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. 

The Fresh Lobster 1928

Here is an odd little cinematic short from 1928, titled The Fresh Lobster. It's an insane little celluloid nightmare in the vein of Winsor McCay's absurd cartoon strip Dreams Of The Rarebit Fiend. Only in this novel little short, the trigger for the hallucinatory adventure isn't a dinner of melted cheese on bread, but the late night snack of a plate of lobster and a pickle.

The film was supposedly released in theaters in 1928, then re-released twenty years later in 1948, this time with sound. All sources seem to agree that there isn't much known about the production of this oddity, nor the impetus for its creation; perhaps it was McCay's popular newspaper strip. The cinematographer is listed as Harry Forbes, who has camera credits for a number of shorts between 1915 and 1931, and quickie b-westerns and adventure films in the 1930s, before his passing in 1939. The producers credited in the title card are Harvey Pergament and Max Alexander. Pergament seems to have had a limited career in the industry, if his IMDB credits are indicative of his involvement, as he's only listed with one other producer credit, and that's co-producer of a 1954 UK title about South Africa titled Flame Of Africa. Max Alexander has quite the list of production credits to his name, largely b-grade crime and western pictures throughout the 1930s and 40s. 

The star of this piece is Billie Bletcher, who started in vaudeville and worked his way steadily from 1914 through the early 1970s in silent films, shorts, voicing characters in Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons, 1960s television appearances in shows like Get Smart and Dennis The Menace, and even had a bit part in the 1940 Boris Karloff thriller The Ape.

Enjoy!

The Ultimate Poker Face

Poster for the Sam Katzman produced
The Man Who Turned To Stone, 1957.

Monster movies have always needed new fields to farm regarding the menace of their product. Once you've exhausted all of the most prominent literary ghouls and goblins, stretched their source material threadbare with almost-unrelated sequels and spin-offs; once invaders from beyond the stars or beneath the waves lose their impact; once the vengeful spirits of slain lovers no longer successfully haunt the halls of the local theaters, nor the sound of voodoo drums is able to conjure the beat of feet to the cinema, it's time to look for other sources of box office bank. 

There is plenty of folklore to glean (or culturally appropriate, depending on whom you talk to) in regards to the animation of inanimate objects via possession by wayward souls or demons, or other supernatural means. Cultures the world over have various poppets, dolls and fetish figures, like the Kongolese nkisi figures, that are allegedly vessels–or prisons, depending on the context–for spirits. We've seen these ideas repurposed into everything from the killer Zuni fetish doll from the 1975 television movie Trilogy Of Terror, to the seemingly endless list of possessed doll/mannequin/ventriloquist dummy films from 1945's Dead Of Night, to the bread and butter of Charles Band's Full Moon Features company with their Puppet Master and Demonic Toys franchises. There is also the Golem. Fairly prominent in the pop cultural zeitgeist, Golem is a word that roughly translates from Hebrew to mean "shapeless mass", and in Jewish folklore, has a plethora of permutations based on the context of the usage; but the one we're interested in here is the one regarding a clay figure brought to life via supernatural means to serve its master. Sort of an earthen zombie if you will. 

Paul Wegener as Der Golem.

The concept of the Golem itself was adapted early to the silver screen by director/actor Paul Wegener in 1915 with Der Golem, the first of a trilogy of silent films, followed by Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancing Girl) (1917) and, Die Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into The World) (1920), of which the final film is the only known to exist in a complete and intact version (see it here). The Golem mythos was revisited in 1937's Le Golem directed by Julien Duvivier, and in a French telefilm in 1967; and in between when the American b-movie boom of the mid-1950s came a-calling, it was looked to again for inspiration.

In 1958, Edward L. Cahn (Sam Katzman perennial who directed Creature With The Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau, as well as classics like Invasion Of The Saucer Men and The Four Skulls Of Jonathan Drake) directed Richard Anderson in Curse Of The Faceless Man, (trailer here) about a calcified Pompeiian warrior who comes back to life to reclaim to current reincarnation of his ancient love. More or less a version of Universal's The Mummy (1932), but with the rock-coated corpse of a dead slave in place of a revived Egyptian. A year prior, we had the Sam Katzman-produced The Man Who Turned To Stone (trailer here) about a group of devious doctors who've found a way to prolong their own existence for centuries by draining the vitality out of other humans, which they currently (in regards to the plot) are doing to girls at a reform school. Without rejuvenation, the docs start to petrify and take on a decidedly Zacherley-esque appearance. That same year, moviegoers were also threatened by The Monolith Monsters, (trailer here) a Universal b-picture starring Grant Williams and Lola Albright, in which a small southern California desert town is menaced by water-thirsty space crystals that petrify (literally) anyone who touches them in contact with water.  In 1967 a very Norman Bates-ish Roddy McDowall helped reawaken the Golem mythos with It!, also known as Anger Of The Golem or Curse Of The Golem, in which he awakens The Golem of Prague to do his bidding (trailer here).

