Der Henker von London / The Mad Executioners

The main weakness of this adaptation of Bryan Edgar Wallace's The White Carpet is that it's really two stories in one, both having enough in them to make a single film.

The Mad Executioners title refers to a group of hooded figures who try, judge and hang those who would otherwise have evaded justice. As the noose they use comes from the Black Museum, it is highly likely that someone within Scotland Yard is party to this conspiracy. Worse, some in the the underworld quickly see the potential for establishing their own copycat courts within their gangs.


The court


A Phantom Carriage

Meanwhile, a mad scientist carrying out experiments into trying to keep heads alive sans bodies by connecting them up to mechanical lungs and hearts. His modus operandi is to abducts young women, take what he needs and then dump the rest across London.

While the narratives do intersect somewhat on account of the sister of one of the investigators falling victim to the madman and the female heroine then going undercover in a bid to ensnare him, its notable that this latter scene does not actually provide the climax to the film as it would undoubtedly have done so had it been a single narrative.




Modern art is equated with madness, this painting being done by an artist under the influence of opium

Despite being produced by Artur Brauner's normally frugal CCC the film looks to had a decent amount of money spent on it, with some particularly impressive sets for the executioners' base and the mad scientist's home-cum-laboratory.

Edwin Zbonek's direction likewise pleases, as does Richard Angst's crisp black and white widescreen cinematography. One scene sees them present an otherwise tedious bar-room musical number in a long take that performs a 360 degree circuit of the set.

The performances are variable. Dieter Borsche is nicely sinister and driven as the mad scientist, whereas Chris Howland's investigative reporter Gabby Pennypacker is more annoying than funny in the Eddi Arent type comic relief role. Maria Perschy makes for an engaging female lead on account of being a bit more active and less of a screaming victim type than usual, with the sparring between her and Borsche as he tries to drug her drink and she tries to avoid this another delight.

Thames Television and the Krimi

I've been watching a lot of episodes of the British TV series The Sweeney from the mid-late 1970s. It was a Thames Television production and each episode is preceded by the Thames logo and fanfare, which was first introduced in 1968. It presents a bunch of London landmarks from different parts of the city crammed together and, as such, is a bit like the imaginary geography of the typical West German krimi film.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Television

Der Todesrächer von Soho / Allarme a Scotland Yard: sei omicidi senza assassino / The Corpse Packs his Bags / El muerto hace las maletas

The opening minutes of this 1972 krimi gave me a strong sense of deja vu: Hadn’t I seen it before?

I hadn’t, with my impression being down to the fact that the film uses the same Bryan Edgar Wallace source as the first of producer Artur Brauner's CCC krimis, The Mystery of the Black Suitcases some ten years earlier.

The mystery of the that title is somewhat clarified by this film’s own title, the corpse of the English and Spanish titles title referring to the fact that several people have been murdered by the knife-throwing death-avenger of the German title.


The walls are closing in

But while the hotel’s Soho location is familiar, the way director Jess Franco presents it is not. He doesn’t bother giving us stock location footage and Big Ben’s chimes in a vain attempt to convince us that this really is London we’re seeing, not Spain.


Making the camera operator work for his money

Although Scotland Yard are soon introduced, in the form of Inspector Rupert Redford (Fred Williams), the film as a whole continues to do things very much its own way:

While krimi regulars Siegfried Schurenberg and Horst Tappert are among those present, they’re both cast against type. Schurenberg plays a drug smuggler rather than a Scotland Yard higher-up, Tappert a decidedly enigmatic and ambiguous figure.

Nor is there a romantic subplot between the Scotland Yard man and the ingénue in danger that ends in their inevitable marriage. And while the final confrontation does take place in dungeon-cum-laboratory there’s a conspicuous lack of dozens of armed regular uniform police.

All this is perhaps to be expected given that this is a Franco film. While undoubtedly familiar with the krimi universe (the name of his most famous character, Dr Orloff, derives from the 1939 version of Dark Eyes of London, remade by Rialto as Dead Eyes of London in 1960) the director has always tended to approach the business of adaptation very much on his own terms.




Into the void


Neo-noir

The thing that makes the film interesting as a Franco film, meanwhile, is its visual style. There isn’t a great deal of zooming. But there are numerous striking images and some stunning compositions - a Welles-inspired shot of two characters in an infinity of mirrors, a Bava or Argento style staircase spiralling into the void, a studied use of colour and its selective absence - all beautifully captured by cinematographer Manuel Merino.

A definite curio.

Der Würger vom Tower / The Strangler of the Tower

While written by Erwin C. Dietrich and produced by his Urania Film company this 1966 krimi just about manages to successfully pass itself off as a Rialto/Edgar Wallace or CCC/Bryan Edgar Wallace entry thanks to the filmmakers’ careful study of the form.

