#013 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [SCHOOL OF FEAR aka SIEBEN TAGE FRIST (1969)]

One of Vohrer's signature examples of style: Though the film as a whole pulls back from the comic-book, highly theatrical flamboyance of the "typical" Krimi, Vohrer's stylistic chops still make their appearance throughout.

No Edgar Wallace source material here—maybe one of the reasons for how separate, even "anti," the film feels in relation to the Rialto cycle? Also: No hyper-kinetic, neon-lit opening credits.

[Note: This is the nineteenth 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 NSFW IMAGES RESIDE BELOW.]

[Note: I'm taking a momentary break from writing up Giallo reviews for the "Sleaze-Art-Sleaze" series (the first two entries being SO SWEET, SO DEAD and AMUCK!) and logging another Krimi review. This one is a strange mix of Krimi stock elements and the form being diverted in other stylistic directions. For anyone interested in the film, the German DVD is the way to go, as it contains a significant amount of footage missing from the current US DVD release; see below for details and related (NSFW) caps.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★★☆ 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Boarding School Krimi
     ii. Exploitation Krimi
     iii. Krimi / Giallo Hybrid
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official):  
     Joachim Fuchsberger (amateur); Horst Tappert (official)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Doesn't have one 

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

Though helmed by the most prolific director in the genre (and the man who arguably had the most influence on the conventions that Krimi films came to follow—Mr. Alfred Vohrer himself), SCHOOL OF FEAR is an example of what it looks like when someone decides to stand those conventions on their head. Maybe that’s because this isn’t an official Rialto entry, or maybe it’s down to how late it arrives in the cycle, or the deformative power that the switch to color seemed to have on so many of the movies. Whatever it is, SCHOOL OF FEAR takes what should be a familiar cast, treading familiar territory, ticking off the boxes of familiar plot, and wrenches it just enough to produce ... well, I’m still not quite sure what it’s produced, other than a vibe of understated weirdness that makes it worthy of mentioning alongside the flashier, more over-the-top touchstones in the genre.

[TAKING THE KRIMI-FAMILIAR AND MAKING IT STRANGE]
When the man responsible for 14 other Krimis—all of them full of outre and baroque stylization (the light-and-shadow schemes of not just noir, but what feels like Mario Bava-inspired noir—and the carrying over of those Bavaesque sensibilities when his Krimis switched to color [look at the lit prisms of color that dominate his shots here, or here, or here])—instead delivers a picture that feels muted, stylistically restrained, stripped of its baroque tendencies, more cold and chilled to the bone, well: 

I think there’s at least room to argue that he was aiming for a kind of counterpoint to what he'd done before. Aiming to deliver not a candy-colored Krimi with sneering villains and damsels in distress (female characters unfortunately put upon, forced to take the clumsy, cringe-inducing, downright offensive groping of their bosses like they're in some sort of sexist 1930s screwball comedy)—not black-and-white chiaroscuro that cross-hatches hairy-armed gorilla-men whose “blind” contacts make them look like living ghouls—but something … else. (Add the fact that it appears to be his last Krimi, and it makes me believe these differences in feel and execution aren't down to shooting schedule, or financial considerations, or some kind of professional laziness, but that they're instead evidence of altered artistic aims.)

I'll spend most of the review covering the ways Vohrer's film diverges from his previous efforts. But first I'll give a short summary of the plot: 

A gang of high school boys have made a boarding school their own private kingdom, thanks to the fact that their leader, Kurrat, has a father who's a rich and powerful industrialist. His influence is such that the administrators of the school don't dare to really discipline Kurrat, for fear of the father's retribution. All the teachers look the other way whenever Kurrat has his way with the rules, and others are happy to be bought off by the spoiled son of some super-rich s.o.b. Kurrat and his gang pull pranks. They sneak off at night to visit a local striptease artist on the beach. They menace everyone who comes within their reach, including the pet dog of one of the teachers.

It is this incident, in which live fireworks are used to chase the dog around the school courtyard, that sets in motion the film's main mystery. When the teacher (Fromm) rushes to save the dog, he finds Kurrat on the scene. So outraged about the attack on the animal, he slaps K. without thinking, so many times that he draws blood. This brings K.'s dad to the school to demand explanation for why his son has been attacked. When he meets his son's attacker, he mysteriously asks for a private meeting with him (a meeting we don't get to see). After this meeting, both Kurrat and his father disappear (the father is eventually found in his car, at the bottom of a lake). Did Fromm do it? And why does the school's astronomy professor (who uses his telescope to spy on the students in the woods) apparently commit suicide after K.'s disappearance? And, could it have possibly anything to do with Nazis?

