captivating.

For whatever reason, as Germany tried to move out from the grim shadows of the second World War, their movie-going public flocked to envelope themselves in other, pulpier ones. Perhaps that‘s an adept reflection of the public consciousness at the time: the desire to forget paired with the inability to shake the horror. And if you can’t shake the horror, perhaps the next best thing is dressing it up as something ridiculous that can be thwarted by a surrogate sense of justice (often but not always portrayed by Joachim Fuchberger) within a 90 minute running time. Many, but not all of the films are based on the fiction of authors Edgar Wallace – the prolific English author who wrote the first draft of the screenplay for Willis O’Brien’s King Kong, and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. If you’ve read any Edgar Wallace, you know his stories are generally highly convoluted crime thrillers which, honestly, can be light on the thrill quotient. I can say this as someone with a fair amount of Wallace on my bookshelves. Why did Wallace strike such a chord in 1960s Germany? Did setting the films in England simply broaden their export appeal, or was there some other reason? Like Dennis Wheatley’s resurgence in Flower Power-generation London, it causes one to scratch at the noggin, but I’m sure there were multiple converging factors. And as the ‘60s progressed and the films continued to be churned out, the surname Wallace went from being a byline to a concept at some point, as Edgar Wallace became a brand that films not even based on his works would have tacked on by producers as a selling point.

American lobby card for The Phantom Of Soho (1964), an image I
first saw in the book "A Pictorial History Of Horror Movies", by Denis Gifford.

For the unfamiliar, Krimi films, in short, are usually whodunnit-style murder mysteries with some unknown serial killer, usually with an unusual supervillain-like name such as The Frog, The Tortoise, The Phantom, The Hexer, The Avenger, etcetera, accruing a hefty body count, sometimes by some bizarre or arcane method, sometimes not, while either a detective inspector from Scotland Yard, or some wealthy playboy who fancies himself a detective, races against time to unmask and apprehend them. When I say mask, I mean that literally, since the baddies in these pictures generally dress more like they’re going to square off with the Fantastic Four, than some nondescript police inspector. This isn’t a new conceit by any measure, since Old Dark House cheapy thrillers (The Old Dark House and The Cat And The Canary perhaps being the most popular examples) and mysterious-killer-on-the-loose serials from the 1930s, inspired by masked euro-criminals like Fantomas, some even based on Edgar Wallace novels, like The Green Archer, already had that template established.

Plot-wise, many of the films fall somewhere between Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and William Dozier’s Batman. That sounds absurd but I assure you it is accurate. The films are generally set either in a moody London—full of sleazy waterfront dives, shifty secret societies whose ranks are largely populated by the upper echelons of nobility, smokey strip clubs and sketchy boarding houses, or some sequestered country estate—largely gone to Gothic ruins but haunted by some murderous specter who seems to be looking for something and willing to kill anyone who stumbles into his path.

Another costumed baddie, with the somewhat unthreatening
appelation of The Frog, from The Fellowship Of The Frog (1959).

I was first made aware of these movies in the 1990s, when I started to receive Sinister Cinema and Something Weird catalogs in the mail. Why, I’ve never known. Perhaps they purloined order lists containing the names of people who’d held subscriptions to MAD Magazine and Conan The Adventurer comics. Maybe there was something in the ether that just told them that I snagged the TV Guide when it arrived in the mail each week and sifted through the nonsense to look for anything that mentioned Boris Karloff or Vincent Price, any old science-fiction or monster movie that might be lurking in the otherwise banal programming schedule.

When I first got my hands on these sensational titles from these oddball German directors, with names like The Mad Executioners, The Phantom Of Soho, The Strangler Of Blackmoor Castle, I was taken aback by the oddball German expressionist set dressing, the blunt-for-its-time gore, the often amazing soundtracks accompanying them and, most importantly, the whole reason I’m bothering to type this already long-winded diatribe, the seemingly random and unconventional camera angles and perspectives used.

The stunning Karin Dor, a fixture of many of the Wallace krimi fims,
at the mercy of The Strangler Of Blackmoor Castle (1963). Dor
would go on to be a Bond girl, albeit one fed to piranhas in the
questionable You Only Live Twice (1967).

Now isn’t the time to go into the amazing early electronic soundtrack Oskar Sala created for The Strangler Of Blackmoor Castle, or the amazing mod-jazz grooves that composers like Nora Orlandi, Martin Böttcher and Peter Thomas made for many of the others, but I would like to spend a little time praising the off the wall visual perspective used in these films.

There I was, sitting through an honestly somewhat plodding remake of The Dead Eyes Of London (1961), starring Klaus Kinski and Joachim Fuschberger. A soon-to-be dead character goes to his bathroom to brush his teeth. Not much to get excited about, but BAM, out of nowhere, as the victim-in-question goes to spritz his mouth with mouthwash, we’re treated to a mouth’s-eye view of the task! Hold on, what? Where the hell did that come from? Same thing with a scene near the end of Der Hexer (1964), a movie that already has mini submersibles, secret passages, scantily clad frauleins and a mysterious assassin. Our main villain goes to make another of several phone calls in the film, when all of the sudden we’re treated to a perspective shot from inside the dial on the rotary phone.

A glimpse inside a soon-to-be victim's mouth, in The Dead Eyes
Of London (1961).

Honestly it’s this sense of visual quirkiness as much as the odd pulp fiction flamboyancy, that kept me trying to get my mitts on these titles to see what oddball art direction or photography choice would pop up.

