Der Teppich des Grauens / Carpet of Horror / Il terrore di notte / Terror en la noche

Within the opening minutes we learn that the cast of this 1962 krimi includes Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Dor and Werner Peters and that its director is Dr Harald Reinl. We also get establishing shots of London, meant to convince us that the film wasn’t made on a studio backlot in Germany and failing in this regard, and, of course, the opening murder, committed via a pellet that sublimates to give off a deadly gas. The victim was about to reveal the identity of a feared master-criminal. Scotland Yard are brought in to investigate…


The hand of doom

If all this is familiar stuff, there are also some unusual things about The Carpet of Terror – a somewhat misleading title, perhaps, but also one that sensibly downplays the Zyklon-B aspect of the killer's modus operandi for the German audience of the period – that make it worth the krimi enthusiast’s time.

For starters Fuchsberger's character, Harry Raffold – the allusion to gentleman thief Raffles is quite deliberate – is not a Scotland Yard man but rather a member of the secret service. This leads to a spot of confusion when he is arrested by an over-enthusiastic Scotland Yard man.


Fuchsberger and Besari

Raffold also has a black sidekick, Bob, played by Pierre Besari. While basically the film's Eddi Arent character, his ethnicity is never made an issue. This is in sharp contrast to monster roles like Al Hoosman's Bhag, where blackness and primitive savagery were part and parcel.

Behind the scenes there are also various points of note. Carpet of Horror was produced neither by Rialto nor by CCC but by Germania Film GmBH. Perhaps consequently it was based not upon an Edgar Wallace or Bryan Edgar Wallace source, these being the properties of Rialto and CCC respectively, but rather an imitation Wallace by German writer Louis Weinert-Wilson.

The film was also a Spanish and Italian co-production like most of Germania's output. Talent from both countries is present behind and in front of the camera including co-scriptwriter Eugenio Martin and composer Francesco De Masi – beneath a Germanised pseudonym – and actors Eleonora Rossi-Drago and Antonio Casas. As such, it might be considered a forerunner of CCC's co-production crossovers like the krimi-giallo What Have You Done to Solange? and Jess Franco's The Corpse Packs His Bags.


Who?

In other ways Carpet of Horror is more business as usual: Dor plays the orphan who has come into an inheritance of £50,000 and who ends up being rescued by and marrying Fuschbeger; most members of the criminal gang are leather-coated proletarian types; the police have a very un-British propensity for carrying and using firearms, and Big Ben's chimes are heard even when the action has relocated to a country house far outside of London.




The gang and the master's (non-)voice

Reinl also again engages in his Lang-isms, with the criminal mastermind a Mabuse like acousmetric figure who we never see until the end and who communicates with their minions via a TV monitor.

Die Toten Augen von London / The Dead Eyes of London

[Note that this review contains a spoiler]

This is one of the quintessential krimis, part of a select group along with The Hexer and The Sinister Monk that would inspire sequels or remakes. It is also noteworthy for having a relatively famous predecessor in the form of the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Dark Eyes of London, one of the few pre-war Wallace adaptations to reach a wider audience; here we might have a quick straw poll on how many have heard of the Weimar German versions of, say, The Hexer or The Squeaker, or have seen them?

It is also important for being the series debut of Alfred Vohrer, who would go on to direct approximately half of all the titles in the series, far outstripping his closest rival Harald Reinl. Putting it another way, Vohrer was to the krimi what Terence Fisher was to Hammer horror, or Mario Bava to the giallo: the man without which the genre would otherwise be just about impossible to imagine.

As Tim Lucas and others have noted, Vohrer and Reinl's directorial styles are different, each man putting his own particular stamp on the material. The thing that really stands out here is how much fun he and his team appear to be having with all sorts of trick shots.

Though some, like the impossible POV shot from inside a man's mouth as he cleans his teeth with a water pick, exist purely as moments of cinematic spectacle, others, like the repeated use of anachronistic irising effects; the device of having a character move in front of and away from the camera in lieu of an obvious cut; or the reflection of one character in another's mirror shades, are more neatly intertwined with the theme of vision running through the film.

