#012 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE SINISTER MONK aka DER UMHEIMLICHE MONCH (1965)]

A remarkable prologue in a genre chock-full of them. We get the death of a wealthy patriarch, the introduction of his scheming children, a death-bed change to his will, his lawyer's death-by-rock-to-the-windshield, and a sudden eruption of color (in the form of a flaming car) in an otherwise black-and-white film. (Also the introduction of Darkwood Hall as a Gothic character in itself.)

 

The family waits outside the death room. From left, Dieter Eppler (who plays Sir William), Hartmut Reck (Ilse Steppat's son Ronny, who happens to be an unrepentant murderer-rapist), and Steppat, the dying man's conflicted daughter. She is the headmistress of a girls' boarding school housed in Darkwood Hall, and hopes that her father's death won't mean that she will lose the property.

The dying man, dictates his last will, giving everything to his disgraced granddaughter Gwendoline (played by series superstar Karin Dor).

The dead man's solicitor leaving in his car. Krimi fans are sure to know that he'll be stopped from making his destination before the opening credits roll.

A mystery man launches a rock at the lawyer's windshield, causes the car crash, and escapes into the night with the will. As the car erupts in flame, so does the film (in color). It's the first (and last) Krimi to use this trick, as far as I'm aware; the following year's HUNCHBACK OF SOHO would become the first full-color Rialto film.

[Note: This is the sixteenth 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.]

[Note: I returned to one of the dwindling number of black-and-white Krimis that I hadn't seen, as a kind of palate cleanser for the depressing retreads that start happening once the series switches to color (those that I've been writing up of late). It also gave me the chance to write about a third entry that features comedian Eddi Arent as the head villain. I watched the film twice (including when I did the capping), and found myself developing a genuine appreciation for what it does right, covered below under four headings.]


My Krimi Rating: ★★★★☆ 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Boarding School Krimi
     ii. Ingénue in Distress Krimi
     iii. Masked Monk Krimi
     iv. Inheritance Krimi
     v. Arent-as-Villain / Arent-as-Human-Being Krimi
    vi. Old Dark House Krimi
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Harald Liepnitz (official)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Karin Dor (who passes the baton in this movie to Uschi Glas) 
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd link)

 
[ARENT AS VILLAIN; ARENT AS HUMAN BEING]
This is now the third Arent-as-Villain entry I’ve written up, and it feels like the most human, in terms of his characterization—the most potentially satisfying, esp. when trying to view him not as a vaudeville character (his usual level of believability) but as a functioning person whose motivations both make narrative sense and elicit some sympathy in the viewer. His primary persona in the film is the overly helpful butler who is overly concerned with Karin Dor’s well-being. And though Arent is known for playing some version of a “comedy butler” in more than one series entry, it's refreshing how restrained he plays it for this one. There’s no (or, not much) Arent mugging at the camera as he tells tired jokes. Not much physical comedy—no Arent standing on his head doing leg-scissor exercises while his Scotland Yard partner tries to question him; no Arent being shot in the back with an arrow that (literally) attaches him to the film’s “Ende” gag. Generally, he feels like a human being here. One who has a deep (if unexplained) devotion to Dor. Everything from his understated, toned-down body language, to his beaming and enthusiastic expressions, to the lines visible on his face in closeup—he's not his usual one-note comedy routine. (Just goes to show, I guess, that Arent did have range, and, when given the opportunity, could layer his performance in believable ways.)

Arent is the resident butler at Darkwood Hall. He is inexplicably concerned with Dor's safety, from the moment she arrives. Instead of playing this extreme of concern for laughs, or for a creepy red herring, the film chooses to play it as a genuine human emotion.

Even when it’s revealed that his desire to keep her safe is (maybe) a mask for a kind of obsessive-compulsive longing for her—how else are we supposed to take the fetishizing he does of her “death” mask, hanging it all alone on a wall in his lavish den?—he still feels more sympathetic than creepy. His death at the end almost makes me feel bad for him (or, at least, for the unfixable tragedy that his life had become), and it shows a welcome depth in the characterization of his “good half”.


