#005 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [ROOM 13 aka ZIMMER 13 (1964)]

[Note: This is the seventh 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. Heist / Master Criminal Krimi
     ii. Ingénue in Distress Krimi
     iii. Proto-Giallo Krimi  

     iv. Arent-as-Comedy-Routine   
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Eddi Arent (official); Joachim Fuchsberger (amateur)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Karin Dor
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd link)


There are some of these Edgar Wallace/Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptations that seem positively crammed with crossed plot lines and competing genres. They don’t qualify so much as hybrids—like a Gothic Giallo, or a Giallo Poliziotteschi—but as potboilers painfully overflowing their pots. Of the ~30 Krimis I’ve seen so far, the best example that comes to mind is one I’ve discussed recently with a reader of the blog here, THE MAD EXECUTIONERS (see the comments for this post). And, according to this write-up on the movie over at Giallo Fever, it appears that this feeling of an overstuffed, overstacked, overheated piling on of disparate plot devices isn’t accidental when it comes to that adaptation, as it’s maybe not the adaptation of one Wallace story, but two.

It’s a risk that all of these Krimis seem to run, one in which you can imagine the films’ production companies trying to find new and better twists to keep audiences of the long-running series interested in (if not exactly comprehending) every, next, wtf twist. If two or three twists are good box office, their thinking might’ve been, then why not five, or 10, or 20? 

If Gothic-flavored inheritance schemes sell tickets, why not pile other popular ideas on top—how about a recently released master criminal who blackmails the socially prominent Lord of that Gothic castle?

And a meticulously rehearsed and planned bank heist that involves diverting and hijacking trains? 

Joachim Fuchsberger, in what could just as easily be an outtake from DER HEXER.

And a good-looking, ladies-man private detective (played of course by Fuchsberger) to act as dashing foil to the stodgier, goofier Scotland Yard investigation? 

The Highlow Club, where a little too much of the plot goes to die.

And a sleazy, low-brow club (the "Highlow Club") that is both the secret hideout of the master criminal *and* the site of two of the film’s most disturbing murders (at least one involving a striptease artist who is actually an undercover cop)?  

Etc.

Letterboxd user laird touches on this in his review, the very same review that, just about seven months ago, set me off on my "Krimi Quest" for the year:

"On the violence side of things, there's a black leather glove wearing psychopath running around murdering women with a straight razor. This is mostly background to another plot thread about blackmail, a dead wife, a criminal investigation, and a gang leader's plan to rob a train. It's needlessly convoluted...you really start to see why these are considered forefather to the giallo films of the 70s."

(Another interesting factoid from him: "The brief scene of nudity apparently earned this movie an 18+ rating in Germany where it became the first of the Rialto productions to fail at the box office.") 

All of the plot lines mentioned above figure variously ROOM 13. But unlike the frustrating lopsidedness of THE MAD EXECUTIONERS, I found that R13 (mostly) wove its plot threads into a weirdly compelling cloth. It’s still not an entirely successful film, but what succeeds of it is as compelling as anything else in the genre. And helps make me forget how regrettable the other plot threads (not to mention comedy routines) tend to be. 

Part of this is because, again, it offers a glimpse of the way that proto-Giallo influences were developing outside of Italy (also proto-psychosexual conventions). Part is because it takes the strange narrative tact of “burying its lead,” submerging the most compelling sections of the film beneath the tediously staged heist. This most compelling thread in the film is the character and arc of Denise Marney, played by the genre-defining Karin Dor (with her then-husband Harald Reinl directing). I.e., when Dor is onscreen as the embodiment of her strange throughline, this is top-tier stuff.

Like mother like trauma?

 This is the mysterious knot of meaning that *should* bind the picture together, the thorniest, Gordian-est problem that *should* drive everything else in the film. Why does the luminous-eyed portrait of Karin Dor's dead mother mesmerize her so? What was the real trauma behind her mother's death 20 years ago? And how does that trauma continue to live and breathe in the world as her still-alive daughter?

[THE MANY LIVES OF KARIN DOR]

Joachim Fuchsberger's Johnny Gray, hired by Denise's father to protect her from the blackmail plot that's being directed at him, begins by making light of the danger and asking her out on a date. They have an eye-opening evening of cheap champagne and tawdry striptease numbers at the aforementioned Highlow Club.

Instead of just a tongue-in-cheek and sleazy time, though, they also witness the second murder in the film. One of the striptease artists, who also happens to be an undercover Scotland Yard officer, finishes her dance and retreats behind a changing screen on stage. Where she meets the almost wraith-like razored hand of the killer:

The finish of the scene that laird's review mentioned above, just after the moment of 18+ nudity. Notice the decorative top of the clothes-changing screen in the extreme foreground of the scene. As the crowd applauds her act, she is murdered—“in front of everybody” (as a character later reports) but also hidden behind the screen:

Behind the screen, the disembodied hand of the killer waits.

She "takes her bow," backing her way behind the uprights.

