#002 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [PHANTOM OF SOHO aka DAS PHANTOM VON SOHO (1964)]

As Giallo as it gets

 [Note: This is the third post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing our favorite Krimis and Gialli (some of the reviews started as rough drafts on my Letterboxd account). As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

 

My Krimi Rating: ★★★★★
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Proto-Giallo Krimi
     ii. Ingénue in Distress Krimi
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Dieter Borsche (official); Peter Vogel (official)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Helga Sommerfeld
 In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd link)


This turned out to be the first Bryan Edgar Wallace I watched as part of my 2014 Krimi Quest. Going in, I had the impression that the Bryan Edgar Wallace movies were fairly derivative knock-offs of the adaptations done by Rialto as part of the "official" Edgar Wallace (Edgar being Bryan's "soundalike father," as Kim Newman calls him) Krimi series, motivated by the desire of other production companies to cash in on the popularity of his father's films.

(That series, 31 films total, is shown on this list over at Letterboxd, a list I'm very happy to've found, as it became the first tool that got me serious about organizing and tracking down the various entries in the genre.)

In case you were wondering...

And this may be true—I still have several BEW movies to track down—but in truth, all Krimis, "official or otherwise," run the risk of feeling recycled and none-too-successful the more of them you watch. PHANTOM OF SOHO stands out for many reasons, chief among them that it feels more like a bonafide Giallo than any other Krimi from the 60s that I've seen, awash in Giallo stylization that seems far ahead of itself in terms of the development of the genre around it. (It could easily have shown up in the Giallo Source Code entry below, as a third movie from 1964 that expanded the reach of the genre in that year, and that helped establish what could, and would, increasingly become staples of future entries.)

So how do these elements take shape in PHANTOM?

Female Peter Neal

Female Peter Neal Triumphant

[1. IN THE MAIN CHARACTER]
Clarinda Smith (Barbara Rütting) essentially plays a female Peter Neal whose career as a fiction writer is inextricably linked to the past trauma that has turned her into a killer (very much in the mold of what we get with Neal, in TENEBRAE). In TENEBRAE, the repressed sexual trauma from Neal's past has spent his adult life bubbling just beneath the surface of his popular crime fiction. It takes the murder of Elsa Manni, an "inveterate shop lifter" who is killed in her ultra-mod apartment in the EUR section of Rome, to open the floodgates of his past and allow it to drown his current life in its wash of ero-guro-ness.

In PHANTOM, Smith's traumatic past has also driven her fiction, but unlike in Neal's case, it has never been much repressed. Only put on hold for the time it took her to establish herself in a position from which she could effectively take revenge. For Smith was the victim of the past trauma, unlike Neal, who was the perpetrator, murdering the person who spurned and humiliated his past sexual desires. The final scene of TENEBRAE reveals Neal to be "hopelessly insane," with only the most tenuous grasp on reality, a grasp that is only important to him as long it allows him to keep committing his crimes. Smith is instead presented as a kind of high-functioning sociopath, who has carefully and elaborately orchestrated events so she will be free to carry out her vengeance on the five or six people she holds responsible.

(It feels like a past trauma story that is, for the time, startlingly cruel: Rütting's character was taken on board a luxury cruise under false pretenses—supposedly hired as the equivalent of a porter—only to be brutalized by every single passenger on what turned out to be a white slaving/sex cruise.) 

Watching the films in close proximity to each other, you can't help but feel an affinity, a template, shared between the two "killer crime writer" characters.

I've seen this somewhere before...

[2. SELF-REFERENCE / SELF-CRITIQUE]
 As in TENEBRAE, Smith's life as a fiction writer opens the door for the movie to take self-referential stabs at both the story that's being told, and the genre as a whole (e.g., how many Krimis begin by either having Edgar Wallace's voice introduce himself as the author of the movie during the opening credits, or, as this movie does, gives the author of the source material a cameo in the opening credits?).