Another of Dead Eyes's merits is the sadistic glee with which Vohrer handles the murder set pieces, ranging from the burning of a man's hands with a lighted cigarette so that he plunges to his death down an elevator shaft, to a strangulation to a shot-through the eye a la Argento's Opera some 26 years later. (The killer, along with almost everyone else, wear black gloves, extending the 'fashion to fetish' trajectory identified by Gary Needham in relation to Bava's The Girl Who Knew too Much and Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; giallo fans will also appreciate some loving close-ups of gleaming knife blades.)

Plot wise it's the usual clotted affair, where just everyone who shows up on screen is improbably inter-related and involved in one way or another, beginning with the recruitment of Karin Dor's Eleanor Ward - a meaningful surname in the Wallace universe, where very few young women appear to have been brought up by their natural parents - to read a barely legible Braille message on a scrap of paper. Said scrap was found in the pocket of a wealthy Australian gentleman fished out of the Thames, an apparent accident of a type that has been occurring with alarming frequency of late, leading to well-founded suspicions of foul play.

But there are also those near certainties you can use to make sense of it all; I say near because as the series wore on the film-makers would occasionally experiment with casting someone against type for an added frisson.

To wit: Joachim Fuchsberger's Inspector Larry Holt is above suspicion and reproach, as is Eddi Arent's comic relief, Sergeant "Sunny" Harvey, while Klaus Kinski's Edgar Strauss is either a suspect or red herring and Dor's foundling the woman-in-peril cum love interest for Fuchsberger. (Is it just me or would anyone else like to see a krimi where it's the Scotland Yard man who is behind the conspiracy as a means of capturing the love interest and the fortune she typically seems about to inherit.)

The nature of Ady Berber's Blind Jack, the henchman who provides the murder gang with muscle is also of interest. A mentally subnormal ape-like throwback, with a tendency towards violence and a string of previous convictions behind him, he's the type of somewhat un-politically correct 1920s Wallace character whose existence in a 1960s German krimi seems daring, naive or something of both in the light of the Nazi period with eugenics, extermination und so weiter.

Since we see Blind Jack in the pre-credits scene, bundling a victim into a van, his role is not a mystery, rather it is the identity or identities of the leaders of the gang, the ones controlling him.

[spoiler warning]

On the krimi-giallo connection it also worth noting here the occupation of one of the gang's leaders, as a presumably Protestant counterpart to the Catholic priests and fake priests who pop up with alarming regularity in the giallo.

[spoiler warning]

Heinz Funk's score again mixes the conventional and the unusual, with some of those not quite sure what they are, or are supposed to be, timbres. It's all in good fun, nonetheless, just like the rest of the film.

Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People

The second krimi to be made for Rialto by director Harald Reinl, Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People begins much where his first, The Fellowship of the Frog, had ended, as the mysterious master criminal Shelton who has hitherto run rings around the police is captured at last.






In case anyone doubts that we're really in London, England

Gunning down a policeman in a desperate bid to escape Shelton is sentenced to death by hanging. Facing the executioner in prison, Shelton seems remarkably calm, indicating that he will have his revenge on those present and the others he holds responsible for his death.




The hanged man's revenge?

Believing Shelton's warnings to be nothing more than an idle threat, Inspector Long (Joachim Fuchsberger) is about to resign from the force and take up a job in his father's Lord Long's bank.

Two things put paid to this plan.

The first is the Inspector's promotion to Chief Inspector, received on account of his bringing Shelton to justice. The second – far more important – is the question of whether Shelton, who apparently took his own life with poison to cheat the hangman, is in fact dead as a series of apparitions and accidents ensue.

Not believing in ghosts, Long orders the exhumation of Shelton's body, revealing a coffin filled with bricks and a hit list of targets, some already effectively crossed off and the remainder including himself and beautiful young bank worker Nora Sanders (Karin Dor, Reinl's wife at the time).

Though things get somewhat bogged down at this point with a confusing number of characters and subplots and a locked room mystery as another victim is somehow shot in the head in his hotel room – the various individuals having been gathered there to better allow Long to protect them whilst contuining the investigation – they pick up for the third act with a suspenseful game of cat and mouse between hero and villain(s) in the latter's trap-laden hideout.






