#007 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE INDIAN SCARF aka DAS INDISCHE TUCH (1963)]

In-jokes from the outset, in-jokes from beginning to end: Lord Lebanon, the movie's rich patriarch, is murdered while on the telephone. When he answers the phone, he's distracted by the fact that there's no one on the other end. And this distraction is the thing that allows the killer to strike without detection. After Lebanon tumbles to the floor, choked to death, his caller comes through the receiver: It's author Edgar Wallace, announcing the meta-jokiness of the movie through that series staple of having his voice be the one that introduces title sequence.

[Note: This is the ninth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing our favorite Krimis and Gialli. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5★) 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Inheritance Scheme Krimi
     ii. Arent-as-Comedy-Routine Krimi
     iii. Kinski-as-Grotesque Krimi 
     iv. "And Then There Were None" Krimi 
     v. Ingénue-in-Distress Krimi
     vi. Old Dark House Krimi  
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Heinz Drache (amateur)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Corny Collins  

In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd link)

This might be a slightly “lesser” Krimi in the grand scheme of things, but it's still got an "enjoyable streak" a mile wide and exists head and shoulders above the bottom-of-the-barrel examples out there (PUZZLE OF THE RED ORCHID, CURSE OF THE YELLOW SNAKE, etc.). It plays as a variation on Agathe Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, tweaking it so that the reading of a rich patriarch’s will is the thing that gets the motley crew of characters to the isolated house (a freak storm then strands them there for the next week). It’s most memorable, I’d argue, in the ways that it is aware of—and then deviates from—conventions that were getting more and more set in Krimi stone. Before I tick those elements off, though, it's worth pointing out one of the best ways in which it *doesn't* deviate: director Alfred Vohrer's signature flourishes.

One thing you always expect from his Krimis are the overt, often flashy moments of stylization. Clever and roving camera transitions. Use of art and objects to foreground the artificial and "meta" moments in the movie. Visual puns. Murder setpieces that point directly forward, toward the Gialli to come. The opening of THE INDIAN SCARF is no different:

 The first shot of the movie is a painting (maybe a tapestry?) depicting Lord Edward Lebanon's ancestral mansion. Smoke is pumped between the camera and painting, immediately causing the viewer to question what exactly we're looking at, and who's blowing the smoke? Is this a theatrical play-within-a-play? Part of the credit sequence? Or?

The static painting is then pulled up like a curtain. Trailing a mesh screen at its bottom, this "unveiling" introduces us to the first actual scene in the movie, one showing the Lord Lebanon's son (played by a rheumy-eyed, always-gaping Hans Clarin) practicing for his imminent debut in London as a world-class pianist.

The production design throughout is nothing if not memorable, esp. in the moments that when it chooses to include oversized chunks of art. In Clarin's room it's a life-size taxidermied horse and the glowering head of a dead composer. Later (see below) it's Ady Berber's head being sculpted by Kinski's artist character. These are the kinds of details that add additional layers of texture to the best Krimis, and make it so easy to see the line that connects these movies to the Giallo.

This "pulling back of the curtain" leads directly into more intrusion of the camera-as-style, a slick, slightly disorienting transition that shifts (via the camera crawling across his open piano) from a shot of Clarin to a shot of his mother contentedly listening to her son play. (She is played by the inimitable [inimitably grotesque] Elisabeth Flickenschildt, who is in a statistical dead heat for my "Favorite Krimi performer of all time".)

Composing the Composer: Later in the movie, Vohrer's staging of Clarin (in a moment of tortured daydreaming) recalls the camera's movement through his piano from the opening.

This wipe of the camera—first from left to right (across the innards of the piano), then from the bottom of the screen to the top—is repeated a few scenes later, as the camera appears to burrow through the walls of the home and into Lord Lebanon's private den. Lord Lebanon's first appearance is as a pair of hands, desperately warming themselves before a fire. The movement of his grasping hands sends them lower, even as the camera comes out of blackness at the top of the screen and matches the downward movement of his arms: 

[BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DEVIATIONS?]
They come in the form of typecast actors playing against the type of character audiences would have expected. As well as in the decidedly tame attempts at eroticism/titillation (positively chaste in comparison to almost any of the Krimis that would be released the following year; see the post on DER HEXER for good visual evidence of this).

The Ady Berber we've all come to expect ... or is it?

• Series regular Ady Berber isn’t a hulking, inarticulate brute for once. He’s also not a villain who uses his preternatural bulk to savagely murder large portions of the cast. Which is of course his typecasting in these movies, taking his hairy George “The Animal” Steele-plus-Tor Johnson bulk and exaggerating it to grotesque heights. In DEAD EYES OF LONDON he plays a dead-eyed, hairy-armed monstrosity, who is sent as a living, breathing, sweating weapon to crush the skulls of men with hefty life insurance policies. In DOOR WITH THE SEVEN LOCKS, he plays a near-lobotimized minion of the chief villain, attempting (among other things) to bury at least one Scotland Yard detective alive.
  
  His first appearance in this movie (the images above) plays up his “dumb brute” status at first: During the start of the freak storm, he scares one of the stranded family members by lumbering through his window from the outside. His only response, by way of explanation or apology, is: “It’s raining.”
  
  From this, you assume it’s going to be same ol’, same ol’ for Ady. But, refreshingly enough, he next shows up as an articulate (if still physically imposing) valet-slash-cook-slash-assistant butler for the family’s manse. He’s revealed to be a former wrestling champion—and this skill is put to good use in restraining one of the many murder suspects—but he’s never presented as the bestial, grunting, demonically grinning killer that he's usually saddled with. His death especially strikes a sympathetic chord, left hanging among the pigeons by the elusive (and seemingly impossibly strong) killer:

The Klaus Kinski we all expect ... or is it?