The most concrete example of the movie's self-referential nature comes in the final scene, when Smith is confessing the details of the crime to Chief Inspector Patton (played by genre chameleon Dieter Borsche) and Sir Phillip (Hans Söhnker). When they press for more details about her motives, she tells them to read the last page of her novel. While they read the end of her book out loud—which involves the captured killer ending her life with a poisoned capsule in her mouth—she kills herself in the same way (while they're busy being distracted by her book).

(Another reason the self-referentiality here feels more modern, more Giallo, is that it isn't played for laughs. Imo, too many of the Edgar Wallace references that are shoehorned into his movies are jokes of the breaking-the-fourth-wall variety, either comparing the movie to one of his books—"That was worthy of an Edgar Wallace story!"—or explicitly citing him as an authorial presence. And almost always for laughs.)

One of the totems in question

[3. USE OF MURDER TOTEMS]
Another Giallo connection is the obsessive use (by the killer) of totemic objects to add layers of meaning to the crime scenes and murders. In DEEP RED it's the macrophotography that shows us the creepy/strange children's toys and paired knives that are important to the killer for some reason. In Argento's TRAUMA, it's the killer's need to obsessively reproduce, as completely as possible, the conditions that occurred during the first traumatic killing that started it all: It was raining outside the night of the first death. Thus the killer can only kill in the presence of "rain," going so far as to trip the sprinklers in a hotel room to artificially create this condition.

In PHANTOM, the murder totems take the form of the "gifts" left on each body. Things like an African "virility sculpture," or envelopes with specific amounts of cash. We learn at the end that these were the items given to Rütting's character as "payment" for the sexual abuse she suffered on the mysterious sunken boat everyone keeps whispering about. Payment that was meant to silence her in the future, but only served as one more ritual reminder of the revenge that she would focus the rest of her life on achieving.

(Actually, this is not unlike the way Richard Harrison puts a piece of bloodied rope on each body that he kills in revenge for the drawing-and-quartering of his partner in the 1968 Eurowestern VENGEANCE.)

Six shades of Giallo

[4. HYPER-STYLIZATION IN A GIALLO VEIN]
You get the iridescent, light-casting gloves of the knife-wielding killer—her pov is basically a fetish-cam for the gloves, whose lumpy, almost deformed-looking fingers splay and grasp at nothing as they approach their victim. In these moments of the disembodied appearance of the gloves (and constantly glinting knife) the film feels as oneiric and menacing as any Giallo I've seen.

You also get more overt sleaze (esp. sleaze that is actually seen onscreen) than many of the Krimis up till then. There are two or three striptease scenes that, though tame by today's standards, glimpse more skin than I expected from 1964. (There's also the sex slave plot mentioned above.)

The comedian in question, holding a possible murder weapon

[5. AN UNEASY RELATIONSHIP WITH COMEDIC ELEMENTS]
Anybody I've ever talked to about DEEP RED invariably brings up the arm wrestling "battle of the sexes" scene between Hemmings and Nicolodi. Usually as criticism of the movie, its writing, its characterization. They usually say that scenes like that, the ones that feel like they're trying too hard to be comic relief, pull them out of the delirious mood that the rest of the movie manages. (I can't say I disagree with this.)

The Krimi genre as a whole, I've quickly discovered, trades pretty heavily in this kind of broad, tone-deaf comedy. Slapstick, vaudeville comedy. In Edgar Wallace Krimis, this comic relief role is usually filled by Eddi Arent—he plays a wise-cracking manservant, a wise-cracking police inspector, a wise-cracking boat-rowing witness to the crimes.

Here Peter Vogel plays the role usually reserved for Arent, that of the comedic sidekick to the main hero/detective, alternately coming across as dapper and a real buffoon. Thankfully, his schtick manages to be integrated in a pretty satisfying (read: not distracting, or eye-rolling) way. In a way that doesn't diminish the mood that dominates the piece otherwise. 