...

I will say that, on the first watch, the thing I found unsatisfying about his character was the time I was given to appreciate him *as the villain*. Though the hooded Monk makes many appearances in the movie—always quickly and expertly dispatching another unlikable member of the cast with his unerring whip-snapping skills—unless you’ve guessed early on that it’s Arent under the mask, you have little time to contemplate him as a villain. Until the final reveal, which feels like it happens maybe too quickly after such an agonizing build-up (the time the film spends on sheer delay—postponing the arrival of the Monk's unmasking while Dor stays stymied in an unfamiliar house, hosted by a new butler who isn't "allowed to say" who his master is [or where he is] ... she is shown to the den, finds her death mask hanging on the wall, and is left to wait ... and wait ...). When the climax finally comes, and the hood is peeled off Arent's face, I was immediately wishing that I'd had more time to take all this in. That he hadn't lost his ability to function as a villain at almost the same moment the audience began to think of him as one.

On my second watch, knowing all this going in, I have to say that I appreciated everything more. And found the ending not so much anti-climatic (or frustrating), but sadder, and more impactful. (More on the ending, and Arent's *other* appearance as a killer monk, below.)

[THE CRUEL NATURE OF THE FILM'S OTHER VILLAINS]
So, as you would expect, the machinations of the plot get a little convoluted. What overrides the confusion for me (in my recall of the movie) is how breathtakingly callous the family of villains are, as they seek to steal Karin Dor's inheritance.

A rogue's gallery of familiar faces. Facing, from left, Gwendoline's (Karin Dor's) cousin Ronny (Hartmut Reck, whose face btw reminded me more than once of Phil Hartman's), Uncle William (Dieter Eppler), Aunt Patricia (Ilse Steppat), and Uncle Richard (Siegfried Lowitz). Fans of the genre will recognize at least three of these four actors, with Lowitz usually playing one of the regular stable of detectives (more on the detective merry-go-round below).

Ilse Steppat, daughter of the dead man, wants to keep Darkwood Hall at all costs, as it is the site of the girls' boarding school that has become her life. Dieter Eppler, her brother, is content to inherit as much London property as possible. Third brother Siegfried Lowitz (who wasn't present for the prologue death, as he was likely orchestrating the car accident and theft of the will) takes his father's death as an opportunity to threaten blackmail for all involved. Steppat's rapist son Ronny is just looking for whatever lifetime meal ticket will be easiest to punch. And … the wild card in all this scheming is the dead man's granddaughter, our heroine Karin Dor (Gwendoline), who is the missing will's sole heir. We learn that her father, the final brother of this scheming trio, has been imprisoned for murder … a murder that (of course) his siblings pinned on him, leaving Dor to live the mistaken shame of being the daughter of a murderer, and to assume that her lot in life will involve anything but enormous inheritances and the opportunities of privilege. 

One remarkable thing about these secondary villains in the movie is just how callous they are when it comes to manipulating Dor's character out of her money—by turns they want to hide her inheritance from her, extort her inheritance from her, and/or force themselves romantically (also, it need not even be said, sexually) in order to make her think she has no choice in life but to join one of them in a prison of forced matrimony. Their interactions are low on humor and high on just how incapable these four are of functioning as moral human beings. They represent a clear and felt menace for Dor. They don't find their abuse of Dor questionable, but tiresome—tiresome because it's taking so damn long, and they're ready to be done with it already so they can exercise total, malicious power over her. 

They come across as really awful people, and infuse the movie with a cruel streak that seems ahead of its time (or an echo of genre outliers from an earlier one: The jaw-dropping psychic cruelty of the satanists in Val Lewton's THE SEVENTH VICTIM comes to mind).

