A RAF plane equipped with experimental radar is shot down over occupied Norway. The whole course of the war could be affected if German scientists can figure out how to repair, replicate and use it.
Duke (Henry Silva) of SOE is charged with the job of intercepting the destroying the wreckage of the plane. The mission goes according to plan but it soon emerges that the Germans were one step ahead. Duke and the local Norwegian resistance attacked a well-disguised decoy.
The real radar equipment has been delivered to an impregnable laboratory deep inside a cavern only reachable by sea and a cliff-face climb.
Worse, the pilot and radar operator is still alive and can surely be persuaded to talk, “ve have vays” style…
Though reconnaissance and intelligence evaluates the probability of a successful raid on the laboratory at zero, Duke obtains permission from the top brass to undertake the suicide mission with a hand-picked team of individuals with little or nothing to lose.
Duke’s first recruit is the Brit John McCarding, an expert climber court-martialled for alleged cowardice that resulted in the deaths of three of his colleagues and who is desperate to prove his innocence. (McCarding’s accent sounds Scottish, though he’s described as “the best climber in England” by Duke.)
His second is Carlo “Charlie” Sardi (Luigi Castellato), an Italian POW who was the only one of six men who undertook a daring midget submarine raid to survive. Though happy to languish in the safety of the POW camp where he fleeces the other prisoners at three card monte, the camp commander correctly surmises that Carlo’s services in operating the submarine bomb can be bought if the price is right.
His third is Sam Schultz (Enzo Sancriotti), a sailor and smuggler who speaks Norwegian and knows the region’s coastline like the back of his hand. Sam is a reluctant ‘volunteer’ for the mission having been caught smuggling contraband by his new commanding officer. Indeed, he soon pledges to kill Duke when the chance presents itself.
The final member of Duke’s team is Sam (Pietro Martellanza / Peter Martell) a good all-rounder and expert frogman with a distinct attitude problem.
En route to Norway the group are intercepted by a German patrol boat, whose crew they easily overcome.
On reaching the Norwegian coast, Schultz decides that his mission is over and attempts to sneak away and swim for shore, taking some scuba gear with him. Worried that their mission could be betrayed and taking the opportunity to demonstrate to the others that he means business – not a difficult task when you’re Henry Silva, it has to be said – Duke calmly shoots the deserter in the back.
Though the four men reach their contacts in the resistance without further incident, Schultz’s body is found by the Nazis who note the American calibre of the bullet within it…
This 1968 war movie was directed by Maurizio Lucidi, one of those talented directors who seems to have flitted between filone without ever really excelling in any or producing the quantity of output to establish much of a name for himself. As such, it’s likely that most audiences will approach Probability Zero more for its star, Henry Silva or as a chance to see an example of what scenarist and co-screenwriter Dario Argento was doing in between Once Upon a Time in the West and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
Given that Argento has indicated that he felt no particular enthusiasm for the war genre and found many of his writing assignments during this time to be disappointingly routine, his writing here proves better than might have been anticipated. Character and situation are well-defined, with some worthwhile attempts to go beyond cliché such as the juxtaposition of the over-familiar ruthless SS type utterly dedicated to the glory of the Third Reich with his more humane and pragmatic Wermacht colleague who reluctantly plays deadly games with the lives of his men:
“To die for the Fuhrer is an honour”
“No one who dies finds death honourable – that’s a quote from Goethe.”
“Captain, your remarks sound dangerously anti-German.”
One reason for the film’s success here is perhaps that the difference between being a western and a war movie often came down to a matter of historical location and trappings at this time: If The Good, The Bad and the Ugly situates its “two magnificent rogues’” treasure hunt against a Civil War backdrop, they also experience WWI trenches and WWII concentration camps by proxy. If A Bullet for the General sees an American agent go on a mission in revolutionary-era Mexico, it is also a thinly-veiled commentary on 1960s US imperial adventures.