Where she's met by the blade. Note that the scene runs from the shot of her feet to the shot of her neck so quickly that 1. we never see either the killer (or the killer's hand) strike the deadly blow and 2. the razor itself seems to be invisible in the scene, until the dying woman removes her hands from her neck and it drops to the floor. The staging makes the killer seem like a ghost, an invisible entity who kills without being seen (or maybe even present).

After this, another murder is committed at the club. And though it occurs off-screen (and thus we don't get to witness any of the weirdo stylistic flourishes accompanying it), Dor is present again, and apparently experiences the murder as a "triggering event" for her character. She has risked going to the club to confront the man blackmailing her father. While there, threatened by the various henchmen that populate the club, she hides in a room where she finds herself fixating on, what else, a straight razor:

Fuchsberger is stuck outside the club with no way to enter, and is about to leave when Dor's screams sound from inside. He breaks down the front door and finds her fleeing down the stairs; he randomly guns down one of the blackmailer's gang and escapes with Dor as she desperately tells him what she saw after finding the razor: Another murder.

I could spend the rest of my life screencapping scenes from Gialli that focus on frenzied and/or eerie and/or voyeuristic close-ups of eyes—eyes staring, eyes being gouged out, eyes not seeing what they see (or what think they see), etc. They are prominent throughout R13 (embedded both in style and theme); another aspect that makes Dor's half of the movie feel so Giallo.

After Dor is returned home she finds herself stuck, like a needle in a groove, repeating the same ritual again, before the shrine of her dead mother:

These borderline delirious moments of lit and overpowering eyes growing larger and larger onscreen—staring more and more deeply into each other; as mirrored (and mirroring) objects; as secret signals being bounced back and forth between two women's brains; as a traumatic call and response—they are truly special. Mesmerism via the mesmerized. Would that the whole movie could be drowning in them.

The various intrigues at the club lead to some decidedly less interesting screentime for Dor's character, as she is tricked *back* to the club under the pretext that Fuchsberger's Johnny Gray has been murdered. She's imprisoned there by the blackmailer, as further leverage to use against her father. After which we're firmly stuck in the "tediously detailed heist" portion of the picture.  

Tbh, I could do without this whole section of the movie; it feels like the equivalent of overly dry, overly complicated exposition, in a movie that otherwise lives and dies by the strengths of its deeply weird nightmare-stuff. No doubt the multi-stage heist was meant to evoke the kind of tense, breathless bravura of the extended set piece in a movie like RIFIFI. Instead it feels needlessly padded, needlessly drawn-out. There’s no tension or suspense about how it will turn out, because, quite frankly, whatever happens is of no consequence to the dramatic power (or pulped-out interest) of the movie. 

Do we really care, as viewers, whether the blackmailer's gang will pull off the heist? Do any of the heist’s details hold within them the weird frissoning moments that mark the best Krimis? Does the heist and its outcome have anything, anything, to do with the Giallo-razor murders that keep cropping up in the movie's narratives like chunks of bad dream? No. No. And no.

Even intercutting the unfolding heist with Fuchsberger and Arent trying to rescue Dor from the club doesn't help things.

What does help—and nearly rescues the movie from its slough of mediocrity—is the final however-minutes devoted to unveiling the real Denise (Dor). Devoted to removing what has so far been obscured by her face, in her brain. The real mystery wadded up in the 20-year-old tragedy that her father repeatedly refuses to speak on. The true reason, in fact, that *anything* compelling exists within the story: 

[ART AS TRIGGER]

The use of art objects to trigger pathology in the viewer has a long literary history. For the Krimi/Giallo tradition, it maybe starts with the 1949 psycho-noir THE SCREAMING MIMI, written by Fredric Brown. This story was "unofficially" adapted as Argento’s BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. 

In the book, the titular Screaming Mimi is a statue depicting a traumatic, repressed moment in statuesque dancer Yolanda’s past life (her attack, on a beach, by an escaped mental patient). When she sees the statue again, living a new, "cured" life in the Big Apple, the trauma still packed in the gray of her brain becomes just as traumatically unpacked, as she proceeds to re-enact her trauma by projecting it onto others, obsessively killing women throughout the city. 

In BIRD, the Mimi statue has morphed into a Mimi painting, which triggers Monica Ranieri's (Eva Renzi's) regression to the day of her own attack (she is the Yolanda character here). Like in the book, she no longer identifies herself with the victim of the attack, but with the attacker. With his identity newly lodged in her brain, she stalks and kills women who remind her of her past victim-hood; she seeks to obliterate her role as victim by obliterating as many additional women as she can.

In R13, Dor is the sufferer of this fate, not because of an attack on her life, but because she witnessed her mother’s suicide at age 5 (her mother, again, who is also her physical double according to the portrait that hangs in her bedroom). This "final reveal" is set into motion by F., who stages the last few experiences Dor's character has in such a way so as to recreate the conditions of her mother's suicide:

After rescuing Dor from the Highlow Club a second time, Fuchsberger leaves her to sleep in a room where he has also planted a blond mannequin on the couch opposite the bed. A blond mannequin *and* a facsimile of the razor that has been used to murder all the women in the film so far. When Dor awakes, and sees this, she takes the woman for a real victim. And takes her final swipe at the disease in her head.