The peplum films of the early-to-mid 60s feature plenty of rock men for our oiled up muscle men to battle, like in 1964's Hercules Against The Moon Men and the Mario Bava directed 1961 feature Hercules In The Haunted World.

I suppose the allure of these stone monsters is that they seem invincible, and we the audience are supposed to sit, anxiously watching, wondering how our protagonists are going to defeat something that is impervious to temperature, bullets, fire, wooden stakes, etcetera. When the villain is unfeeling, in every sense of the word, it's akin to trying to defeat Superman; alas, each of the aforementioned creeps have their own Kryptonite which the heroes successfully find, or accidentally stumble into, before the running time is up. 

Nkisi Nkondi (Power Figure), from the collection
of the Brooklyn Museum

The list of similar films is far too long to try and collate a comprehensive list of, and ultimately a pointless task. If you're looking for a good monster made of rock movie, the ones listed above should be a good start. If you're more into possessed killer trees, might I recommend From Hell It Came or the infamous Evil Dead.

If anyone has any favorites of the so-called sub genre, I'd be glad to hear about them.

Even Supes had to deal with malevolent minerals. From The Adventures of
Superman #470, Sept. 1990.

A Night In The Cemetery

One of the amazing things that I've gotten to do over the last few years (this was the fourth, I believe) that falls into the category of "I can't believe I get to experience this!" but somehow had the good fortune to be a part of, is the Trylon Cinema and The Friends of the Cemetery "Cinema In The Cemetery" event. Over the last four Septembers I've gotten to sit in Minneapolis's oldest cemetery, the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery on Cedar Avenue, and watch old horror films screened on a small screen erected directly in front of the caretaker's cottage. If you had told monster movie-obsessed child-me that I'd get to sit and watch Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth or Hammer Films' Dracula in a cemetery, I'd have thought you were either bonkers or trying to sell me a line. 

Not only did that happen, but twice–during the first year, watching El Santo And Blue Demon Against The Monsters, and the following year during Dracula, of all things–the scene was complete with a full, blood-red harvest moon!

This year the program was a little different. The Trylon usually creates a theme, and runs one film per Saturday along that theme for the month of September. One year it was all Hammer Films productions; last year was a month of Vincent Price films, etcetera. This year there was only one outing scheduled, for whatever reason, and it was a showing of the 1924 silent classic The Hands Of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt as the titular Orlac. Being a silent film, of course, the music was crucial, and this was supplied not by pre-recorded soundtrack, but by a live ensemble called Spider Hospital. You can hear a piece of the music here.

I took my sketchbook along and did some doodling during the brief period of waning daylight before the show started. I didn't get much on paper before it was too dark to see, but that's fine. I was there to watch the movie, and the movie was great. The only irksome thing cantankerous old me finds with these outdoor screenings, is the crowd is often a mixed bag. Some old folks who remember the films and have remained fans, some film buffs out to catch a classic in an unique environment, and those who've shown up for a novel experience–usually families looking for something to do besides sit around the house and ask what there is to do. I generally have my Svengoolie shirt on at these things (solidarity is important) and usually get one or two middle-aged guys who point at the glow-in-the-dark design and say "That's what I'd be watching if I wasn't here tonight." 

Some sketches of headstones.

I'm no puritan when it comes to the film viewing experience; unless there's someone gabbing on their cell phone during the picture, or standing in front of the screen, everyone's allowed to have a good time watching a movie. But I've found these things have a tendency to turn into amateur Mystery Science Theater 3000 events. Yes, films from the beginning or middle of the last century have elements that don't translate well to people who don't have the context or reverence for the material that I or other fans of the films might have. Especially when the film is a silent film. Of course there's no dialogue for the actors to utilize to help convey emotion or context, so they have to over emphasize body language and facial expression. Every concerned character becomes a wide-eyed, chest-clutching basket case on the  verge of a nervous breakdown, every swooning lover becomes a creepily melodramatic, bewildered caricature. It looks goofy to the CGI generations and that's understandable, but to constantly lambast and heckle the material and performances as if we were sitting around at the Internet Cat Video Festival gets a bit irritating after a while. Same goes for the guy sitting next to me who spent nearly all of the ninety-two minute running time scrolling through his various social media streams on his cell phone. Apparently the comments he was receiving in response to the comments he made on some picture of something was more riveting than what he'd paid $10 to experience.

I don't know why there aren't more events scheduled this month. Hopefully disgraceful acts like this won't prevent future screenings.