We open in tried and tested fashion with establishing shots of London and a murder, committed by the titular Strangler of the Tower. That he’s played by man-mountain Adi Berber of Dead Eyes of London and others only adds to the ambience.




The twin poles of krimi London; I wasn't sure whether the murkiness of the image is down to the transfer or an accurate rendition of a London fog.

Otherwise, however, the film features a less familiar cast than most krimis. Only Berber is really familiar, with Kai Fisher’s distinctive red hair invisible given the black and white nature of the piece.


Berber's first appearance, revealed by his victim's lighter

This lack of familiar faces gives the film a somewhat different dynamic. We have to pay more attention to the performers and the dialogue rather than relying upon type-casting. There’s no immediate syllogism, that Eddi Arent equals comic relief; Klaus Kinski red herring / suspect, and Karin Dor ingénue in danger.

The issue here for the non-German speaker, in watching an unsubtitled copy such as this, is that the film is thus that bit less immediately accessible in narrative terms.

But if I wasn’t able to follow what appears to be a typically convoluted plot, it is clear that it has the right ingredients: an ingénue in danger; a mysterious criminal brotherhood with an underground lair; a plethora of suspects cum red herrings; a dogged Scotland Yard investigator, and so on.


The criminal fraternity and the damsel in distress

Indeed, there’s even a touch of self-referentiality insofar as one the characters – the one residing in the equally obligatory country house – is an avid krimi reader.

Visually the film is instantly accessible, with the time-honouored combination of stock footage of London alternating with studio back-lots and corresponding realist and expressionist idioms.

What’s largely lacking compared to the typical Alfred Vohrer or Harald Reinl entry, however, are those more imaginative, excessive and playful moments of pure cinema. The exceptions, such as the shooting of the action mirrored in a pair of glasses, do however suggest that director Hans Mehringer, whose only film this was, had enough of what it took. So too does the recurrent use of visual clues, such as a necklace and a pair of two-tone shoes.

The film’s use of Soho locations is worth noting insofar as the filmmakers make extensive use of The Paul Raymond Revue Bar, or a mock up of it, for the obligatory night-club scenes.


Classy!

Walter Baumgartner and Hans Möckel’s scoring is also something distinctive, being in a straight crime jazz idiom that lacks the quirky touches characteristic of Peter Thomas or Martin Boettcher’s work.

Worth a look.

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.

The Psychopath

Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s Freddie Francis directed a number of horror and thriller films. Unfortunately it was often often a case of quantity over quality as he took on unpromising assignments from Hammer, Amicus and whoever else was offering steady work. Yet if The Deadly Bees and Trog are notorious examples of bad cinema, Francis also directed some intriguing films such as Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly and The Vampire Happening.

The Psychopath, made under the auspices of Amicus, is also one of Francis's better efforts, clearly gaining from his experiences in helming a number of Hammer's mini-Hitchcocks and the curious British-German krimi co-production Traitor's Gate.










Images from the title and credits sequence; thanks to the guys at Cinemageddon who put together this German version with the English audio track.

Indeed, the story here comes across as something that Edgar Wallace could easily have penned in the 1920s, given a 1960s update in the manner of the Rialto films from West Germany.

Almost everyone except the investigating Inspector Holloway is a suspect, be it the group of old war colleagues initially targeted by the killer; the young medical student who is dating one of their daughters, or the widowed old woman confined to a wheelchair through a psychosomatic rather than physical condition who lives with her Milquetoast son in a house full of dolls.




"No love lost in the House of Dolls" - a relevant Joy Division quote, given the war crimes that have something to do with the case.

Dolls also figure in the killer's modus operandi, as a doll bearing the features of each victim is left with their body. Besides being a nice Wallace-esque quirk courtesy of screenwriter Robert Bloch, the use of the doll / mannequin trope also helps position The Psychopath as another point of connection between various 1960s and 70s thrillers:


One of the dolls that signal death

Bloch had also, of course, written Psycho, whose mother-son relationship is vaguely echoed by that between Mrs Von Sturm and her son. Psycho's shower scene murder provided a major source inspiration for the likes of Freda and Bava, who upped the stakes in films like The Ghost and Blood and Blood and Black Lace respectively: What Hitchcock suggested a blade could do to human flesh, Freda showed. Where Hitchcock gave audiences two murder set pieces, Bava gave them six.

Bava's film, of course, also featured mannequins and people as mannequins in those body in pieces and Hans Bellmer kind of ways. ("Mannequin comes from the French word mannequin, which had acquired the meaning "an artist's jointed model", which in turn came from the Middle Dutch word mannekijn, meaning little man, figurine.")