According to Will Wright in Sixguns and Society the narrative structure of westerns as a whole changed between the 1930s and the 1970s in relation to shifts in the nature of American capitalism. In the earlier period, the bond between hero and society was stronger, with the hero acting to save the weak society from the villain. By the 1960s, however, this connection had largely broken down. While the hero might still save the society through his actions – as here, if we read the film as a displaced western – it was less relevant to his relationship with the rest of his group and / or with the villain, with whom he shared a common professional bond. (Richard Brooks’s The Professionals, in which four specialists go to rescue a Texan millionaire’s wife from the Mexican bandito who has kidnapped her is exemplary here.)
Though Wright’s model has been criticised by Christopher Frayling as far as the Italian western is concerned – criticisms that seem especially valid given its accelerated developmental pace and looser generic boundaries compared to the American western, it provide some useful ideas to play with: referring to Probability Zero’s obvious model and predecessor in Argento’s work, are we dealing with a reinterpretation of The Dirty Dozen or of Five Man Army?
In truth, however, for the average viewer none of this matters. Even with a panned and scanned, washed out video that is less than ideal for showcasing the rugged scenery and the action set piece, Probability Zero works, and works whether we read it as a war or western movie. Everyone – writer, director, cast, crew – does the their thing to the best of their professional abilities, with the result a solid, gritty action-adventure that engages the audience.
One curiosity is Carlo Rustichelli’s incidental music, with many cues sounding very similar – perhaps even identical – to those in his gialli and gothic scores for Bava and, as such, a little out of place at times. Then again, this only adds to the difficulty in placing the film versus acknowledging its accomplishments…
Sunday, 9 March 2008
Fragment of Fear
Reformed drug addict Tim Brett (David Hemmings) has managed to turn his life around. He is about to be married and his first book, recounting his experiences, has just been published.
Visiting Italy, David is congratulated by his eccentric Aunt Lucy (Flora Robson).
A keen philanthropist who has dedicated her life to helping ex-convicts, she wonders whether Tim might not help his former junkie friends overcome their addictions rather than avoid them or, when David proves reluctant, pass on their names.
Shortly thereafter Aunt Lucy is found murdered.
Her funeral is attended only by Tim and an Italian friend (Adolfo Celi), though there is also a wreath from the mysterious Stepping Stones group.
Back in England, Tim goes to visit his aunt's old acquaintances and again hears about the Stepping Stones, the charitable foundation established by his aunt after the murder of her husband 35 years before.
On the train, an eccentric if harmless seeming woman engages Tim in conversation and gives him a letter, not to be opened before he reaches home. The letter warns Tim off investigating the Stepping Stones further. It proves to have been written on his typewriter; a tape recorded message and a cigarette butt in the toilet indicate beyond a doubt that an intruder has been in his apartment.
Someone from the Stepping Stones telephones, indicating that he can see Tim at this very moment. Unphased, Tim moves to call for the police. He does not need to do so, however, as at this very moment a policeman arrives on the door. He tells Tim that the woman from the train has accused him of harrassing her...
This rarely seen British thriller from director Richard Serafian, best known for cult road movie Vanishing Point, presents an intriguing kind of missing link between Antonioni's Blow-Up and Argento's Deep Red that should appeal to fans of the giallo.
The overall feel of the piece is, however, perhaps a touch more Antonioni than Argento.
The emphasis in on building an atmosphere of menace and paranoia rather than on the violent set piece, though Hemmings' cautious advances through his apartment, makeshift weapon in hand, certainly provokes a sense of deja vu in relation to Argento's masterpiece.
The way Serafian uses music is also intriguing in this regard. Johnny Harris's kinetic jazz-rock score is high in the mix and seems to drive the action at times.
Unlike Antonioni, Serafian also provides a 'proper' resolution to his film, gradually revealing the nature and extent of the conspiracy. Yet this resolution and the build up to it are very different from Argento, perhaps more reminiscent of Polanski, where 'defeat' tends to be more of an option.
To say much more than this – and that Serafian is clearly his own man, little interested in following trends or slavishly imitating any other director – would likely ruin things...
