Judex

Given that his widowed daughter Jacqueline Aubry is about to be engaged to remarry and obtain the family a noble title in the process, banker Favraux should be happy. All his schemes, 20 years in the making, seem about to finally come to fruition. Unfortunately for him there are two flies in the ointment.

The first, whom he initially dismisses, is Judex, the self-appointed scourge of the underworld – his name, as Favraux's assistant Valliers explains, means 'judge' or 'upholder of he law' – who knows his wealth and power is built on blackmail and treachery and has sent a letter telling the banker to own up to his crimes and give up his half his ill-gotten gains, or else.

The second is Pierre Kerjean, an old co-conspirator who went to prison for Favraux on the promise that his family would be supported, duly had his naïve trust betrayed, and has now showed up seeking help in finding his long-lost son.

The old man is easy enough to deal with, being taken care of in a hit and run 'accident' but Judex proves another matter entirely.

Making his first appearance at Jacqueline's engagement party disguised as a bird-masked conjurer, he spikes Verneau's drink, causing the banker to drop down dead at the very moment indicated in his letter of the previous day.






Judex's formal introduction, as classic surrealist shock moment


The masked ball

Following Favraux's burial, Judex and his men dig up the banker's coffin and take it to their secret hideout in a windmill. Favraux, who was not dead but merely in a catatonic state comes to in a cell for the continuation of Judex's punishment.


Marie listens in


And Diana, the huntress, makes her move

Meanwhile the governess, Marie Verdier, whom Favraux had been planning to marry and is secretly the head of a criminal gang of her own under her real name Diana Monti, stakes her claim to his ill-gotten gains and thus sets herself on a collision course with Judex...


Another quasi-surreal moment

Charming and entertaining as it is, Judex is never quite as good a film as it could have been for one very simple reason: the subject was not director Georges Franju's first choice. Knowing that a femme fatale and a diabolical master of disguise provided rather more interesting anti-heroic possibilities in tune with his own sensibilities, his preference was for two of silent serial director Louis Feuillade's other characters, Irma Vep of The Vampires – work out the anagram of her name, as a predecessor of “Johnny Alucard” – and the eponymous Fantômas. (Bringing it back for today's audiences we might consider here why the Joker gets the best lines and notices in the Batman films; if this seems arbitrary consider that both films feature caped crusaders and that the look of Batman's nemesis can be traced to another half-forgotten tale of crime and punishment, The Man Who Laughs.)

While Franju does make Diana / Marie into something of an Irma Vep character as she slinks around with feline grace in a black body stocking before disguising herself as a deliciously devilish nun, this serves to also emphasise the comparative blandness of Judex himself, with only his initial appearance in the bird mask really having the same imagistic power.




Suor omicidi; note also the reversal of the usual black and white symbolism in the first image

Indeed Feuillade, a conservative rather than an instinctual anarchist like Franju, had actually created Judex as something of a watered down version of his earlier more anarchistic villains-as-heroes that he hoped would quell the establishment criticism they had provoked.


Light and dark – Diana shows her true colours

The most telling scene with regard to the difference between the two men's sensibilities is one late here that sees Judex encounter Favraux after the banker has been rescued by Diana. As Judex lurks outside Favraux expresses contrition for his old actions and indicates that he is does not want his old life back any longer. In part this is because he knows it suits several influential people for him to be dead to the world, with the implication that if he did dramatically reappear – a reappearance not outwith the realms of probability in the universe of these films – he would then soon wind up dead for real. Judex then bursts in regardless, still determined to act as judge, jury and executioner without evident regard for the clear selectiveness of his approach – a selectivity which becomes still more evident and compromised by the end of the film – but also his impotence in the face of what is clearly an endemic criminality amongst the respectable classes. As such, if Feuillade's Judex was a figure and a film acceptable to the establishment, here Franju pushes both that little bit further to bring the inherent contradictions of his prececessor's work to the forefront.

Franju further makes the film distinctively his own through a number of intertextual references to his previous films, with the doves that Judex produces and the guard dogs that protect Jacqueline and her daughter both referencing Eyes Without A Face. Certain of his composer of choice Maurice Jarre's musical motifs also sound very similar to those in the earlier film.

Balanced against this, however, Franju also beautifully captures the style of his silent serial models with intertitles, irising and other archaic effects like keyhole shaped masks, while also using his camera in a thoroughly modern and personal manner that recalls the contemporaneous nouvelle vague and Alexandre Astruc's theoretical notion of the “camera pen” with which the auteur director inscribed their signature onto their work.