Shelton's appearances and disappearances are well executed

If there is perhaps already a sense of deja vu about some of the characters and situations, the more Mabuse-like figure of Shelton provides Reinl more scope to play Langian games than the Frog did, pointing the way towards his actual Mabuse films, whilst the introduction of Eddi Arent's soon to be patented comic relief figure – here a police photographer who habitually faints at the sight of blood or a corpse – points the way forward for the Rialto series as a whole. (Arent had appeared in Der Racher, but it was not a Rialto production and proved to be a one-off from Kurt Ulrich Studios.)

Visually the film presents an advance on its predecessor, with some pronounced expressionist touches around the phantom Shelton's brief appearances in the shadows and / or fog, various chiaroscuro effects and some attention-grabbing but nevertheless restrained compositions alongside the elegant dolly work.




The good-humoured Long responds to the phantom's note by correcting his rank to Chief Inspector

There are also some repeated visual motifs such as the frequent Langian clocks – Reinl tellingly overlaying the first with his credit and cutting away from it at the exact moment of Shelton's intended execution – and the sudden appearance of a noose before the hangman in an ironic reprise of the noose he had placed before Shelton. (Reinl's way of introducing the nooses into the frame is also somewhat reminiscent of Leone's in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly)

The process shots, featuring racing cars and speedboats, are less satisfactory unless we work on the possible but unlikely seeming premise that this was intentional on Reinl's part, as a way of giving the film more of a 1920s or 30s feel, or of further drawing attention to its filmic nature beyond Arent's character. (Here it's worth remembering, however, that some of critics who would likely have taken Reinl to task here may well have been more sympathetic to the equally obvious process work in Hitchcock's Marnie, indicating the difficulty of drawing a clear distinction between bad filmmaking and Brechtian distanciation.)






Shelton as Mabuse

Heinz Funk's score is more experimental than its immediate crime-jazz predecessors, featuring some suitably disquietingly weird timbres and effects alongside the more usual suspense cues.

There is no ende gag yet, nor any Hier Spricht Edgar Wallace, though the Goldmann's novel is specified – nummer 11 in the series.

Edgar Wallace - Der Frosch mit der Maske / The Fellowship of the Frog / Frøen med masken

To quote Frank Booth: “This Is It!”

The it in question being the beginnings of the modern krimi film, the first of some 40 odd works based on the work of Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace to be made in West Germany between 1959 and 1972.

But whilst many such European genre film firsts are necessarily somewhat tentative, as with the 25 or so Italian westerns made before A Fistful of Dollars that imitated rather than transformed the pre-existing American models, it emerges as a surprisingly confident production whose imprints can still be felt in many a later entry in the series.

Certainly the missing elements, such as stock footage establishing that the film was 'really' shot in London – or more to the point wasn't – the colour credits sequence, and the twelve gunshots followed by the “Hier spricht Edgar Wallace” announcement are in the minority and only really become evident when the film is considered in the light of hindsight.

To itemise what we do have: a strangely attired master criminal; professional and amateur investigators, the former from Scotland Yard; a Soho nightspot, complete with singing femme fatale; a damsel in distress; a would-be avenger; a comic-relief butler; a blind peddlar who isn't all that he seems; a country house; the criminals' secret base; some neat self-referential touches – one investigator goes undercover as a lighting man and records a crucial crime scene with a concealed camera; a distinct propensity for British bobbies to seemingly carry firearms as a matter of course; and a confusingly large number of somehow interconnected characters to provide intrigue, victims and suspects as and when required.

The master criminal is the titular Frog, the head of a three-hundred strong gang identifiable by their numbers and the brand they all wear. His own identity is unknown, with the quest to unmask him propelling the story onwards at a characteristically breathless Wallace pace, wherein one year of undercover work by Inspector Higgins is telegraphed into a single sentence and a brief scene in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to apprehend the Frog.