Trivia fans may note that John Bingham's novel was adapted by Paul Dehn, who had won an Oscar with Hammer composer James Bernard for writing the Boulting brothers thriller Seven Days to Noon, while Serafian's son Deran would later appear in Fulci's Zombie 3. Six degrees of separation, indeed...
Visiting Italy, David is congratulated by his eccentric Aunt Lucy (Flora Robson).
A keen philanthropist who has dedicated her life to helping ex-convicts, she wonders whether Tim might not help his former junkie friends overcome their addictions rather than avoid them or, when David proves reluctant, pass on their names.
Shortly thereafter Aunt Lucy is found murdered.
Her funeral is attended only by Tim and an Italian friend (Adolfo Celi), though there is also a wreath from the mysterious Stepping Stones group.
Back in England, Tim goes to visit his aunt's old acquaintances and again hears about the Stepping Stones, the charitable foundation established by his aunt after the murder of her husband 35 years before.
On the train, an eccentric if harmless seeming woman engages Tim in conversation and gives him a letter, not to be opened before he reaches home. The letter warns Tim off investigating the Stepping Stones further. It proves to have been written on his typewriter; a tape recorded message and a cigarette butt in the toilet indicate beyond a doubt that an intruder has been in his apartment.
Someone from the Stepping Stones telephones, indicating that he can see Tim at this very moment. Unphased, Tim moves to call for the police. He does not need to do so, however, as at this very moment a policeman arrives on the door. He tells Tim that the woman from the train has accused him of harrassing her...
This rarely seen British thriller from director Richard Serafian, best known for cult road movie Vanishing Point, presents an intriguing kind of missing link between Antonioni's Blow-Up and Argento's Deep Red that should appeal to fans of the giallo.
The overall feel of the piece is, however, perhaps a touch more Antonioni than Argento.
The emphasis in on building an atmosphere of menace and paranoia rather than on the violent set piece, though Hemmings' cautious advances through his apartment, makeshift weapon in hand, certainly provokes a sense of deja vu in relation to Argento's masterpiece.
The way Serafian uses music is also intriguing in this regard. Johnny Harris's kinetic jazz-rock score is high in the mix and seems to drive the action at times.
Unlike Antonioni, Serafian also provides a 'proper' resolution to his film, gradually revealing the nature and extent of the conspiracy. Yet this resolution and the build up to it are very different from Argento, perhaps more reminiscent of Polanski, where 'defeat' tends to be more of an option.
To say much more than this – and that Serafian is clearly his own man, little interested in following trends or slavishly imitating any other director – would likely ruin things...
Trivia fans may note that John Bingham's novel was adapted by Paul Dehn, who had won an Oscar with Hammer composer James Bernard for writing the Boulting brothers thriller Seven Days to Noon, while Serafian's son Deran would later appear in Fulci's Zombie 3. Six degrees of separation, indeed...
Thursday, 6 March 2008
Das Ungeheuer von London City / The Monster of London City
Life imitates art imitates life in this 1964 krimi from Artur Brauner’s CCC.
A Jack the Ripper figure is stalking the streets of London, murdering prostitutes like his model. Meanwhile a Grand Guignol / Tod Slaughter style production based on the exploits of the original ripper is drawing sell-out crowds, prompting concerned politician Sir George (Fritz Tillmann) to raise the spectre of theatrical censorship.
All of this puts ripper actor Richard Sand (Hansjörg Felmy) under unwanted pressure. Already struggling to put his drug addicted past and period in a sanatorium behind him, being flagged as suspect and public enemy number one are the last things he needs.
Then again, it’s possible that his method like approach to the role may have led to madness...
As ever, however, he’s hardly the only suspect: Sir George himself has a strange habit of sneaking out at night attired similar to the ripper’s trademark get-up, while the play’s impresario and unacknowledged, pseudonymous author can hardly contain his glee as bloodthirsty punters turn each performance into a sell-out and would quite possibly do anything to keep this situation going...
