#011 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [CIRCUS OF FEAR aka PSYCHO-CIRCUS (1966)]

Kinski on the bridge ...

Margaret Lee is running out of options ...

A title card that feels decidedly un-Krimi-like.

[Note: This is the fifteenth 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.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5★)
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Heist / Master Criminal Krimi
     ii. Arent-as-Comedy-Routine Krimi
     iii. Arent-as-Villain Krimi
     iv. Kinski-as-Grotesque Krimi  
     v.  Proto-Giallo Krimi 
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Heinz Drache (amateur); Leo Genn (official) 
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Doesn't have one  

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

(NOTE: Before I knew what a Krimi was, somebody described CIRCUS OF FEAR to me as an old-fashioned Giallo. Watching it in this frame of mind was, needless to say, an enormous letdown, and made me dislike the movie quite a bit on that first watch. Also, purely as a matter of personal taste, almost all the scenes with the animals—esp. the poor elephants—just depress the heck out of me.)

♫ It's election night in America, and / I just feel like watching a Krimi ... ♫ 

Though I stand by the assertion that the Krimi’s switch to color signaled the end of its golden (and black-and-white) age, there *are* color Krimis out there worth watching. If the colorless-color remake of THE DEAD EYES OF LONDON is one of the worst color examples of the genre’s decline—all around a blandly perverse, blandly cast, blandly executed example of what the Krimi becomes when drained of its uniquely grotesque staging and atmospheres (also, any sense of the genuine playfulness of its experimental glee)—1966’s CIRCUS OF FEAR is a more “traditional” (also slightly dated) example that manages to still feel at home in the upper percentiles of the genre.

More traditional, but done in a non-traditional way. Instead of  the tradition of shooting a UK-set film in Germany, with highly artificial use of London landmark stock footage to “convince” viewers they’re watching a movie taking place in England, here we have a UK co-production, directed and scripted by Englishmen (John Llewellyn Moxey and Harry Alan Towers, respectively), with an opening prologue that was actually shot (on a Sunday, Moxey says in the commentary) on London’s Tower Bridge.

The film’s traditional start, with what seems like an Edgar Wallace gangland/heist prologue—the gang uses Tower Bridge as a staging area to waylay and rob a bank truck—quickly shifts to something more akin to earlier Rialto pictures, with an emphasis on garish, ostentatious characters and a sometimes-inspired use of a traveling circus going to stay at its “winter quarters” as the site of the rest of the movie.

Also non-traditional: The fact that the German portion of the cast is in the minority when it comes to casting. Moxey says that the “German contingent” of Krimi actors were “part of the package” tied to the German money that co-funded the film. That contingent consists of three of the most visible and recurring of Rialto’s players—Heinz Drache (who usually, though not always, serves in the role of hero detective), Eddi Arent (who occupies different levels of comic relief, depending on how broad the script calls on him to play), and of course Klaus Kinski. (Moxey, in the commentary, keeps marveling at what a “great face” Kinski has onscreen—that his big-eyed skull-mask largely equals his effectiveness at this point in his career.) 

(I’ll also admit that my appreciation of the Krimis I’m now revisiting have in some cases shifted as I’ve seen more of the later Rialto pictures. Whether this is a form of nostalgia that should be avoided, or simply an example of having a better context—with each, next film seen—in which to evaluate their varying degrees of quality, I can’t really say … certainly this growing context has allowed me to write at greater length about CoF, and in a way that’s more constructive than in my last review.)

A film full of faces (some familiar; some not) ...

Genre stalwart Heinz Drache.

Christoper Lee, hiding behind the mask.

Leo Genn, nothing if not upstanding and proper.

Suzy Kendall, just a few years before her role in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE.

Krimis can always use more Kinski ...

... and more men in masks.

Non-traditional characteristic #3: The film’s “preferred” soundtrack is the English one, and as far as I can tell contains the German actors’ actual voices, dubbing themselves in English. Kinski’s low, disaffected drawl of the lines—“I want wooorrrrkkkk … not hard wooorrrkkkk…”—makes me smile every time I hear it, and helps enlarge his character in my memory of the movie, despite his limited screen time. In fact hearing the actual voices of all three speak English makes me happy, after all the awful dub jobs I’ve heard trying to track these movies down.

The other big draw, I would guess at least at the time, was Christopher Lee. He plays a hooded lion tamer, whose face was scarred beyond recognition by an encounter with one of the big cats, and who has a twin brother who went to jail for murdering Drache’s father. He’s forceful, even behind the mask, and is never not a presence in the film.

As with many of the plot- and twist-heavy Krimis, though, this one lives and dies by how deftly it manages to handle all the subplots getting stacked on top of each other. (This proliferation of pulp ideas is also studded with Giallo cast connections—BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE’s Suzy Kendall [director Moxey says she was dating Dudley Moore at the time]; DOUBLE FACE’s Margaret Lee; and Leo Genn, from LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN): 

• There’s the “broad daylight” Tower Bridge robbery that opens the film; 
• the murder and/or capture of the entire gang except for the shadowy “Boss,” whose face no one has seen;
• Drache as circus ringmaster hounding Christopher Lee re: his father’s murder;
• a mysterious suitcase of money that Lee finds, Kinski wants, and that was (the viewer assumes) hidden by the gang’s boss in the circus’ winter quarters;
• the circus’ resident “little person,” Mr. Big, blackmailing what feels like five different characters; 
• plus a bunch of other stuff—Margaret Lee serially cheating on her hothead, knife-throwing partner; Kendall possibly hiding a terrible secret for her Uncle Christopher Lee; and reliable ol’ Leo Genn, as the harried (but also exceedingly proper) Scotland Yard inspector, going undercover in the circus in an attempt to tie together all the threads.