As Higgins' body is found, complete with a couple of potential clues, footprints which do not match and a reside of cement dust in the dead man's mouth, the true investigators are revealed in the form of Inspector Hedge of the Yard and Richard Gordon, an American of independent means who affects the manners and lifestyle of an English gentleman – he is also the employer of the butler – and might as well be one.

Gordon and his butler are played by Joachim Fuchsberger and Eddi Arent, soon to become typed as the definitive hero and comic relief figures respectively, although Fuchsberger's heroes would hereafter tend more to be offficial representatives of the law.

With the man with the non-matching footprints soon identified as Mr Bennett we are next introduced to his son Ray and daughter Ella, whom the more attentive viewer might already recognise as one of the Frog's next targets, Higgins being the other.

While Ella is the dutiful daughter, concerned for her father's and brother's well-being – Mr Bennett always seems pre-occupied by his trips into London on unspecified business – Ray is somewhat wayward, with a desire for an easy life that leads him into trouble as in a short space of time he goes on to ignore the advice of the avuncular Mr Johnston at his work; anger their employer, the fearsome permanently be-gloved Mr Maitland, and winds up in a Soho club where he falls for the resident singer, named Lolita.

Sure enough, she is also involved with the Frog; even if we're still no clearer as to his identity – though Gordon suspects he may be wearing the mask to conceal his identity as missing master criminal Harry Lime, on the grounds that some sort of disfiguring mark would be too obvious / straightforward – we at least now have a number of suspects to work through.

Lime, of course, is also the name of the post-war profiteer in Graham Greene's story memorably brought to the screen by Carol Reed, with that Anton Karas zither score and Lime / Orson Welles's speech about cuckoo clocks and the Borgias; there was also a TV series around the time of the film in which he was reinvented as a detective hero.

Whether intentionally or otherwise Ray and Lolita are vaguely reminscent of characters from Weimar German films such as Asphalt, to recall the era of the first Wallace craze within Germany – one swiftly ended by the Nazis – and the way in which the novels and these films, though now coming across as naïve, harmless kitschy reminders of a more innocent-seeming age, were often shocking and controversial enough in their day.

Lolita's song, entitled “Night and Fog on the Thames,” has some interesting connotations here, in suggesting not only the danger of the area as presumably intended by its authors but also the phrase used by the Nazis when they arranged the “night and fog” disappearances of those they deemed undesirable.

Two other shock moments of note here the dispatching of an unfortunate policeman who happens upon the Frog's gang in the middle of a robbery and the way in which the Frog silences an over-noisy female prisoner. In the first, we don't get any POV shots of the attack as we might get in a later film, nor the actual the moment when throat is slit, but do get a surprisingly graphic hands clutching throat shot. In the second the Frog unexpectedly whips out a submachine gun and somewhat needlessly drills the woman full of holes to shut her up for good.

Away from Fuchsberger and Arent two other krimi regulars making their debut genre appearance are Fritz Rasp and Dieter Eppler, the latter also a familiar face from a number of straight horror productions of the time such as The Head and Castle of the Walking Dead.

Coincidentally or otherwise, Castle was also directed by Fellowship of the Frog helmsman Harald Reinl, who would go on to direct a further half-dozen Edgar Wallace entries, making him the second-most prolific director in the series after Alfred Vohrer.

With most of the camera set ups, angles and movements functional and the editing classical, the Expressionistic aspects of the film come primarily through elements within the frame, as this street or that interior is made darker and more dangerous looking or a light source 'just happens' to cast some suggestive pattern; the one time Reinl does break out some Third Man-esque Dutch angles is when a fist-fight breaks out, with this being a scene that also features some more dynamic camerawork and editing.

Willy Mattes's jazzy score is pleasing if comparatively lacking in the quirky qualities.that would came to the fore in later films.

Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen / The Devil's Daffodil / The Daffodil Killer

With newspaper hoardings announcing a second daffodil murder a young woman goes to make a call to Scotland Yard, but is herself murdered by a black clad masked figure before she can can be put through to them.






The daffodil killer strikes again in a scene full of giallo-style iconography but comparatively lacking in style

After leaving a daffodil on the body the killer then goes after Global Airlines investigator Jack Tarling, played by archetypal krimi detective hero Joachim Fuchsberger, finding him with a cargo of fake daffodils containing heroin intercepted by customs officials as part of a cargo from Hong Kong.