Though Das Ungeheur von London City / The Monster of London City is purportedly based on a Bryan Edgar Wallace story, one strongly suspects he was credited by CCC for a combination of marketing and legal reasons. Despite this dubious provenance and the relative paucity of familiar names amongst the cast and crew – only female lead Marianne Koch, playing the obligatory ingénue / innocent in peril, and composer Martin Bottcher, whose crime-jazz scoring contributes nicely to the film’s downbeat mood – the results are surprisingly good.
Putting their money on the screen rather than in the pockets of a Fuchsberger or Kinski, the filmmakers, led by director Edwin Zbonek, manage to evoke both a more convincing London than many of their competitors and a more expressionistic one. The apparent paradox in this contradictory blend of styles is resolved insofar as, through such models as Hitchcock’s The Lodger and Lang’s M, the reality of the modern urban experience was defined as something approaching expressionistic nightmare.
The self-reflexive admixture of appeal to prurient interest, coupled with the evident caution about going too far, especially in the occupation of the ripper’s victims and the hereditary / syphilitic insanity that motivates him, works in similar terms. It is, that is, all about Victorian hypocrisy and its enduring legacy, that combination of private vice and public virtue which fostered the conditions for exploitative entertainments for a sensation-hungry audience and the exploitation of this selfsame audience by the entrepreneur and / or the concerned moralist or politician.
Neither of these are things one really gets from the traditional Wallace krimi, where the air of artifice is always that bit more pronounced and the world evoked that bit more distanced, for better or worse.
Indeed, it’s when the filmmakers take their lead from the more typical krimi that The Monster of London works less well. The narrative is too conventional, with that over-familiar combination of obvious red herrings and a killer who no-one – except the krimi viewer, that is – will suspect.
The inclusion of a hapless husband-and-wife team of would-be detectives who take it upon themselves to solve the case also results in some some awkward shifts in tone even as it introduces a touch of comic relief.
Still, a pleasant surprise overall.
A Jack the Ripper figure is stalking the streets of London, murdering prostitutes like his model. Meanwhile a Grand Guignol / Tod Slaughter style production based on the exploits of the original ripper is drawing sell-out crowds, prompting concerned politician Sir George (Fritz Tillmann) to raise the spectre of theatrical censorship.
All of this puts ripper actor Richard Sand (Hansjörg Felmy) under unwanted pressure. Already struggling to put his drug addicted past and period in a sanatorium behind him, being flagged as suspect and public enemy number one are the last things he needs.
Then again, it’s possible that his method like approach to the role may have led to madness...
As ever, however, he’s hardly the only suspect: Sir George himself has a strange habit of sneaking out at night attired similar to the ripper’s trademark get-up, while the play’s impresario and unacknowledged, pseudonymous author can hardly contain his glee as bloodthirsty punters turn each performance into a sell-out and would quite possibly do anything to keep this situation going...
Though Das Ungeheur von London City / The Monster of London City is purportedly based on a Bryan Edgar Wallace story, one strongly suspects he was credited by CCC for a combination of marketing and legal reasons. Despite this dubious provenance and the relative paucity of familiar names amongst the cast and crew – only female lead Marianne Koch, playing the obligatory ingénue / innocent in peril, and composer Martin Bottcher, whose crime-jazz scoring contributes nicely to the film’s downbeat mood – the results are surprisingly good.
Putting their money on the screen rather than in the pockets of a Fuchsberger or Kinski, the filmmakers, led by director Edwin Zbonek, manage to evoke both a more convincing London than many of their competitors and a more expressionistic one. The apparent paradox in this contradictory blend of styles is resolved insofar as, through such models as Hitchcock’s The Lodger and Lang’s M, the reality of the modern urban experience was defined as something approaching expressionistic nightmare.
The self-reflexive admixture of appeal to prurient interest, coupled with the evident caution about going too far, especially in the occupation of the ripper’s victims and the hereditary / syphilitic insanity that motivates him, works in similar terms. It is, that is, all about Victorian hypocrisy and its enduring legacy, that combination of private vice and public virtue which fostered the conditions for exploitative entertainments for a sensation-hungry audience and the exploitation of this selfsame audience by the entrepreneur and / or the concerned moralist or politician.