Indeed, if anything, I would actually say that Franju's combination of new and old works better than that of Truffaut in Shoot the Pianist, as a film set in the present but making use of anachronistic techniques, and perhaps even Jules et Jim, as a film set partly in the same period.

Whereas to me Truffaut's use of irising and suchlike can come across as somewhat mannered, Franju's assemblages always have that sense of authenticity. There's the sense that unlike his younger counterpart he was never trying to impress anybody with his knowledge of cinema history and technique but was simply expressing himself and the delight he found in the early cinema. (Whereas Truffaut 'studied' at the Paris Cinematheque, Franju, along with Henri Langlois, founded it.)

Though not an actor, American magician Channing Pollock has a 'fit' with the Judex character and the film's universe, in that you believe he could pull of these tricks and invent this technology after seeing his bird-masked conjuring routine – which must have challenged his ability to misdirect somewhat, one supposes – and thereby makes the role his own.

Edith Scob brings that distinctive combination of fragile beauty and steely resolve to Jacqueline Favraux as she had earlier exhibited in the role of the titular Eyes without a Face, making it clear why Franju was drawn to work with her time and again.

The real star of the show as far as I was concerned, however, is Francine Bergé who, as Franju's Musidora / muse, has a much more active, challenging and trangressive role – see here Vicki Callahan's Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade for an extensive analysis of the actress and her characters and what they meant to 1910s audiences, particularly in relation to gender norms – as Diana / Marie.

Eurobabe fans will want to note that Sylva Koscina has a smaller, but nevertheless pivotal role, as a passing circus acrobat, while Eurotrash fans may be intrigued to know that the film was produced by Robert De Nesle, later known for his work with Spanish maverick Jesus Franco.

Nuits rouges / Shadowman

Georges Franju's last film needs to be understood in relation to the trying circumstances in which it was made, as outlined by writer and actor Jacques Champreux in the interview included as an extra on the Eureka 'Masters of Cinema' series DVD, where the film is double billed with Judex.

The original plan was for a contemporary remake of Louis Feuillade's Fantômas, one which would be as shocking to 1970s audiences as the original had been to their counterparts in the 1910s and which would thereby serve as antidote / antithesis to the more familiar and comfortable 1960s series starring Jean Marias as the eponymous anti-hero.

A French television station liked the idea and gave Franju a relatively big budget to work with. He then found that securing the rights to the Fantômas character would cost around half this budget. Parallel to this Champreux had been working on a script for a pulp villain inspired by silent era star Lon Chaney Sr, “the man of a thousand faces.” He suggested to Franju that they might use this, with the director agreeing.

The production was then shot in both 16mm and 35mm versions, for television and cinema respectively, in Belgrade. When the footage was sent back to the laboratory in Paris for processing – suggesting that Franju was working without rushes, giving an indicator of his talent but perhaps also why his approach might lead him to encounter problems a routine journeyman would not have – it was discovered that someone had stolen the 35mm material en route.


The Shadowman

If the salvage job nature of Shadowman / Nuits Rouges has the serendipitous effect of bringing it that bit closer to the surreal strangeness of its model in certain ways – Feuillade famously writing characters into or out of his stories from episode to episode depending on the actors' availability and other chance factors – the downside is that it weakens the extent to which it presents an actual serial-like narrative with a regular roller-coaster ride rhythm.


The 1000 Eyes of the Shadowman?

It starts off well, with the introduction of Baron de Borrego and his secret treasure, the wobbliness of the secret panel hiding a wall safe and the rather prop-like nature of the mask endearingly low-tech and providing further hints as to the pastiche / parody nature of the piece.


The Templars

Unfortunately for the Baron his servant is completely untrustworthy and in desperate need of money to pay off his gambling debts and thus sells this information on to the initially sceptical Shadowman.




The mad scientist and his auto(n)matons

His secret base and army of minions, including zombie like slaves produced by a mad scientist, are also a delight. Indeed, the latter subplot was my favourite, both for its imagery of the hitherto mannequin-like zombies advancing implacably and inexorably on their targets and the typically Franju-ian politics. After all, the mad scientist only follows capitalist logic to its (il)logical conclusion when he suggests that replacing of the workers with his automata would allow for great cost savings since they don't need paid and can be kept in storage when not needed.


A mechanical auto-pilot

Nor is there any problem with the masked villain's visit to and murder of the Baron, against warnings of dire consequences that he cannot begin to understand.