There’s also the expected Eddi Arent comedy routines: He plays the circus accountant, but is insufferable in his attempts to be taken seriously as one of the troupe’s clowns. We get brief, mini-setpieces of him showing off the tricks that he hopes will bag him the job—a rigged, blood-spraying guillotine; a box that drenches the person inside with water instead of making them disappear, etc.

The Arent we know ... and ...

... the Arent we usually don't.

What counterbalances his comedy is the fact that he is, in the end, revealed to be the murderous mastermind who’s been orchestrating everything by publicly playing the fool (the chief other suspect is of course the black-masked Lee). Arent turns out, by implication, to have ratted out his own gang in order to hoard the heist money and to have spent most of the picture sleeping with Margaret Lee (his hairy arms that stand-in for his character early on in the trailer scenes with her—the camera sure not to show his face or let us hear his voice—seemed all the more vulgar when I realized they were attached to him). 

As in the same year's HUNCHBACK OF SOHO, using his buffoon persona as a cover for his villainy feels like it adds another layer of viciousness to the reveal, to what he’s done. (Though I suppose fans could argue that you can see the twist coming a mile away, Arent’s pleasingly two-sided performance—again, as in HUNCHBACK—is what sells it for me. And because Arent is such a buffoon in so much of the series, when he does go dark, it feels perhaps darker than it would for some of the other series regulars.) He also turns out to have a motivation for his murders that shows up, among other places, in THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE (1969): He is seeking to avenge the memory of his father, a world-famous knife thrower whose legacy his ego has caused him to project via sweeping acts of crime.

Anatomy of a murderer: Until he's revealed at the end, Arent-as-villain exists in the film only as a series of body parts (mostly shown during his rendezvous with Margaret Lee). Also, these sequences sometimes include use of a Giallo-killer first-person pov.

So is it any good? Decent, I’d say, esp. if you’re already inclined to be a fan (at the very least, you can’t argue with the cast). Where it falls down is in the octopus-armed middle, with a new arm of plot uncoiling what feels like every 5 minutes. Slowly you realize that the heist prologue of the movie—the film’s highlight, along with the reveal and capture of Arent at the end—might as well not exist, as it has no material effect on the goings on at the circus, other than to inject Kinski (a minor character) and the suitcase of money (only peripherally important to the plot) into the final two-thirds. It really feels like it’s playing a game with too many cards in its hand. That, and it never scales the psychotronic heights of the truly great Krimis … 

And though I’m sure there are purists out there who would argue that it’s *not* a Krimi—Moxey seems fuzzy on whether or not the screenplay was adapted from Wallace (most of the blurbs I’ve seen about the movie say it was)—for me it’s in the Krimi-verse through and through. As mentioned above, just don’t expect the heights of weird style (Karin Dor’s wide-eyed and mesmerized worship of her mother’s portrait; or, THE PHANTOM OF SOHO’s light-casting gloves ported in from the genre future; or, the Fassbinder vibe of Elisabeth Flickenschildt’s INN ON THE RIVER, what with its breathy, tired-in-life songs performed by her, and Kinski in a sweaty, perpetually dirty white suit and rat mustache; or Flickenschildt in her husband’s creepy rubber death-mask, clutching her “gallows hand” in the air all through THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE; etc.).

Or the flights of distorted, giddily experimental music (the title themes for DEAD EYES OF LONDON and DER HEXER are my current favorites).

Or the black-and-white prime of the real K-greats.

Thankfully, though, it doesn’t succumb to the kind of dreary, depressing pointlessness—the Slough of Genre Despond—that too many of the other color films sink into. (This film might be middling, but they are painfully, tediously less than the sum of their parts.) In short, the more of a Krimi fan you are—and the more you agree that the switch to color saw an undeniable decline in the genre's quality—the more you'll find yourself able to appreciate the (admittedly middling) pleasures on display here.

Leonard Jacobs
November, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The Blue Underground DVD | LANGUAGE: English | DIRECTOR: John Llewellyn Moxey | WRITER(S): Harry Alan Towers, Edgar Wallace | MUSIC: Johnny Douglas | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ernest Steward | CAST: Christopher Lee (Gregor); Leo Genn (Elliott); Anthony Newlands (Barberini); Heinz Drache (Carl); Eddi Arent (Eddie); Klaus Kinski (Manfred); Margaret Lee (Gina); Suzy Kendall (Natasha); Cecil Parker (Sir John); Victor Maddern (Mason); Maurice Kaufmann (Mario); Lawrence James (Manley); Tom Bowman (Jackson); Skip Martin (Mr. Big)