What she does with her face in these scenes reminds me an awful lot of Nieves Navarro's facial expressions, during her drug-induced nightmare vision at the beginning of DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT.

 

For a film that spends so much time focusing on Dor's face—both her live face, and her-as-her-dead-mother's-painting-face—it's notable maybe for the fact that her final shot in the film is face-down, obscuring both the violence that she did to her own neck *and* the cracked identity that she carried through the film. We get the shot of her face-down on the carpet (note the pool of blood trailing away from her neck), then a shot of Fuchsberger looking up at her mother's painting, then a reverse shot that ends with a close-up on the razor that's fallen from her bloody hand. From there, instead of any access to Dor's countenance, we get the staring mannequin head (included, three photos down), the "doll" that F. used to trigger Dor's submerged psychosis once and for all. The doll's face we can see clearly—in all its artificial posing. The fact that Arent embraces the mannequin at the end of the movie like a real person, a lost love, makes his presence in the movie even more tonally off-putting (and, on some level, almost offensive).

The full text of Fuchsberger's speech “explaining” the madness of Dor's character: 

“I found out about it when I talked to the Marney's family doctor. Denise was a mere 5-year-old when she saw her mother, who was insane then, committing suicide with a straight razor. She sat for hours by her mother's body. She just sat and watched. This whole ghastly scene has affected her whole life. To be certain, I left her alone here last night, with that mannequin and a razor. She mistook the doll for a sleeping woman. She reacted precisely as before [slitting the mannequin's neck]. Denise was insane. She'd murder women. She couldn't stop herself. She'd murder any woman, no matter who she was. Until she became her own target. Exactly like her mother 20 years ago.”

Exactly like Brown's Yolanda. And Argento's Monica.

(At first I took that last line from F.'s speech to mean that Dor's mother was possibly a proto-proto-Giallo killer, who herself murdered an unknown number of women 20 years earlier, before turning the razor on herself. When I rewatched the scene to transcribe the speech, though, I decided that he was referring only to her suicide.)

Also, Fuchsberger’s use of the Arent’s comedy mannequin (he calls her Emily throughout the film, while exhibiting a creepy physical attachment to "her") is very Giallo. Not the comedy part, but the mannequin part. Mannequins dominate the psychosis on display in everything from BLOOD & BLACK LACE, to HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, to BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA (in the staging of the second murder), to SPASMO (where the mannequins are variously hung in the woods and obsessively stabbed to “death” [even though they are of course not alive] and kept hidden away in Ivan Rassimov’s secret “kill” lair [a la Stephen Forsyth’s lair in HATCHET]), etc.

Fuchsberger’s resigned, pensive, world-weary retreat at the end of the film—high contrast to his introduction, dallying in bed with a nameless woman who is clearly meant to represent one of his empty “flings”—suggests both that he had genuinely developed feelings for Dor’s character, and that his devil-may-care/crack-adventurer/ace-detective worldview has been irreparably crippled. And crippled in a way that he has no ability or special skill to fight. Though he has “won” the day by solving the case (the case that bumbling Scotland Yard couldn’t manage on its own), its solution is also his defeat. The mannequin trigger that he left in Dor’s room succeeded in triggering her final stage of psychosis. But its triggering also spun out of his control: essentially, he *caused* Dor's death by suicide in order to solve the case. 

The final sequence with his character shows F. channeling all this despair in pretty impressive and understated ways. His face shows us that he knows he was complicit in her death. His face shows us that he has finally met a moment in life that his vaunted skills and youth-charisma cannot match. He is no longer up to the task. All he can do, his face seems to say, is to give up. Resign himself to it. Shrink before it. Get in his car and drive away from it.

He starts the sequence, disgusted by Arent's shallow, stupid prattling about his "love" for his mannequin Emily (after his lengthy speech explaining Dor's motives, he does not utter another word in the film):

No “ende” gag. Only Fuchsberger's defeated-in-victory detective making his lonely drive away from the estate. (Along a tree-lined, THIRD MAN-esque path that looks an awful lot like the one used toward the beginning of FACE OF THE FROG.) Would that the whole movie could've managed this sort of impact.

Leonard Jacobs

September, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release offered in Vol. 4 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets. | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs; almost always the way to go if possible. | DIRECTOR: Harald Reinl  | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, Will Tremper | MUSIC: Peter Thomas | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ernst W. Kalinke  | CAST: Joachim Fuchsberger (Johnny Gray); Karin Dor (Denise Marney/Dead Mother Marney); Richard Häussler (Joe Legge); Walter Rilla (Sir Marney); Siegfried Schürenberg (Sir John); Kai Fischer (Pia Pasani); Benno Hoffmann (Blackstone-Edward); Bruno W. Pantel (Sergeant Horse); Kurd Pieritz (Inspector Terrence); Erik Radolf (Ambrose); Eddi Arent (Dr. Higgins); Hans Clarin (Mr. Igle)