While successful in blowing up the customs officials the daffodil killer fails to kill Tarling, who then meets with his Hong Kong counterpart, Ling Chu, played by the unlikely seeming figure of Christopher Lee, as planned.


Fuchsberger and Lee

After announcing their presence to Scotland Yard the two men then investigate the convoluted mystery, beginning with the daffodils' importer, Lyons, before moving on the Soho nightclub where the first three murder victims all worked, the Cosmos...


Yet more daffodils and a characteristic mirror shot

With the subsequent proceedings continuing very much in the conventional krimi vein – Klaus Kinski is also on hand in characteristically twitchy mood, though Eddi Arent's comic relief is absent – the most interesting aspect of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodil is arguably its production context, as one of the few collaborations between German and British filmmakers on an Edgar Wallace adaptation.

From the point of view of the krimi productions, the chief benefit of the co-production emerges as its affording more location shooting and less stock footage than usual. Even here, however, while Picadilly Circus is effectively used as the backdrop for one assassination – the victim ironically falling into a flower-seller's basket after being shot – Scotland Yard is still represented by a plaque on some random building elsewhere over which, inevitably, Big Ben chimes.


On location in exotic Soho

Insofar as the German audience would happily accept this attempt at conveying London-ness, what really hurts the film is the blandness of the Shepperton Studio interiors, which generally have a somewhat flatter and anonymous look to their lighting and lack the kind of production details that are so much a part of the charm of their German counterparts.

In fairness Terence Fisher's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace suffered from a similar aesthetic discomfort when moving geographically in the other direction, suggesting that both British and German filmmakers of this type were perhaps somewhat set in their own comfortable ways of working at home.

Certainly if the later example of Cave of the Vampires is taken into account director Akos Rathony gives the impression of being a competent veteran but one who never found his particular niche, the first signalling his similarity with Fisher and the second his difference.

Ultimately one thus feels that it is the film's very title that indicates what it most lacks: an expressive use of colour.

If it is Blood and Black Lace rather than Hammer that would prove the catalyst here, The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils' intersection of a drug smuggling plot with a masked killer working his way through a number of glamorous women, all from a particular place, and the prominence given elegant yet sleazy sounding bongo rhythm heavy music combine to suggest that some influences may conceivably have gone in the other direction.

It's as if, having seen what the British could bring to the krimi the Germans then sought to see whether the Italians could do any better, with the colour flooding into the antique shop from the adjacent dance hall and the more surreal look given the masked killer in Bava's film indicating that they most certainly could. (Not that this prevented future German-British krimi collaborations, as Circus of Fear demonstrates, but the results were decidedly uninspired.)

With Fuchsberger's investigator operating in the same respectable, s(t)olid manner as his more usual Scotland Yard men, it is Lee's character who is given responsibility for the more ruthless aspects of the investigation, including a spot of torture where he drowns out the victim's screams by turning up the radio.

Much like the notion of having a white actor playing a non-white this is a piece of stereotyping whose implications – these sadistic Orientals with their history of fiendish tortures as per Fu Manchu etc. – are decidedly awkward today.

This is however partly offset by Lee's always respectful performance, alongside the simple fact that at the time the ability to perform the role would have likely appeared a positive sign of his versatility as an actor rather than as negative display of potential cultural insensitivity; here it must be remembered that Lee also appeared in all manner of European productions with no-one ever really seeming to complain that his portrayal of, say, a WWII veteran German officer in The Virgin of Nuremberg was offensive or taking away work from indigenous actors.

More important than this, however, is that within the context of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils itself the filmmakers actually make an oblique comment on the performative rather than essentialised nature of identity by having Ling Chu have a habit for quoting Confucian proverbs and epigrams in a Charlie Chan manner only to eventually reveal that he has been making them up as he went along.

Finally, it should be noted that the film was shot in both German and English language versions, with some differences in the casting of the smaller roles. That the German version is the only one available, complete with a commentary track but no English subtitle option, presents a clear indication of the differing popularity of Wallace in the two territories today.