It is also the reason why Arent's unmasking as the main villain carries with it the possibility of so much sympathy—why his performance seems so human: It stands in contrast to how inhuman Dor's oppressors are—they who want to rob, murder, and/or molest her, whose necks Arent has spent the movie snapping in order to *protect* Dor and her inheritance ... that he also did this in the hopes that she would, out of gratitude (or even love) eventually marry him is where the audience identification with his tragic character starts to trail off, and instead aligns him more with later Slasher/Giallo killers, insecure and addled men who undertake their murders so they can dominate (or impress) a woman they “love”.

(Beyond the subplot of someone else trying to take revenge on Ronny because of the rape he committed, there are others: Chief among them being that the girls at Steppat's boarding school are being systematically kidnapped by a white-slaving ring. As in ROOM 13, the overemphasis on these other plots only dilutes what should be the real strength of the material [in R13 it's the proto-Giallo/proto-Slasher plot; here it's the identity and motivation of the masked Monk re: Dor]. It encourages the viewer to spend too much time sorting red herrings, and not enough time focusing on the more psychotronic aspects of the story.)

Just one of several sequences that focus on the conniving family and their attempts to dominate and/or hoodwink Dor.

[THE MURDERS THEMSELVES]
Both in the measured, almost ritualized way the Monk dispatches his victims (Craig J. Clark, in his Letterboxd review, put it best: "After each murder, I found myself looking forward to the expert way he coils up his whip in preparation for the next victim."), and how effectively staged his appearance comes off, he makes for one of the most satisfying Krimi villains I've seen:

[EMBEDDED CHUNKS OF OTHER KRIMIS, DEPLOYED IN WAYS THAT ACTUALLY WORK]
The film works if you're a Krimi fan, because it looks both forward and backwards in the genre:

1. What else can be said about Karin Dor's influence on the genre? As far as I’m aware, this is her last appearance in a Krimi (11 in all), and one where she symbolically hands off her ingénue baton to Uschi Glas (who plays one of the kidnapped schoolgirls here, and who would go on to play similarly menaced characters in THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS, THE GORILLA OF SOHO, THE CORPSE IN THE THAMES (aka, ANGELS OF TERROR), and SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS [also, the “Giallo-that’s-really-an-unofficial-Krimi,” Antonio Margheriti’s NAKED YOU DIE]).

She had at this point in her portrayal of Krimi female leads run a richer gamut than most other female cast members (save for Elisabeth Flickenschildt, who, because of age, was perhaps given the chance to do more with her undeniable screen presence than just play a damsel in distress … it’s also possible Barbara Rütting may eventually join this rarefied group, but I still have too many of her performances yet to see). She’d played the Giallo-killer in ROOM 13—effectively embodying Yolanda from THE SCREAMING MIMI, effectively foreshadowing Monica Ranieri from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. And she’d played the most stock version of the ingénue character in one of the absolute most perfect Krimis, THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE. She’d even played an ingénue-lite in “imitation” Krimis like THE INVISIBLE DR. MABUSE.

She is, as much as Joachim Fuchsberger, Eddi Arent, or Klaus Kinski, part of the very DNA of these films, one of the integral reasons that they succeed. Her absence from later entries is just that: an absence. One that the films largely failed to fill for the rest of their run. 

2. A welcome use of the expected grotesques: Grotesque characters (and character traits) had become the norm in the series by 1965, and SUSPIRIA's Rudolf Schündler plays a creep artist who lives in the attic and spends his time making death masks. Though he figures into the white-slaving plot, the more interesting sections of his screen time come when he's interacting with Dor's character. He invites her into his studio and puts on a record, which turns out to be the same piece of music that Rose's brother Mark listens to while in class, in Rome, in Argento's INFERNO.

Later, he takes a plaster cast of her face for his collection, in a scene that reminded me of Kinski doing the same to Ady Berber in THE INDIAN SCARF:

3. The latest installment of the Detective's Club: Harald Liepnitz is the film's resident detective. Liepnitz also appears as detective in CREATURE WITH THE BLUE HAND and as a psuedo/assumed detective hero in CURSE OF THE HIDDEN VAULT. What's most interesting about his turn as detective is that he is only one of at least eight different actors who would play the chief sleuth for the films.  