Neither of these are things one really gets from the traditional Wallace krimi, where the air of artifice is always that bit more pronounced and the world evoked that bit more distanced, for better or worse.
Indeed, it’s when the filmmakers take their lead from the more typical krimi that The Monster of London works less well. The narrative is too conventional, with that over-familiar combination of obvious red herrings and a killer who no-one – except the krimi viewer, that is – will suspect.
The inclusion of a hapless husband-and-wife team of would-be detectives who take it upon themselves to solve the case also results in some some awkward shifts in tone even as it introduces a touch of comic relief.
Still, a pleasant surprise overall.
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Trauma DVD help
I have the old Tartan DVD of Trauma, which was certainly an improvement on the pan and scan video through which I first saw the film years back, but has never really struck me as being a particularly good transfer - I find the colours in it a bit murky.
Can anyone advise on whether this is a reflection of the cinematography or if there is a better looking DVD out there, preferably with both English and Italian audio options; part of the reason I ask is that I recently upgraded my Sleepless disc from the UK MIA release to the Italian Medusa one and it is so much better looking and sounding.
Can anyone advise on whether this is a reflection of the cinematography or if there is a better looking DVD out there, preferably with both English and Italian audio options; part of the reason I ask is that I recently upgraded my Sleepless disc from the UK MIA release to the Italian Medusa one and it is so much better looking and sounding.
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Marisa Casale - script girl
I started watching Probability Zero earlier, a late 1960s Dirty Dozen style war movie for which Dario Argento wrote the story; his father Salvatore produced it. The most intriguing credit for me, however, was for the script girl, Marisa Casale. Was she also Argento's wife, and Fiore Argento's mother?
Saturday, 1 March 2008
Die Weisse Spinne / The White Spider
When her husband Richard dies in a car accident Muriel Irvine (Karin Dor) is surprised to learn that she is the beneficiary of a larger than expected insurance policy he had taken out only days before, £50,000 rather than £5,000. (Remember that this was back when having £50,000 meant you were actually worth something.)
It offers the prospect of wiping out Richard's debts to exclusive Soho bridge club and secret gambling den Club 55 and of leaving her with a tidy sum besides.
Unfortunately the Anglo Insurance Company suspect foul play – especially since Muriel only identified her husband's horribly burnt remains from his distinctive white glass spider good luck charm – and are reluctant to pay up. Indeed, having had several similar occurences recently, they even pass on details of the case to the police.
Inspector Dawson goes to Club 55 to investigate and is found floating in the Thames the next morning, prompting Scotland Yard's bosses to call in world-famous criminologist Conway from Australia to investigate further.
Worse follows as Mrs Irvine discovers that Richard also owed family lawyer Mr Summerfield money. It is a small sum, but still more than she can afford after paying for the funeral.
Who is behind the conspiracy?
Happily Summerfield, however, agrees to fight the case in exchange for a percentage of the insurance money and also finds Mrs Irvine a job working for a charitable foundation he is connected with. Its mission, as it so happens, is helping ex-convicts settle back into society. Two such cases, with no love lost for one another and old scores to settle, are ex-Dartmoor men Ralph Hubbard (Joachim Fuchsberger) and “Kiddie” Phillips (Horst Frank), released after stretches for extortion and armed robbery respectively.
As the story unfolds we learn that Club 55 has an even more sinister business, performing murders for hire. A multitude of questions emerge.
Who is behind the operation?
Who commissioned Richard Irvine's murder?
What are the relationships between the insurance company, the club and the foundation?
Is Richard still alive, having done something of a Double Face with his car and another's body?
Who, if anyone, can the viewer trust?
And, in more meta terms, when is a krimi not a krimi?
The broader use of the term would, after all, imply any crime film, after the origin of the term
and subgenre in taschenkrimi – i.e. pocket crime novel. The narrower use of it would however apply specifically to adaptations of Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. This puts Die Weisse Spinne / The White Spider in an in-between position: it’s a krimi by criterion A, but not by criterion B. To compound matters, it's by neither Rialto nor CCC.