A phone's eye view of the villain from Der Hexer, (1964)

Obviously these krimi films aren’t the only pictures to have ever used atypical perspective like this, but I’ve yet to see any that others which did, that used it so effectively. Like I said, outside of niche film enthusiasts or 1960s Late Late Show devotees (where many Americans might have seen these pictures in dubbed form), these types of movies are largely forgotten. But their thumbprint is definitely on the secret agent/spy films they shared the box office with (both in content and soundtrack), the stylish Italian giallo films that came shortly after (I find it hard to believe some of these German directors like Alfred Vohrer weren’t taking style notes from Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti, and vice-versa), and even American slasher films of the 1980s.

The skull-faced killer in 1968's The Hand Of Power uses a 
scoprion-shaped ring with retractable tail dipped in poison as his
weapon of choice.

Many of these titles are available in dubbed form on a number of streaming services, some have been released in remastered form on DVD, primarily for the German market. Dubbed 16mm prints are available still through Sinister Cinema. 

Whoʼs To Say

 

Maybe youʼll find a time where it seems you donʼt seem to weigh on your
partnerʼs mind – Or so it seems
As anything more than a weight to help keep the
Mattress held down overnight
So it doesnʼt randomly ascend into the
Bedroom ceiling fan light
Which hasnʼt worked the way it should for say
the last twelve years anyway
No breeze cut your way

 Oh , whoʼs to say? 

Maybe youʼll be sittinʼ down
With the holidays coming ‘round
And your head switched off
‘Cause it feels like a tired old little town
Where nothing new is kicking around
All the new ideas moving on once theyʼve found
Nothing there but stifling air and
ugly old notions anyhow
And reaching for a snow globe
Maybe you might find yourself gasping
When you identify with the lonesome figure
In the bubble in your grasp and
All alone in the center of a blizzard
Of wet debris
Are there parallels there to square or just a
maudlin fantasy
 
Oh, who’s to say?
 
Perhaps someday maybe
You might tune into a sign
While slowly milling forward in some
Grocery store check out line
That with maybe one baby step more forward
You could breach the ceiling into the sky

In one spectacular display of top-blowing

And the clerk wouldnʼt miss a step just

Repeat cash, charge or check? 

While the roof debris rains down

Someone will say “Who was that clown?”

And the crowd might all just laugh and go

On about their way

But rest assured though gone youʼll probably

Be haunting their jokes for days 

Oh, whoʼs to say?

A Deeper Misunderstanding

 

Pieces of pinecone at the back of a dresser drawer

Amidst loose coils of socks that don’t fit or lost their match

There’s a sound sewn into the breeze from the dark outside the window

Like the echo of a dog bark broadcast over the radio

It ain’t nostalgia

It isn’t naïve idealist meandering juxtaposed

Against the harsher grit of test result truth

Just a feeling that floats in every so often, on its own

Schedule down its tried familiar route

Like a somewhere’s summer something days’ parade.

 

The way that clouds smudge the moonglow

Create black paper cutout shapes of all the trees

-- the way the afternoon sun polishes

The brown-green glass of the river

Until it shines and hurts the eyes if you catch the glint directly

Like halogens off of beer bottles

Or a memory that just woke up.

Flickers of wonder we absorb in the

Spare seconds of life

In spite of the sound of the clock

Ticking down the seconds we no longer

Have left.

 

All over town, beyond and throughout

From village to city

Brownstones bearing worn out reflections

Of the other ones across the street

Streets of houses haunted by the

Specters of past presences

Entire histories of human beings reduced

To echoes in time and dust-flocked

Fingerprints on Goodwill shelf clutter.

 

Driveway to driveway there’s a distance in the air

A space not defined by the volume of ozone

But by bones discovered that nobody

Buried there

Mystery skeletons strewn between mailboxes

So folks get busy and obsessed piecing

Together a creature they never knew

Drunk on nostalgia juxtaposed against

The harsher grit of bank account balance truth

Something you can’t see right

Permanently out of focus like an electric dark blue light

It opens us all up to a deeper misunderstanding.

Stormfront, U.S.A.

 

House is quiet

Trees are still

Tall grass standing frozen as if

Trying not to draw the notice of a swaggering mower

Sound like a stone quarry off towards town

— A storm is percolating in the west.

 

The de-icer blue sky decays

A clotted gray-green, thick fungi on the afternoon

The smell of dirt in the air

A humid held breath;

No lodge prattle

No song of insects, susurration of frogs

or gospel choir of birds

The quick stink of burnt ozone

and a shockshow of lightning rattles through

flexing flash with a warning to nature:

“You aren’t tough enough to deflect, we’re here

Under the highest authority.”

 

The first fistful of droplets on the eaves

A herald to the blitz

Suddenly silence followed by a

Tornado wind and

The clouds purge, liquifying the landscape

Shattering trees and ravaging all they're expected

To nourish

As if every angel in someone’s heaven

Were power-pissing from the other side of

The gloom in a contest

To see who could cause the most irreparable damage

For the sake of getting away with it while cackling

 

And they’ve succeeded in breaking up all

The driveway basketball games, leaving

Swing sets only to be ridden by the bullyish wind

And as the town gets battered down

Folks are cloistered in cellars and sitting rooms with

Discomfited stares and

Crackle-clutter radios

Keeping away from the windows and

Wondering aloud how friends and neighbors

Might be faring as if someone in the room

Were in on the show and knew how it would

All play out

But mostly talking to cover the thought

Looping beneath their hats and hairdos –

“Will I live to see this end, and if so,

Will there be anything worth rebuilding when it does?”