Joachim Fuchsberger and Heinz Drache are the two most used (also: the two most satisfying, appearing as hero-detectives in at least 17 and 8 films respectively), but we also have the somewhat older (and stodgier) Siegfried Lowitz (you can seem him detecting in FACE OF THE FROG, THE FORGER OF LONDON, and DER HEXER); Gunther Stoll, who feels always miscast in such a leading man role, and feels more suited to shifty, deranged killers like the one he plays in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (as detective, he appears in HUNCHBACK OF SOHO and DOUBLE FACE); Horst Tappert, whose lack of charisma I've already written about in THE GORILLA GANG and THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE; and Hansjörg Felmy, who is genially solid in the detective role in movies like ANGELS OF TERROR and THE MAD EXECUTIONERS (and is surprisingly layered as the Jack the Ripper-afflicted actor in MONSTER OF LONDON CITY). 

Also, another name that can be added to the list is Harry Riebauer, who is Inspector in Bryan Edgar Wallace's STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE, and plays a police doctor in the B.E.W. entry THE MAD EXECUTIONERS, as well as more than one shiftless, lecherous red herring (in COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS, he is the unemployed brother of the school's headmistress, who uses his access to the school as a way to sleep with the girls … which is, actually, a kind of re-do of Ronny's character here.)

Get in line, Detective ... Harald Liepnitz fills the requisite role here.

4. End of the mystery, end of the monk. Arent's unmasking here is quite a contrast to the unmasking of “Monk” Eddi at the end of THE BLACK ABBOT. There it's played as an improbable joke (he says he put on the killer monk's mask because he was cold [?!?!]), a jokey bridge to the film's Ende gag. Here, it feels both more serious, and more sad. 

In this moment of unmasking I kept thinking of the wardrobe mistress' unmasking of the killer in OPERA (that black, finely textured fabric and the cut of the eyeholes have a lot in common).

Liepnitz's explanation for Arent's motives, talking to Dor: “A woman must have hurt him deeply when he was young. So he felt only hatred against anything feminine. That would also explain his disguise as a monk. But then he met you. The notes you received came from him. He was a criminal, but he wanted to help you prove your father's innocence. He must have loved you very much.” 

What's weird about this solution to the mystery (other than unexplained bits like his hatred of women would drive him to dress as a Monk [?!]) is the fact that the film also has a strange kind of “double explanation”. After Liepnitz makes this speech to Dor, the solution is immediately explained in even more detail to Sir John (reliable ol' Siegfried Schürenberg). It's hard to say what the narrative reason for this double reveal is, esp. as one scene follows directly on the other. It's a clumsy, utilitarian redo of exposition, which seems to have no effect other than to deaden the sadness of the Monk's death by repeating a series of purely made-up motives that don't, in the end, have much to do with the plot.

Interestingly enough, the first Krimi that casts comedian Arent as the villain also dispenses with the Ende gag altogether.

 Leonard Jacobs

November, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release offered in Vol. 6 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Harald Reinl | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, J. Joachim Bartsch, Fred Denger | MUSIC: Peter Thomas | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ernst W. Kalinke  | CAST: Karin Dor (Gwendolin); Harald Leipnitz (Inspector Bratt); Siegfried Lowitz (Sir Richard); Siegfried Schürenberg (Sir John); Ilse Steppat (Lady Patricia); Dieter Eppler (Sir William); Hartmut Reck (Ronny); Kurt Waitzmann (Cunning); Rudolf Schündler (Alfons Short); Kurd Pieritz (Monsieur d'Arol); Uta Levka (Lola); Dunja Rajter (Dolores); Uschi Glas (Mary); Eddi Arent (Smith)