Another review of the film: http://dantenet.com/er/ERchives/reviews/d_reviews/daffodil.html

Der Fluch der gelben Schlange / The Curse of the Yellow Snake

This CCC krimi from 1963 feels very much like a cross between Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer, with a Fu Manchu like mastermind plotting world domination, beginning with the expulsion of the British from Hong Kong.

In other words it's the kind of film that's highly problematic in these more politically correct times in that its stereotypes go beyond the usual ones of an imaginary / idealised England, which we insiders can always laugh off as camp or kitsch, to also encompass those of an Other culture, where it can be difficult to find an acceptable position to take.

But rather than refusing to engage with such films – and here I would include the Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu films along with the likes of Hammer's Terror of the Tongs and Stranglers of Bombay – I would argue that it is the cult film fan's responsibility to see them and attempt to contextualise them so that they can be understood as the products of their time, place and circumstances.

Here, of course, what we have is a 1960s German adaptation of a 1920s British novel. One defence could be to argue that the orientalist aspects of the piece are more ignorant and innocent and thus excusable than those of the contemporaneous Dr No, while Caucasian actor Pinkus Braun's Eurasian villain is likewise not in the same league of grossly insensitive caricatures as Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffanys.

In other words, there's always some way of making excuses for the things we like, so why should cult fans be any different?






Some nice expressionistic compositions, albeit compromised by panning and scanning from the original 1.66:1 to 1.33:1

The story begins in a studio-set Hong Kong as two agents of the Fighting Hand society steal the Yellow Snake, a legendary talisman that guarantees victory in war to whomsoever possesses it and begins the battle on the Day of the Dragon, November 17.

Our hero, Clifford Lynn (Joachim Fuchsberger), immediately raises the prospect of an inside job to his adoptive father, Joe Bray (Fritz Tillmann), that the murdered guardian of the hidden snake might have been “more loyal to his colour than you think,” and that his half-brother, Graham / Fing Su (Braun), could well be the one behind the crime.

He's right, of course, but until everything turns to type midway through, we've got an interesting subtext of filial piety as Cliff is send to London to undergo an arranged marriage to one of Bray's business partners which neither he nor either of the prospective brides to be are particularly happy about, all to be overseen by Fing Su...

And, even when Fing Su and Cliff show their true colours – i.e. yellow and red, white and blue respectively – as the true villain and hero of the piece, there's still an element of this remaining, in that Fing Su's loyalty, as his choice of name serves to indicate, is to his late mother's side of the family and her motherland...


The two brothers can hardly bear to look at one another

Thus, though I wouldn't say Fing Su is quite presented as more sinned against than sinning, things are definitely more complicated than they initially appear – much, indeed, like Rohmer's novels with their self-deconstructing presentation of Petrie's desires for the 'exotic' Kâramanèh.

And in the end that is perhaps why I so enjoy popular works like these: they are not trying to be art, but only to entertain their audience and, in so doing, unselfconsciously express the unconscious desires, fears and beliefs of this audience. (More awkwardly, of course, they also helped shape them at the time they were originally circulated; but again I'd say that something like the Indiana Jones films are far more pernicious here today precisely because they'll be approached by more people unthinkingly. In most circles you don't have to defend your liking for them, whereas if you watch Eurotrash or whatever you have to work through to your position.)


An obligatory this is England shot

Other pleasures to be had from the film include Fuchsberger's charming yet somewhat grey knight performance; Werner Peters' characteristically shifty mercenary businessman; a woman and child as property subtext if we want to look for it, and some nice expressionistic angles and lighting from director Franz Josef Gottlieb and cinematographer Siegfried Hold.

As with Eddi Arent's comic relief, the score is however likely to divide audiences. Rather than attempting to convey orienticity the composers take a decidedly modernist experimental approach, with strange electronic noises perhaps reminiscent of the Darmstadt School or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. While they work in the context of the film, especially as many are emphathetic to its visual images, I don't think they'd be the best cues to have on a krimi compilation CD.

A useful article on Fu Manchu derivatives: http://www.njedge.net/~knapp/clones.htm

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.