This theme would be taken up would later gialli like Torso ("They were only dolls - stupid dolls, made out of flesh and blood!") and Deep Red, along with the Spanish Pieces ("It's exactly what you think it is.")

Nevertheless, there are also differences between Francis's film and its intertexts. While The Psychopath features a number of stylish compositions and makes conscious use of a limited colour palette primarily consisting of reds, greens and the black-white scale, it's far less imaginative and excessive than Bava's work.

Insofar as the two men were great cinematographers and technicians, I would ascribe this to a general film cultural thing. Take an English Gothic by Fisher or Francis, and an Italian Gothic, even one nominally made in an English style, by Robert Hampton or John M. Old (Bava's reading of his distributors request to make up "an old English name" under which he could be credited) and you immediately get the difference.


A US poster for the film; did Glenn Danzig see it on a double bill with Fanatic? Unlikely, since Fanatic was a Hammer production, but a nice thought....

Francis's Taste the Blood of Dracula is perhaps exemplary in this regard, insofar as he apparently only gave the film's cinematographer Arthur Grant colour filters he had previously used himself somewhat reluctantly. Had the film been directed by Bava you suspect he would either have functioned as his own cinematographer or encouraged whoever was his cinematographer to use more stylised lighting from the get-go.

Returning to the krimi, there are also some distinctive omissions: First, no attempt is made to signify that the film is indeed taking place in London, England. Instead, this is just taken for granted. Second, the usual developing romantic attachment between the woman in peril and the Scotland Yard man aspect is missing, perhaps because Patrick Wymark is not a dashing and dynamic lead in the Joachim Fuchsberger or Heinz Drache mould.

As far as placing the film temporally the treatment of Mark Von Sturm is noteworthy. Had the film been made a few years later, I got the feeling that he would have been made into an explicitly homosexual figure rather than being given artistic inclinations. As it is these inclinations still lead into fairly coy Peeping Tom-type artists and models territory as far as nudity and sleaze are concerned compared to five years later.

Two final aspects of the film that must be commented upon are the effective score by twelve-toner Elizabeth Luytens, one of those serious composers who benefited from the opportunity to do the kind of high-culture music she wanted within the low-culture format of the horror film, and the titles, with their use of an eerie eyeless doll's head vaguely recalling Halloween's pumpkin head.

Vampires of Dartmoor - Dracula's Music Cabinet

One of the most interesting recent phenomena in the film soundtrack scene is the imaginary score, of music for films that do not exist or as alternative soundtracks for those that do. Much like everything, the results are of variable quality: For every The Giallo’s Flame, that successfully channels the spirit of Fabio Frizzi’s mellotron, there are two or three unimaginative, lazy, fake 70s porn soundtracks that think some fuzzed-out, waka-chuka guitar is all that’s required.

Given this hit and miss aspect, when I heard about the upcoming re-issue of this late 1960s album I was intrigued, but also wanted to know more. A quick search and a rip of the original, long out of print, vinyl was on my mp3 player, via Mutant Sounds.



And what a treat Dracula's Music Cabinet is. It's sufficiently like the work of Peter Thomas. Heinz Funk and Gert Wilden to function as the alternate score to many a krimi or post-Expressionist Mabuse / mad scientist entry, with bizarre studio effects, weird vocals and self-explanatory titles like Der Henker von Blackmoore and Die Folterkammer des Dr. Sex [or Fu Manchu], whilst also being just that bit different.

The re-issue is available from Moviegrooves.

Un giallo di Edgar Wallace

Poster for The Dead Eyes of London, as Gli Occhi di Londra or The Eyes of London, and proclaiming it to be an Edgar Wallace giallo:

The Trygon Factor / Factor One / Das Geheimnis der weißen Nonne / The Mystery of the White Nuns

[Warning: this review contains spoilers]

The Trygon Factor / The Mystery of the White Nuns must rank as the most unusual of the Preben-Philipsen / Rialto film Edgar Wallace krimis. It’s not just the British director, The Witches' Cyril Frankel, and predominantly British cast, but almost the whole structure of the film. For in addition to incorporating giallo and superspy / comic book elements, the film repeatedly plays with familiar krimi film tropes in thoroughly unexpected ways that leave one wondering what exactly was intended and whether some of those involved might even have been at cross-purposes with one another.


What, no Edgar Wallace?

The opening pre-credits sequence sets this out quite nicely: It’s established that London is being plagued by a series of audacious heists that have left Scotland Yard baffled, until now. One of Superintendent Cooper-Smith’s (Stewart Granger’s) men, Sergeant Thompson, believes he has a lead and has gone to a country home, Emberday, to meet up with his contact, Sister Claire (Diane Clare).