Once you get used to how cartoonish Vogel looks (the glasses, pronounced mustache, and bowler hat threaten to be too much at the start; in many ways, he spends the movie looking like the mailman in Argento's FOUR FLIES), you begin to appreciate the ways in which it genuinely works:

• It's much more understated than in the worst Arent examples. You don't have to suffer through Arent chewing through scenery and physical gags like a poor man's Chaplin, or Keaton, or whoever, but instead get sometimes subtle jabs and quips that achieve what comic relief is I guess theoretically designed to do (i.e., provide a moment's relief), without undercutting what else is going on. (And, don't get me wrong, there are times when Arent fully pulls off his gag-laden characters; INN BY THE RIVER would be one of those examples.

• It becomes refreshingly perverse late in the film (when Vogel's character believes the chief of police has been implicated in the murder, he exults in the fact that he will finally be able to realize his life's "greatest dream": to arrest and/or humiliate and/or see executed his own boss [?!?!?!]); and

• As many of these movies do, it ends on a moment of Vogel/Arent comedy (one more thing that also links it to Argento and Gialli; what is the end of BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE but the final punchline to a running joke that was set up by Musante's character in the opening scenes?). Here, though, it comes across as genuinely felt, even touching. Having the last shot be Vogel holding the hand of the woman he has just confessed his love to (the woman he believes to be on the lam, and likely to be sent to jail once they return to England) feels sweet. Esp. in the context of the trauma inflicted on the woman who committed all the movie's murders, a woman who just happens to be the sister of the character holding Vogel's hand in that last scene. Maybe too sentimental, but only just.

[6. CASTING]
The best Krimis (just like the best Gialli) for me live and die by the strength of their cast. For my tastes, this has one of the best: 

Elisabeth Flickenschildt

Helga Sommerfeld, forced into a situation that mirrors her sister's tragedy

Werner Peters is worried

Dieter Borsche is suspicious

• Elisabeth Flickenschildt, who is hand's down the most interesting and memorable female actress in these movies. Here she plays a black-wrapped wheelchair-bound mistress of the strip bar “Sansibar,” her grotesque face made moreso by a mysterious scar and a big-toothed disdain for both the police inspector and her fellow human beings. She's maybe more mesmerizing in INN ON THE RIVER, but she's never been more grotesque than here; 

• Werner Peters, who is one of the direct links between these movies and Argento's; he's the flamboyantly caricatured art dealer in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, but plays an uptight-and-shady "physical therapist" in this one; 

• Helga Sommerfeld, who shares the last scene with Vogel (disguised as a nun) and is strangely compelling as the lingerie-wearing photograph artist who trawls the sleazy aisles of the "Sansibar";

• Also the aforementioned Dieter Borsche. It took me two viewings to realize that, though he plays the brilliant, intuitive Scotland Yard inspector here, he played the reptilian and sleazy chief villain in DEAD EYES OF LONDON, whose white-eyed contacts and enormous flamethrower will always make me remember what is otherwise a somewhat disappointing film.

Here's hoping there are more Bryan Edgar Wallace pics out there that rise to this level.

Leonard Jacobs

September, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The low-quality Retromedia disc (now OOP; I have my doubts that this is the complete film, as I've read elsewhere that there are multiple versions of the film, and this disc contains at least a couple abrupt cuts). | LANGUAGE: English dub (which is, surprisingly, effective) | DIRECTOR: Franz Josef Gottlieb | WRITER(S): Ladislas Fodor, Bryan Edgar Wallace | MUSIC: Martin Böttcher | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Richard Angst  | CAST: Dieter Borsche (Chief Inspector Hugh Patton); Barbara Rütting (Clarinda Smith); Hans Söhnker (Sir Phillip); Peter Vogel (Sergeant Hallam); Helga Sommerfeld (Corinne Smith); Werner Peters (Dr. Dalmar); Hans Nielsen (Lord Harald Malhaus); Stanislav Ledinek (Gilyard, club manager); Otto Waldis (Wilhelm Grover, man with birthmark); Hans W. Hamacher (Capt. Muggins); Elisabeth Flickenschildt (Joanna Filiati)