The curse of the pan-and-scan strikes again
It looks as if the film's producers Arca-Winston wanted to get onto the Wallace bandwagon, but couldn't find an actual Wallace property not already taken by Rialto or CCC and thus settled on something in the same style by Louis Wiener Wilton, before setting about recruiting as many of the Rialto team as they could, including director Harald Reinl, his actress wife Karin Dor and, of course, perpetual Scotland Yard man Joachim Fuchsberger.
Behind the Wallace-esque pseudonym of Albert Tanner hides frequent krimi screenwriter Trygve Larsen, also known as Egon Eis. Intriguingly Eis had actually scripted a 1931 adaptation of Wallace’s The Squeaker before returning to the author 30 years later with The Fellowship of the Frog, The Red Circle and others for Rialto as Larsen.
Though they didn't get Eddi Arent for the comic relief role English-born Chris Howland makes an agreeable substitute, while the one-two-three of Horst Frank, Dieter Eppler and Werner Peters more than compensates for Klaus Kinski's absence.
The lack of a Siegfried Schurenberg style Sir John figure can be explained away by what is arguably the film's key departure from formula: the relegation of Scotland Yard to a subsidiary role, with Conway intriguingly presented as a Mabuse-like figure in a way that serves to highlight his affinities with the criminal mastermind behind the white spider murders and which seems intended to make you wonder just how far the murderous web might actually stretch.
The mise-en-scene positions us with Fuchsberger and Dor, lessening the sense of ambiguity
Unfortunately it's a conceit that doesn't quite come off, for the simple reason that we're likely to immediately reason that Fuchsberger's Hubbard is in actuality Conway and very definitely one of the good guys. Putting it another way, the filmmakers' willingness to experiment and to alienate their audience doesn't go that far – or far enough for their (white spider's) strategem to work.
Instead, the vague pretence that Fuchsberger is a bad guy overcomplicates and overextends the narrative while lessening our point of enagagement with it, especially since we're already working through something similar in relation to Dor's character.
It works better in her case because of the basic ground rules of this universe: an upstanding Scotland Yard man can always be trusted, whereas a woman may be an ingenue in peril, a treacherous spider woman, a combination of the two or even something else.
Far better, one thus suspects, had Reinl presented Conway and his nemesis to us as two sides of the same coin but let us know the former face of it from the outset – an approach, moreover, that would have been more consistent with his hero Lang if we think of Spione and the Weimer era Mabuse films.
Everything else – Peter Thomas's crime-jazz score; Frank's menacing professional killer with his unsettling preference for referring to himself in the third person; the talismanic, mythical qualities afforded Soho and Dartmoor; the anachronistic neo-expressionist German backlot vision of London; the surveillance technology etc. – is in perfect accord with the krimi formula, such that you would probably attribute the film to Wallace senior and Rialto if you missed the opening credits and ignored the absence of the ende joke.
Though compromised by a panned and scanned, badly dubbed VHS-rip with choppy sound, this ersatz Wallace is worth a look for the krimi completist. Others, however, would be better served by the real thing.
It offers the prospect of wiping out Richard's debts to exclusive Soho bridge club and secret gambling den Club 55 and of leaving her with a tidy sum besides.
Unfortunately the Anglo Insurance Company suspect foul play – especially since Muriel only identified her husband's horribly burnt remains from his distinctive white glass spider good luck charm – and are reluctant to pay up. Indeed, having had several similar occurences recently, they even pass on details of the case to the police.
Inspector Dawson goes to Club 55 to investigate and is found floating in the Thames the next morning, prompting Scotland Yard's bosses to call in world-famous criminologist Conway from Australia to investigate further.
Worse follows as Mrs Irvine discovers that Richard also owed family lawyer Mr Summerfield money. It is a small sum, but still more than she can afford after paying for the funeral.
Who is behind the conspiracy?
Happily Summerfield, however, agrees to fight the case in exchange for a percentage of the insurance money and also finds Mrs Irvine a job working for a charitable foundation he is connected with. Its mission, as it so happens, is helping ex-convicts settle back into society. Two such cases, with no love lost for one another and old scores to settle, are ex-Dartmoor men Ralph Hubbard (Joachim Fuchsberger) and “Kiddie” Phillips (Horst Frank), released after stretches for extortion and armed robbery respectively.
