#010 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE HUNCHBACK OF SOHO aka DER BUCKLIGE VON SOHO (1966)]

This movie's version of the prologue murder that opens so many films in the genre. These caps make it clear that the Krimi had vaulted into a new era, not just an era of color (this being the first color entry from Rialto), but an era that would willingly employ the slackening of censorship to play up the sex-and-sleaze side of things (putting a woman running in lingerie front and center—who is then immediately strangled to death). Note also that the prologue shows that not all of the Krimi's self-reflexivity and meta-ness was played for laughs. In the prologue murder, we see the club Mekka make a return, last seen as the hideout for the gang that Joachim Fuchsberger is trying to smash in the far superior INN ON THE RIVER (1962).

[Note: This is the fourteenth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED. ALSO, SOME IMAGES IN THIS POST ARE NSFW.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5★) 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Boarding School Krimi
     ii. Inheritance Scheme Krimi
     iii. Ingénue in Distress Krimi
     iv. Arent-as-Comedy-Routine Krimi
     v. Arent-as-Villain Krimi
 Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official):
     Gunther Stoll (official)  Who's the Ingénue: 
      Monika Peitsch

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

This first color Rialto Krimi tends to prove the rule when it comes to my sense that the switch to color for the genre equals, ultimately, a switch to diminishing returns for the Krimi fan. Whether that's because those adapting Wallace's stories had begun to run out of source material by 1966 (unlikely, considering the staggering number of work written by Wallace; I've seen the figure quoted that, at some point in England, a full one-fourth of all published work was written by Wallace). Or the possibility that the status of the films as some sort of cash cow shifted the focus of the filmmakers away from frisson, dizzying energy, perverse experimentation, and toward by-the-numbers recycling designed to maximize revenues. Or that the loss of certain, key cast members really did signal a loss of a certain gravitas and mood that the films could otherwise claim, well, I'm not sure. The notion of “loss” though—re: originality, energy, stylistic tours-de-force—isn't in doubt. 

(There's definitely a kind of familiar cast-to-quality ratio, wherein the more classic Krimi actors remaining in the cast tends to equal a lesser drop-off in quality. Here, thankfully, we get a handful of recognizable players: old dame Agnes Windeck, who appeared as the surprisingly hard-edged widow in DER ZINKER [THE SQUEAKER, 1963]; Pinkas Braun, who played curled-lip villains in everything from THE DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS [1962] to THE ZOMBIE WALKS [1968]; Siegfried Schürenberg, whose amiable Sir John is a master's class in genre acting in comparison to Hubert von Meyerinck's frankly stomach-turning dirty-old-man Sir Arthur [see him in all his sagged glory in this review]; and Eddi Arent, who is among *the* faces of the series.)

Kim Newman, in his coverage of the German box sets for Video Watchdog, summarizes the plot this way:

“Wanda Merville (Monika Peitsch) shows up in England to claim an inheritance but is kidnapped and replaced by a schemer so her nasty family can keep the fortune … Gunther Stoll, a newcomer, is Inspector Hopkins, while Pinkas Braun again plays a verminous gangster working for bogus respectable types, a disgraced general (Hubert von Meyerinck) who restages the Battle of Tobruk with toy tanks in the basement, his supposedly daffy wife (Agnes Windeck) and a hypocritical bogus priest (Arent).”

Hubert von Meyerinck. In THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE, he plays horn-dog head of Scotland Yard Sir Arthur. Here, he plays a dotty old military man, who spends his days in the basement playing with toy tanks.

If that sounds both uninspired and overly complicated, take into consideration that there are yet more subplots clogging up the film. The chief one is the way the movie adds the “girls imperiled by a white-slaving gang”-Wallace-ism to the mix. Here the girls are juvenile delinquents who have been sent to live at what appears to be a charity/church reform school. There, apparently unbeknownst to the authorities, they are forced to wear old-fashioned uniforms and do industrial-sized loads of never-ending laundry (a white slaving ring that enslaves girls so it can make money off them doing … other people’s laundry?!?!). This item helps the film feel like a cross between a Dickensian squalor plot that involves an heir to an unexpected fortune being hoodwinked by others and a free-love sixties time capsule that attempts to “sex up” the Krimi, but fails. 