It's when the Baron's nephew and heir Paul arrives in Paris that things start to go awry. Because we don't know what the master of disguise Shadowman – AKA “the man without a face” – actually looks like we are in no position to know that this Paul is an impostor and while certainly experiencing a shock when this deception is revealed are not placed in a state of suspense beforehand.

Things get worse as we're then subjected to a long and rather tedious expository sequence outlining the backstory of the Templars and their treasures, in which we're also introduced to another unidentified character in the form of the hooded Templar who swears to avenge the Baron. But precisely because he isn't identified, it's hard for us to identify with him.


The rooftops of Paris, or a Belgrade studio at least.

Though Nuits Rouges picks up hereafter as it settles into a regular pattern of moves and countermoves by the good guys and the bad guys – again limited by the extent that we know which of these labels to apply any given individual, though the inherently perfunctory nature of the characterisation qua bumbling police inspector, femme fatale etc etc. certainly helps – and a more regular alternation of scenes of suspense and shock, story and spectacle, the momentum is never quite regained.

If it's difficult to recommend Nuits Rouges to the casual viewer who perhaps only knows Franju as the director of Eyes Without a Face, those already committed to his unique cinema will nevertheless find a lot of pleasure in the film.

For us it's very much a case of the more you bring to the film the more you will get out of it: it's about being on same fantastique / surrealist / art-trash wavelength, where one is not only able to identify Gerd Frobe as the titular villain of Goldfinger but also as the nemesis of Dr Mabuse in the 1960s series inaugurated by Franco Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, before then going on to that repressed history of pop-modernist European cinema outwith the official canon; while I'll refrain from doing so, true obsessives will also want to seek out the 1919 Feuillade L'Homme sans visage and the 1974 French TV series of the same name, which features all Nuits rouges' leadings players, for comparison purposes.

Equally, however, Nuits Rouges is no lost masterpiece. The televisual origins of the material are apparent in its flat lighting, a far cry from the Eugen Schuftan's sublime cinematography on Eyes Without a Face, whilst the use of irising rather than straight cuts seems as much influenced by the presence of commercial breaks as Feuillade.

[DVD Times review of Judex and Nuits rouges]

Svezia, inferno e paradiso / Sweden Heaven and Hell

This 1969 mondo is mainly known for one thing: it is the film which gave the world The Muppet Show theme, manha manha. It was written by Piero Umiliani, writer-director Luigi Scattini's composer of choice.

The film itself is very much business as usual, presenting the usual mixture of the defamiliarised, like the state-run alcohol shop, and the downright strange, like the team of the blind divers who salvage things from Stockholm harbour, accompanied by an intermittently informative but mostly sceptical, supercilious and non-sequitur voice-off:

“Sweden covers little more than a quarter million sqaure miles of Europe. Its population is eight million, which means statistically around thirty four and one-quarter inhabitants to every square mile. The quarter inhabitant is an infant. At sixteen he or she acquires the status of a half and at twenty graduates to a whole.”




The titles and customary statement of fact with slow-motion spacehopper action

The specific theme or question tying all the vignettes, which also include the likes of sex education classes, sex shops, swingers' and lesbian clubs, together is that of the title: does the Swedish model society of the time represents more a heaven or a hell on earth?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is a balance of both. Thus, for example, the selling of alcohol through the Systembolaget apparently meant that the authorities avoid supplying registered alcoholics, who would then purchase their booze from other customers allowed to use the store. Others, presumably no longer able to afford the marked-up prices are seen inhaling from petrol soaked rags and eating shoe polish on bread to get a hit. Or, to recast things in sociological terms, it's about the unanticipated consequences of a essentially well-intentioned but at times paternalistic social-democratic welfare state.


Shoe-polish on bread. Mmm

The balance also presumably depends on where and when you were viewing the film, your own social values and – one suspects, having only seen the film in English – the particular slant given the material by the voice-off, Edmond Purdom supplying the English narration and Enrico Maria Salerno the Italian.

For the contemporary viewer at nearly 40 years distance of the material comes across as dated rather than shocking, providing a point of contrast with the harder edged strain of mondo typified by the slaughterfest likes of Africa Addio.

Indeed, the biggest shock may be in the attitudes espoused by the voice-over, with its indiscriminate 'drugs are bad' lumping together of hash and heroin and 'women become lesbians because they've been raped or otherwise actively turned off men, whom they should naturally desire' discourses.