 

The students' nighttime visit to the stripteaser's place, a weird cross between club and home, that sits on stilts on the beach.

Our first introduction to Kurrat (wearing his ubiquitous blue-and-white scarf, an object of clothing that he never seems without; once he disappears, its appearance begins to stand in for him, in the film.)

According to the title card that precedes Filmjuwelen's presentation of the movie, the German version is seven minutes longer than the English version. For this disc, the film uses the English dub for all but these seven minutes, wherein it reverts to German soundtrack/English subs. The cuts are along the lines of what you would expect, usually falling into the category of either non-vital exposition or material that was perhaps deemed "too much" for the English release. E.g., the striptease artist (Hilde Brand, I think), appears in lingerie, but never completes the strip part of her act in the shortened version. In the German version (below), she does.

Fromm attacking Kurrat in the courtyard.

One instance where a visible drop in picture quality suggests certain parts of the movie were taken from an inferior source.

[DEVIANCE No. 1: THE PROLOGUE]
The prologue moves from one disorienting tactic to another. It begins with a match, almost disembodied, being lit in the dark. We slowly see the man holding the match, and assume he's searching for something. Shortly we see another man, apparently searching for him. The second man blinds the first with a flashlight, and we continue to be in the dark about what the heck ground situation is going on:

The prologue, in a "traditional" Krimi, would use this setup to show us the film's first death (most likely the murder of the man shielding himself from the flashlight, *by* the person holding that flashlight). The murder itself would then be punctuated by animated and bloody bullet holes piercing the screen to spell out Edgar Wallace's name. Then the credits proper, all set to a jaunty Peter Thomas or Martin Bottcher tune.

SCHOOL OF FEAR undercuts this, though, by presenting an otherwise mundane scenario (mundane but for the disorienting style that Vohrer couches it in): The man with the flashlight is Joachim Fuchsberger, one of the school's teachers, trying to find out why the power has gone out. The man with the match is the school caretaker, a boorish lout who is annoyed that he's been summoned from bed by the power outage. A fairly boring scene. No horribly dead bodies being discovered in the dark. No bleeding credit sequence bathing everything in neon splash. Nothing infused with that patented Wallace weirdness, or seeping eeriness, or theatrical horror appeal. Instead ... the caretaker simply finds the fuse box and turns the lights back on.

Except: Just as soon as the lights are restored, they go back out again. Fuchsberger is plunged back into darkness, out in the hall. And instead of trying to return to the fuse box, or rouse the caretaker again, or provide any exposition that might explain why he seems to ignore that the just-restored lights have been inexplicably cut again, he instead goes and searches Kurrat's room. He finds Kurrat and three of his gang missing. 

On his way (presumably) back to bed, he runs into Fromm, who is also running around the school's halls, in the dark, in the middle of the night, for apparently no reason. Fromm discourages Fuchsberger from reporting Kurrat's disappearance to the principal, and is cast immediately as some sort of co-conspirator or villain, a person who has secret knowledge of Kurrat's extracurricular activities that he doesn't want others to know (because he is somehow benefiting from this information himself?). This is important from a plot perspective, but what's decidedly more important is how this prologue establishes Vohrer's stylistic impulses for the entire film. 

It's a muted, mature, slow-burn style. Trading baroque and ostentatious Krimi flourishes for vaguely disconcerting, slowly unfolding spaces. Characters bathed in moody, blue-tinged shadow and uncertain focus. Instead of men screaming in agony as they are stabbed to death by a ghost villain (as happens in the prologue of THE BLACK ABBOT, e.g.) there is this fairly dialogue-heavy exchange that suggests subtle character relationships and half-submerged plots. (What *isn't* "anti" about this opening scene is the setting up of Fuchsberger as the film's de facto hero and audience surrogate.)