A laundress' work is never done ... and that's Wanda Merville (Monika Peitsch) on the left side of the crank, forced into servitude in this 24-hour laundry so some other girl can claim her father's inheritance.

The “sexed up” part comes when we learn what happens to the white-enslaved girls once they “graduate” out of the laundry business—they are forced to become money-making escorts at the seedy London club Mekka. This part of the white slaving plot shows up, regurgitated one way or the other, in several of these later color Krimis. The only place where it borders on being effective (in that group of color Krimis I've managed to see so far) is Vohrer’s last entry, 1969’s THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE. And only there because it involves a proper “English Lady” who is in fact so shockingly, brazenly vindictive that her performance alone—dripping sadism into every scene that includes her—almost rescues the film from its scrambled rehash through the sheer callousness of her onscreen persona. She literally forces whole boatloads of London showgirls into abuse, torture, and (eventually) death in South American brothels. And she literally only does this (the money it makes her seems totally beside the point) because a scant few of them have dared, at various points in her life, to attempt to date her son (a son she seems intent on forcing into a life that involves no female companionship but her own). As I mentioned in the review, she's the closest thing to a return of Elisabeth Flickenschildt to the genre as we get, post her last appearance in 1964's THE PHANTOM OF SOHO (a film in constant competition for my #1 Krimi spot). 

Here, the tawdry “sleazing up” that takes place feels—perhaps most of all—just depressing.

Even Siegfried Schürenberg's Sir John has the good sense to be embarrassed by the tasteless "sex-on-display" choices being made. Just what do the filmmakers hope to achieve by including nudity like this anyway?

(It's also depressing because it's so stereotyped: E.g., the butchy head matron of the reform school exults in whipping the juvenile delinquent girls with a riding crop. Which I guess is supposed to be a mid-60s attempt at S&M eroticism. Watching it now, it feels dated, unimaginative, and [most of all] tedious to sit through. Likewise with the various mini-rebellions that the girls stage, in an attempt to escape their imprisonment.)

 Ilse Pagé takes her stand in the face of Hilde Sessak's whip. Pagé would go on to play the thankless role of horny old Sir Arthur's put-upon secretary in later films ... and: Maybe *that's* where they got the idea for Inspector Perkin's otherwise inexplicable use of a riding crop ...

[WHERE/HOW THE FILMMAKERS BREAK WHAT DIDN'T NEED TO BE FIXED TO BEGIN WITH]
Beyond the above-mentioned attempts to add titillation to this 60s entry (the fact that they fail at this so badly is strange; if they needed any templates for how to properly sex up the series, in eyebrow-raising and genuinely erotic ways, all they had to do was look at what Vohrer did so successfully in DER HEXER, just two years earlier), there is the other major misfire: 

Gunther Stoll being a hero-dope. And, look, there's that futuristic Scotland Yard electric wall map that gets screen time in like every single Krimi after this.

• Introducing the first in a long line of utterly forgettable (utterly devoid of screen presence) hero-detectives. Here Gunther Stoll is inexplicably cast in the Fuchsberger/Drache role. I say inexplicable, because he's best-known to cult-genre fans today as the insane and murdering schizophrenic father of the titular Solange, in Massimo Dallamano's Krimi/Giallo co-production, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? Even if this weren't his most-recognizable role today, it still seems head-scratching that producers would cast Stoll in the square-jawed, dashing leading man slot, considering his physical appearance—his pinched face and thinned features always make me think of a rat instead of a hero—and his complete lack of charisma. When your dashing hero has a prominent scene that shows him lethargically washing his own laundry, so bored-to-tears by his job as Inspector that he might decide to stay home and wash his socks instead of investigate a murder, well ...