The 'desperate', 'unhappy' 'lesbians'

Another criticism is one endemic to the mondo as a whole, that too often we're shown five minutes of things that that could in themselves have made 'proper' 50 minute documentaries, such as the aforementioned blind divers (what it is it like to experience the world as they do?) or the centre for troubled children (what does the existence of a 12-year-old prostitute say about the failings of the system?)


A cold war era nuclear bunker of a type that may unfortunately be coming back into fashion; note the vehicle at the bottom of the image providing for the rapid tracking style shot

Beyond this the apparent banning of the film in Sweden itself because some material was collected covertly without the informed consent of those caught on camera is also of interest when considering the mondo filone with their tendency to exploit the third world more than the first, whilst also providing another indicator of the strength of the Swedish social democractic idea(l) in its defence of the otherwise relatively powerless. It also provides an intriguing point of connection to Fredrick Wiseman's Titicut Follies, as a 'legitimate' documentary that suffered comparable legal challenges.

By turns intentionally and unintentionally funny, sad, touching and surreal – the opening credits sequence, of identically clad girls on grinning faced orange spacehoppers bouncing in slow motion – Sweden Heaven and Hell remains sufficiently entertaining, for the right and wrong reasons, to be worth a look, while again giving plenty to think about.

[Tim Lucas' s Video Watchblog post on the film: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2008/06/cincinnati-heaven-and-hell.html]

Qualcosa striscia nel buio / Something is Creeping in the Dark / Something is Crawling in the Dark

We open on a dark, stormy night on an isolated road that is seeing an unusually high amount of traffic.

Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.


Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film

In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).


Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent

Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.

They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.

With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.


The old dark house, plus ca change

Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.

Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.

Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.

In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?

Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:

Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”

Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”

“And why not?”

“Because you're swimming in it.”

As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.






The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?

Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...

This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.

With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.

Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.

Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.


At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down

Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.

Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.

The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.

What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.

Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.

The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.

One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?

Guess the film from the poster

It's one of those Polish posters, so unless you know the language it may be difficult :-)



The clue is that it's a giallo with either an animal and / or a number in its title.

Krimi project?

I'm toying with the idea of putting together a little book / booklet on the krimi films, along the lines of the Midnight Media giallo and slasher series or Tough to Kill: The Italian Action Explosion, as a sort of viewer's guide, nothing too heavy or serious.

This post is just really to gauge interest, to see if there would be any and also so see if you have any ideas for what could be used as ratings icons - e.g. bowler hats, London towers, Kinskis?

Der Gorilla von Soho / The Gorilla of Soho / The Ape Creature / The Gorilla Gang

The bodies of drowned men, all elderly, wealthy foreigners with no relatives in the UK, keep being hauled out of the Thames. While the first seemed like an accident – the victim's wallet still being full – the fourth in as many months offers a challenge to statistical probability and suggests that something more sinister may be afoot.


Here we see the Gorilla of Soho, in its natural habitat...

As it so happens the victim, an Australian millionaire, was found with something else in his possession: a doll with writing on it.

The first problem facing Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert) and Sergeant Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen) is that the writing, in addition to being obscured, is in an language they do not know.


Yet another doll

Accordingly Miss Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas) is brought in. An expert on African languages, she soon identifies the words “crime,” “murder” and, most revealing of all, “the monster and the gorilla”


Female narcissism


Female to be looked at ness, as Pepper frames Susan


Not so easy to place

The notorious Gorilla Gang has returned...

The revelation that Ellis had left his wealth to the organisation Love and Peace for People shortly before his untimely demise naturally leads Perkins there. He arrives to find known blackmailer Sugar (Herbert Fux, in his only krimi role) and the organisation's head, Henry Parker, in the middle of a heated exchange; though not party to the exchange that Sugar is being paid off because of something to do with Henry's brother, Donald, the Inspector certainly knows that something is up.

Accordingly his next point of call is a nightclub with scantily clad models who pose on pedestals for the members – who, as it turns out include Sir Arthur – to photograph and sketch them. He is not there for this, however, but rather to speak with club habitue Sugar and to dig around to see what he can find out, thereby learning that one of the girls at the club, Cora, was involved with Donald Parker.


Herbert Fux, lit in the dominant red of the nightclub

Meanwhile Sugar is confronted by a gunman and almost grabbed by a digger – shades of My Dear Killer's opening decapitation murder – but escaped by diving into the river; it's supposed to be the Thames but remains as unconvincing as the rest of the non-stock footage.




Fux and a foreground gunman, in the dominant blue of the nighttime exteriors

This stock footage, meanwhile, is itself somewhat badly used in the obviously back projected driving sequences, with the same iconic red bus appearing behind the drivers no matter where they're supposed to be in London.