The titular family are old, respectable and moneyed – albeit perhaps not as wealthy as they once were, assuming they have not let part of their home be used by the nuns out of philanthropy alone...


Who says nuns have no fun?

The Sergeant is right to be suspicious, all the more so when he happens to notice some of the nuns taking part in a cheesecake style photo-shoot with Trudy Emberday and finds his ‘innocent’ look around the grounds attracting excessive attention.

Unfortunately, having also been spotted by some of the other nuns talking with Sister Clare, he has also clearly learnt too much and is thus murdered by a black-clad, masked assassin who drowns him, with appropriate impiety, in the font.




Giallo murder #1

So far, so krimi, except for the way that the story then continues is by identifying each and every one of the criminal gang for us; suffice to say that the mystery of the white nuns isn't.

Consequently, rather than being aligned with Cooper-Smith as he continues the investigation – why did Thompson’s body turn up in Wapping, some fifty miles away and why did his lungs contain fresh rather than Thames water being the first of the many questions; the link between the convent’s pottery factory and its London-based distributors the next – we are positioned more as external observers watching a game of move and countermove between the gang and Scotland Yard.




The times they are a changing

Besides the appearance and modus operandi of the murderer, with another victim later being drowned in the bath in a possible Blood and Black Lace reference, another giallo-esque aspect is a belatedly revealed – and thus none too effectively incorporated, except retrospectively in playing spot the perhaps lesbian-coded man-hater – element of gender confusion that wouldn’t have been too out of place in the likes of Four Flies on Grey Velvet.


Done with mirrors

The comic book or superspy aspect comes into play through the presence of Eddi Arent, as the sole krimi regular within the cast of the English-language version under review here. He plays a Continental safecracker smuggled into the country to help the gang penetrate an otherwise impenetrable safe with his rocket gun whilst wearing a yellow armoured suit, these being two pieces of apparatus that wouldn’t look out of place in Diabolik or Fantastic Argoman.






Arent goes to work

Another thing that is unusual here is the fate that befalls Arent’s character, along with the other men recruited for the job: It’s 'just not cricket,' a far cry from the usual Wallace criminal organisation that demands and rewards its members’ loyalty.

This said, the gang’s betrayals do feature another Wallace staple, namely the vehicle with the rear gas fill-able compartment, one of those elements that, if prefigured in Fritz Lang’s Weimar films, I’ve often wondered about in the post-WWII krimi in relation to the Einsatzgruppen of the intervening period...

In a similar manner the nuns’ order seems characteristic of Wallace’s treatment of religion and charitable organisations, modulating what might be seen as an attack on the former – i.e. a convent of criminal nuns – by foregrounding the latter – i.e. that these nuns do not represent any real order. Returning to the giallo, it’s a bit like the plethora of films there that feature fake or defrocked priests as killers, compared to the relative minority with actual killer priests, a have your cake and eat it strategy that lets the viewer take the message they want from the text.








Giallo murder #2

The marriage trajectory of the typical krimi damsel in distress is also spoofed somewhat, with the suave, droll and self-deprecating Cooper-Smith romancing a French hotel worker young enough to be his daughter and who quite candidly admits to being on the lookout for a wealthy English husband.

If the role of Luke Emberday, the obligatory upper-class twit cum madman who ought to be in the attic, cries out for Klaus Kinski, Robert Morley makes for a more than satisfactory Werner Peters stand-in as the ever-nervous Hubert Hamlyn, manager of the pottery’s distribution arm.

The Trygon, by the way, refers to the distinctive (de)mark on some of the pottery, three triangles (representing the three stated aims of the convent) which together enclose/delimit a fourth and create a fifth, that the gang uses to transport their ill-gotten gains and which perhaps recall The Lavender Hill Mob, or vice-versa, given the 1928 date of Wallace’s original novel, Kate Plus Ten.

In summary, an atypical krimi that may be best appreciated / approached by those already familiar with the more conventional aspects of the form.

Another Giallo/Krimi locandina poster

'A giallo by Edgar Wallace'; for The Hunchback of Soho, but broadened out to The Hunchback of London:

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.

Krimi book

I have just been alerted to the existence of this book on the krimi.



If only my German were better (read, more than three years of barely remembered lessons from secondary school), and I'd be going for Das Edgar Wallace Lexikon and Ein Fall für das FBI: Die Jerry-Cotton-Filme by the same author as well, along with Sir John jagt den Henker. Siegfried Schürenberg und die Edgar Wallace-Filme...

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.