• Klaus Kinski slips us a mickey. Kinski plays the illegitimate son of the dead millionaire, a tortured artist type who is openly insulted by the other family members and is, more than once, seriously suspected of being the “Indian Scarf Killer”. He’s shown shooting himself up with some drug, and the family doctor suggests that his behavior is that of a serious drug addict. He’s shown shattering wine glasses with his bare hand, and you think, “Here we go on the Kinski train again.”
  
  But, like Berber, he’s cast against type. His injections aren’t illicit drugs, but insulin to treat his diabetes. His “tortured artist” is actually quite talented, seemingly content to stay alone in his room and work while the rest of the family sneaks around the house and offs each other. (This includes one particularly memorable scene where he’s taking a mold of Berber’s head, with Berber breathing through a straw while he waits for the plaster to set; see below.) And, instead of this bastard son being the killer, it turns out the killer is the millionaire’s legitimate (but quite mad) son instead. 

Immortalizing Berber, parts 1, 2, & 3. Also: More "art as outsized device".

When is an ingenue not an ingenue?

• The ingenue is almost after the fact. Corny Collins (pictured above) has to be one of the least-memorable actresses in the "ingenue in distress" role that often makes or breaks these movies. Part of this is no doubt down to the fact that her screentime (and overall importance to the plot) is severely limited (for once, her character isn't the sole heir to the inheritance that everyone is scheming for, just one of many). Another part, though, is no doubt down to the fact that she is absolutely no Karin Dor.

What should be one of the most indelible scenes in the movie. Yet, with Corny Collins in the middle of it, I didn't even remember that it'd happened until I went back through the movie to pull caps.

• When is Sir John not a Sir John? Another deviation: Siegfried Schürenberg, who I've watched play Sir John—the hopelessly over-matched buffoon-head of Scotland Yard—at least six times now, here plays not a Sir John at all, but one of the distant relations of the dead old millionaire. He's a globe-trotting anthropologist who has spent his life digging up other people's lives. It's a small thing, but I admit it took me two or three scenes to realign my expectations whenever I saw him onscreen. I had to forget his accumulated character of Sir John, and believe him to be somebody else (which, tbh, I never quite succeeded in doing).

• MIA Eroticism. With 1964 being such a banner year for these movies pushing the envelope on onscreen depictions of nudity and/or sexuality and/or eroticism, it's notable how little THE INDIAN SCARF has to do with this trend. Other than jokey moments like the one below, when the killer spies on his next victim through the removed nipple of a painting in her room, the film is largely devoid of even *hints* at the erotic. (Another scene later, when Drache discovers a secret passage that allows him to spy on Corny Collins while she changes clothes comes to mind, except that her "underthings" look like they would rest just as comfortably on somebody's grandmother as this woman who's supposed to be one of the potential "love interest" characters in the movie.)

[THE WAYS IT DOESN'T DEVIATE] 

• Series clown Eddi Arent plays his fourth or fifth "Death Butler" character. His sometimes deliberately weird, deliberately restrained performance reminds me most of the way he played this character in the inaugural Rialto Krimi, THE FACE OF THE FROG. That is: His hijinks aren't as grating as in, say, PUZZLE OF THE RED ORCHID. But they aren't as organic and well-integrated (not to mention, at times, genuinely amusing) as in something like THE INN ON THE RIVER. It is a mostly buttoned-up Eddi we get here ... His schtick of removing the dinner service for each, next murdered family member works well enough, and further reinforces the connection to AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (there an Indian figurine  was removed from the dinner table after each murder).

I can read it on your face, Eddi...

• Heinz Drache, the poor-man's Joachim Fuchsberger, plays not a Scotland Yard detective, but the murdered millionaire's solicitor. By default, once the bodies start piling up, he becomes the film's amateur sleuth (and defacto hero).

• Ghosts of Gialli to Come. In Giuliano Carnimeo's 1972 Giallo THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS, the murderer, a violin player, uses a recording of his violin practice to cover the fact that he's actually in other parts of the apartment building, committing the murders. Here, Clarin does the same, using his seemingly endless piano practices as an audio alibi. The recording is hidden inside the seat of his piano bench. 

• The ever-present "Ende Gag". Arent, Drache, and Collins are the only three characters left alive at the end of the film. Drache finally reads Lord Lebanon's will and reveals that a huge chunk of his fortune is left to you-know-who:

The jokes make it impossible (for me at least) to rate it more highly (or take it more seriously) in the series as a whole. But Vohrer's ever-dependable style and the sections of the movie that play against type save it from the bottom of the rankings.

Leonard Jacobs

October, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release in Vol. 4 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets. | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Alfred Vohrer  | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, Harald G. Petersson, George Hurdalek | MUSIC: Peter Thomas | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Karl Löb | CAST: Heinz Drache (Frank Tanner); Corny Collins (Isla Harris); Klaus Kinski (Peter Ross); Gisela Uhlen (Mrs. Tilling); Hans Nielsen (Mr. Tilling); Siegfried Schürenberg (Sir Henry Hockbridge); Richard Häussler (Dr. Amersham); Hans Clarin (Lord Edward Lebanon); Alexander Engel (Reverend Hastings); Ady Berber (Chiko); Eddi Arent (Richard Maria Bonwit); Elisabeth Flickenschildt (Lady Emily Lebanon)