Next the investigators visits St Mary's, a convent-run institution for wayward girls where Dorothy Smith, a mute black girl, tries unsuccessfully to communicate something to Perkins on his way to ask the mother superior about Jack Corner, the ex-boss of the Gorilla Gang who had worked at St Mary's following his release from prison three years earlier.

Apparently Corner suffered horrible burns as a result of an accident in the boiler room – a fate with echoes of Sheila Isaac's fate in The Case of the Bloody Iris or the scalding of Amanda Righetti in Deep Red – but disappeared shortly thereafter.

On the way back Susan discovers another doll in her bag with writing on it, again in an African language: “The gorilla sometimes comes at night; the mother superior doesn't know,” revealing that one of the girls knows more that the others. Curiously, however, they don't connect the African language to Dorothy, the only non-white girl there, encouraging Susan to go undercover at the convent as a welfare officer.

Meanwhile the gang, the contours of whose activities are gradually taking shape, are plotting the murder of their next victim, Mr Stuart. At a meeting with Henry Parker and his lawyer, Dr Jekyll [sic], Stuart, another wealthy foreigner of advancing years, surprises the foundation's director with the news that they are not to be the prime beneficiaries of his will. Rather, he has just discovered that he has a daughter, Susan Ward, whom he is intend on tracking down.

That same night Stuart falls victim to the gorilla and is delivered to St Mary's. There the Sister and a reluctant Dorothy dispose of his body as they have clearly done the gang's previous victims. The girl also plants a doll on Stuart, whose body is fished out of the Thames shortly afterwards. Perkins discovers the doll, whilst the post-mortem reveals the curious fact that he been drowned in fresh rather than sea water...

At this point we're only about half-way through; safe to say that everything ultimately ties together and is resolved in a re-assuring manner with everyone getting their just desserts one way or another...

Though certainly entertaining at the camp and trash level, this is one of those awkward post-Blood and Black Lace pre-The Bird with the Crystal Plumage krimis that shows the filmmakers trying to find a more contemporary aesthetic, attitude and approach but largely failing.

Part of the sense of deja vu throughout the proceedings must also, however, be attributed to the highly formulaic nature of the material. Obviously popular genre works, both literary and cinematic, are always formalaic to an extent, but there is nevertheless the distinct impression of the filmmakers adapting a bottom of the pile krimi featuring rather many elements that had appeared earlier in the cycle and which thus now feel distinctly past their best before date.

Thus, for example, the gorilla costume wearing villain instantly recalls the likes of The Monk with the Whip and The Frog with the Mask. This in itself is not a problem but it does leave one wondering why that bit more, insofar as the film's Gorilla Gang – I suspect the novel may be different – seem to have been given their appellation for no particular reason. And, in a film like this that moment of questioning in the viewer is fatal.

It would have been better if the gang had been using a trained gorilla in their crimes. While certainly more difficult to render on screen convincing way – here it's worth remembering that 2001: A space Odyssey was released in the out the same year – this would also have kept one more in that state of wonderment and presented a nice line of descent back to Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue and thus the very origins of the detective genre and sensation literature.

As it is, despite the alternative Ape Creature title, the filmmakers don't even try to cover up that it is a man in a suit, with the on-screen presentation of making it clear from the outset that we are dealing with a man in a gorilla suit.

Again the contrast with the likes of the the monk with his whip or the archer in green is telling, insofar as the films in which they appear present us with an enigma of the sort absent here: are these supernatural figures from the past who have somehow manifested in the present, along the lines of Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles, or merely something more mundane?

Not everything is the filmmakers' fault, however, with the plot being very obviously a retread of The Dead Eyes of London, beginning with the paradigmatic substitution of reform school girls for blind beggars as the subjects for dubiously motivated philanthropy and continuing through the foundling who is unwitting heir to a fortune; the man-beast cat's paw figure; the woman helping the police because of her special linguistic abilities and soon falling into peril thereby, and the pushing of one blackmailer down a lift shaft.

If all this is partially masked by the shift to colour and to another set of stock performers – Horst Tappert assuming the Joachim Fuchsberger role; Uschi Glas the Karin Baal one; Uwe Friedrichsen the Eddi Arent one etc. – the behind-the-scenes team are essentially the same, featuring such ubiquitous krimi film names as director Alfred Vohrer, production manager Horst Wendland, editor Jutta Hering, cinematographer Karl Lob and composer Peter Thomas.