As the story unfolds we learn that Club 55 has an even more sinister business, performing murders for hire. A multitude of questions emerge.
Who is behind the operation?
Who commissioned Richard Irvine's murder?
What are the relationships between the insurance company, the club and the foundation?
Is Richard still alive, having done something of a Double Face with his car and another's body?
Who, if anyone, can the viewer trust?
And, in more meta terms, when is a krimi not a krimi?
The broader use of the term would, after all, imply any crime film, after the origin of the term
and subgenre in taschenkrimi – i.e. pocket crime novel. The narrower use of it would however apply specifically to adaptations of Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. This puts Die Weisse Spinne / The White Spider in an in-between position: it’s a krimi by criterion A, but not by criterion B. To compound matters, it's by neither Rialto nor CCC.
The curse of the pan-and-scan strikes again
It looks as if the film's producers Arca-Winston wanted to get onto the Wallace bandwagon, but couldn't find an actual Wallace property not already taken by Rialto or CCC and thus settled on something in the same style by Louis Wiener Wilton, before setting about recruiting as many of the Rialto team as they could, including director Harald Reinl, his actress wife Karin Dor and, of course, perpetual Scotland Yard man Joachim Fuchsberger.
Behind the Wallace-esque pseudonym of Albert Tanner hides frequent krimi screenwriter Trygve Larsen, also known as Egon Eis. Intriguingly Eis had actually scripted a 1931 adaptation of Wallace’s The Squeaker before returning to the author 30 years later with The Fellowship of the Frog, The Red Circle and others for Rialto as Larsen.
Though they didn't get Eddi Arent for the comic relief role English-born Chris Howland makes an agreeable substitute, while the one-two-three of Horst Frank, Dieter Eppler and Werner Peters more than compensates for Klaus Kinski's absence.
The lack of a Siegfried Schurenberg style Sir John figure can be explained away by what is arguably the film's key departure from formula: the relegation of Scotland Yard to a subsidiary role, with Conway intriguingly presented as a Mabuse-like figure in a way that serves to highlight his affinities with the criminal mastermind behind the white spider murders and which seems intended to make you wonder just how far the murderous web might actually stretch.
The mise-en-scene positions us with Fuchsberger and Dor, lessening the sense of ambiguity
Unfortunately it's a conceit that doesn't quite come off, for the simple reason that we're likely to immediately reason that Fuchsberger's Hubbard is in actuality Conway and very definitely one of the good guys. Putting it another way, the filmmakers' willingness to experiment and to alienate their audience doesn't go that far – or far enough for their (white spider's) strategem to work.
Instead, the vague pretence that Fuchsberger is a bad guy overcomplicates and overextends the narrative while lessening our point of enagagement with it, especially since we're already working through something similar in relation to Dor's character.
It works better in her case because of the basic ground rules of this universe: an upstanding Scotland Yard man can always be trusted, whereas a woman may be an ingenue in peril, a treacherous spider woman, a combination of the two or even something else.
Far better, one thus suspects, had Reinl presented Conway and his nemesis to us as two sides of the same coin but let us know the former face of it from the outset – an approach, moreover, that would have been more consistent with his hero Lang if we think of Spione and the Weimer era Mabuse films.
Everything else – Peter Thomas's crime-jazz score; Frank's menacing professional killer with his unsettling preference for referring to himself in the third person; the talismanic, mythical qualities afforded Soho and Dartmoor; the anachronistic neo-expressionist German backlot vision of London; the surveillance technology etc. – is in perfect accord with the krimi formula, such that you would probably attribute the film to Wallace senior and Rialto if you missed the opening credits and ignored the absence of the ende joke.
Though compromised by a panned and scanned, badly dubbed VHS-rip with choppy sound, this ersatz Wallace is worth a look for the krimi completist. Others, however, would be better served by the real thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)