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.