While Thomas and Hering's contributions are solid, with the former exhibiting the ability to adapt to the new musical idioms of the time whilst still producing something distinctively his, Lob fails to push the expressive use of colour far enough in the set-pieces and lights the expository scenes in somewhat flatly. Putting it another way if Lob's work on Dead Eyes of London was almost comparable to that of Bava on Black Sunday – as two films released in the same year and independently of one another showcasing traditional black and white Expressionism circa 1960 – his work his work here falls far short of his Italian counterpart on Blood and Black Lace – as one of the key models for the new colour Expressionism / expressivism.








Another almost there but not quite murder set piece begins

Vohrer's direction is, in itself, nothing to be ashamed of. It's brisk and efficient and contains enough self-conscious stylish moments and images without becoming self-indulgent. But there's also little he hasn't done before. Maybe it's a case of seeking to demonstrate a consistency of authorial voice – the opening credits, after all, proclaim “an Alfred Vohrer film” before anything else – but if so, it's also one without that vital element of development that Peter Wollen identified as the distinction between the John Ford and Howard Hawks.

A key moment here is one of the film's most striking images, in which another character is reflected in the mirror of a Kinski-esque blackmailing ex-con's sunglasses. For, in fact, Vohrer had used the exact same shot with Kinski himself in Dead Eyes, where he had played this selfsame role.


The Kinksi-alike – or in a giallo the Luciano Rossi-alike

Likewise, while the choreographing of one of the murder set pieces to the smooth jazz record playing on the dansette is a nice touch – the victims legs cease kicking just as the music stops – this is offset somewhat by the re-introduction of non-diegetic mood music moments later as their body is discovered. (I'm also fairly certain that another krimi had featured a similar device, in a manner more directly prefiguring Tenebre. Please let me know if you know which film it is. )

This said, the period between Dead Eyes of London and The Gorilla of Soho can hardly be compared to the 40+ years of Ford and Hawks' careers, nor the ever-desperate production context of the German popular cinema in the 60s with the solidity of Studio era Hollywood.

Indeed, another element that emerges from the film is precisely that of the rapidly changing social and moral climate of the 1960s basically outstripping (at times literally) the ability of the filmmakers to adapt their material. Thus, for example, whereas 1964's The Phantom of Soho had featured a brief blink-and-you'll miss it flash of exposed breast from of its nightclub performers, here the nightclub is wall-to-wall breasts and buttocks; bush was still a no-no though the obscuring literal and metaphorical fig leafs here would soon come off for the later giallo-krimi crossovers, the St Pauli thrillers and the Schulmadchen report cycle alike.

If this is again just a syntygmatic shift, other elements attest to more profound changes. While the name of the Peace and Love Foundation clearly resonates with post-Summer of Love idealism, the reference to it as a Salvation Army type organisation and its actual philanthropic work in finding work for ex-convicts along with their distinct recidivist tendencies are grounded in an early 20th century weltangschauung that was becoming increasingly shaky in the Age of Aquarius. (Consider here also the case of Jack Henry Abbott, and the question of how far his inability to cope with his release from prison was the result of inherent psychopathy or long institutionalisation or the relative weight commentators might afford these alternatives depending on their politics.)

Likewise, it's the question of whether the Sergeant Pepper character, with his less dedicated attitude towards his work and chasing after every figure in a skirt, is a Wallace name that has been given a non-Wallace characterisation or is entirely the invention of the filmmakers as a younger, hipper alternative to the hitherto traditional but ostensibly outmoded Eddi Arent upper class twit type.

After all, the “you've never had it so good” ideology of the period was one in which the old politics of social class supposedly no longer mattered, though the cynic in me would suggest that it was more the case that new post-war model of mass production requiring more mass consumption than anything else, with the gap between the haves and have nots certainly returning with a vengeance less than ten years later and the persistence of the lumpenproletariat or underclass – old wine, new labels? – emerging as a challenge to left and right alike.

Elsewhere we get a couple of girls at St Mary's engaging in a catfight, apparently because one made vaguely lesbian advances towards the other; the head of Scotland Yard showing a distinct interest in one of girls at the club, and, at the end, a decidedly phallic “ende” that seems to belong more to the world of Bond and the Beatles than bowler hats. Yes, the times they were a changing...

To sum up, not a good krimi but one which is certainly entertaining and which proves to offer a lot to talk about – I haven't even mentioned the underwater gorilla sequences, which have to be seen to be believed – even if itself it doesn't really have much to say.