Were they trying to inject comic relief into the main hero? Why would they, when Eddi Arent, Siegfried Schürenberg, and Hubert von Meyerinck already provide that in spades (also a near-sighted barrister that gets thrown into the mix via one of the subplots). 

Were they hoping this casting-against-type would provide a chance for Stoll to carve out his own persona in the genre, as distinct from the ones inhabited by Fuchsberger and Drache? Okay, but then give him something interesting to carve out. All-in-all, he's a dud. The first dud, in a long line of them for the Krimis moving forward.

[THE “FIXES” THAT ACTUALLY ALMOST WORK]

• Casting Eddi Arent's buffoon routine as cover for the fact that he is, for the first time in the genre, a real bastard main villain [NOTE 11.02.14: Preparing screencaps today for an upcoming review, I realized that Arent played the villain in the previous year's THE SINISTER MONK, so technically HUNCHBACK is the *second* Rialto film where his comedy persona is used as cover to cast him as the master villain. Additionally, if you count the non-Rialto film CIRCUS OF FEAR, also from 1966, then it's really #3]. When his tried-and-true yucking-it-up mask comes off, he's revealed to be surprisingly chilling as a humorless, heartless, conscienceless killer, a man posing as a priest who in fact is happy to force girls into sexual bondage—a gang leader who will wantonly kill his associates in order to save his own skin. It's an example of the film using something that the genre has ingrained in its audience—Eddi Arent = hijinks—in order to subvert those expectations and actually pull off a trick that had, up till then, not been seen in a Krimi (as far as I know at least).

The Eddi Arent we've all come to know ... but wait ...

Here's the one we don't ...

It seems clear that Vohrer is quoting himself here. See, for instance, the image of Klaus Kinski below from Vohrer's 1961 film DEAD EYES OF LONDON. Vohrer seems to be using the visual tags of Kinski's mirrored glasses and menacing closeup to better identify Arent with the villainy so associated with good ol' Klaus (and all other Villains of Krimi Past).

• Some of the setpieces. In one or two instances, the story manages to do something that feels both forward-looking and authentic toward what's gone before. In a cross between a James Bond trap and one of the weirdo dream-horror details that are specific to the best early Krimis, there is a room in the reform school where women are strapped to chairs and menaced with an acetylene torch contraption that emerges out of a hole in the wall like a metallic snake (or slim-nosed fire hose). It seems both excessive (in terms of the level of violence that's being summoned to snuff someone out—something akin to the sudden weapons-grade flamethrower [dribbling a flame as big as a person] at the end of DEAD EYES OF LONDON) and perverse in its associations (in the way that, say, the razor murder fetishism is in ZIMMER 13, or the way that Hans Clarin's stunted infantilism seems to go hand-in-hand with his brutal  [also: enthusiastic] strangling campaign in THE INDIAN SCARF).

• What they do with the Hunchback. He's underused for sure, but he's still a satisfying variation on the hulking Ady Berber beast who cast his shadow over so many other Krimis. There's also a nice twist having to do with his hump (is it real or fake? And what does it mean if it is?) that feels well-executed. The staging of his murders seem both cruel and, at times, overwhelming (esp. when they are shot claustrophobically). 

 Leonard Jacobs
November, 2014

 

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release in Vol. 6 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets. | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Alfred Vohrer | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, Herbert Reinecker | MUSIC: Peter Thomas | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Karl Löb | CAST: Günther Stoll (Inspektor Hopkins); Pinkas Braun (Alan Davis); Monika Peitsch (Wanda Merville); Siegfried Schürenberg (Sir John); Agnes Windeck (Lady Marjorie Perkins); Gisela Uhlen (Mrs. Tyndal); Hubert von Meyerinck (General Edward Perkins); Uta Levka (Gladys Gardner); Suzanne Roquette (Laura); Hilde Sessak (Oberin); Susanne Hsiao (Viola); Ilse Pagé (Jane); Albert Bessler (Butler Anthony); Richard Haller (Der Bucklige); Eddi Arent (Reverend David)