[DEVIANCE No. 2: STANDING STOCK KRIMI-ISMS ON THEIR HEAD]
The film repeatedly does things to “make strange” the conventions we have come to expect. It's a making strange that is largely achieved by draining them of their flash-in-pan, overly mannered, overly realized style, and playing them in the opposite direction whenever possible.

So for instance: 

Though we do get *the* face of the Krimi Joachim Fuchsberger (the male face at least; the female one would be Karin Dor)—Fuchsberger plus an assortment of other Krimi familiars: follow-on lead detective Horst Tappert (in a handful of the later color Krimis, he filled the Scotland Yard inspector role that was so often handled by F.), and rheumy-eyed, red-faced congenital creep Konrad Georg (as Fromm)—there's not much else that lines up with expectations.

The private boarding school populated by persistently “off” characters and hidden mysteries, with an assortment of female students being menaced by an unknown killer sounds pretty stock on paper. It's the setup we get in THE SINISTER MONK, THE HUNCHBACK OF SOHO, NAKED YOU DIE, THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS, et al. But then you get the wrench: There isn't a female student in sight. It's all young men here. This sounds like a simple enough (and insignificant) swap, but it ends up altering the film's tone drastically. Instead of scenes of sniping girls sneaking out to dance with boys in town, or to rendezvous with one of the school's attractive male teachers, or to be kidnapped by the main villain so they can be shipped off to some white-slaving ring, we get a gang of boys led by the smoldering, hipster-rebel Kurrat. He is charismatic AND pained. He is not the requisite ingénue-in-distress (usually the menaced center of these school-based Krimis) but a rebellious, dangerously sexual character who actively reshapes what happens in the plot according to his inscrutable will. And like any bonafide rebel-loner, he seems imbued with a certain degree of tragedy, or sadness, or *awareness* beyond that of his peers. He is contemplating things his classmates won't think about for years (if at all).

The Conflicted Rebel: At one point Kurrat backs down from an open show of rule-breaking because the astronomy teacher—who uses his telescope to spy on K., who seems to have a secret relationship with him—challenges him to "be a man". Instead of showing off, reveling in his insubordination, K. becomes suddenly sullen. Apologizes in front of everyone even though it causes him to lose face. He's a surprisingly layered character, with an actual arc, and enough conflicting emotions to make one care what happens to him. (And his name is another example of how this Krimi deviates from the other ones: Throughout, there is zero attempt to give the characters names that are supposed to sound British, in order to locate the action in an England as imagined by Edgar Wallace.)

One part Jim Morrison, one part James Dean ...

... and one part Narcissus?

These boys don’t have to worry about being sold into sexual slavery, or being duped out of their unknown inheritances by scheming and powerful men, or being forced into marriage with a shadowy master villain. In short: They don't have to submit to the expectation of being the damsel. And it is this simple inversion that tweaks the Krimis-come-before so effectively. In past Krimis, it was the girls being menaced. Here the invincible boys thumb their noses at the universe of authority and do the menacing. (Also the "boys" are clearly being played by men in their twenties.)

In one scene, Karin Hübner (who, interestingly enough, plays both one of the menaced female dancers in MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE *and* the comic-book master villain doing the menacing) attempts to break up a fight in the showers where three of the dominant boys are bullying another who they suspect of squealing. She is the caretaker's bored and dissatisfied wife, who harbors deep resentment for the pampered rich kids in the school, they who can seemingly go through life doing whatever they want, whenever they want (while she's forced to live a colorless, back-breaking routine cleaning up after them).

She tries to frighten the three boys with the threat of exposing what they’ve done—they respond by talking to her suggestively, innuendo that culminates in all three exposing themselves to her. When they do, the camera lingers on her conflicted face; we have seen the interactions with her boorish husband previously, and guess that whatever “marriage” exists between them is an emptied one indeed. It is an uncomfortable scene—made all the more uncomfortable because of the length of time the camera lingers on her reaction—and one that feels like it couldn’t exist in any of the Krimis that had come before.

This scene with Hübner reinforces that another Krimi staple is missing: not only is it not a girl's school here, there is no central ingénue-in-distress at all, that character whose presence so often serves as the primary motivating factor for the film's hero (Fuchsberger). The only whiff we get of this is in the role played by Petra Schürmann, a fellow teacher who is revealed to be in a semi-secret relationship with Fuchsberger's character. We get a scene of them riding horseback together and planning marriage (this after she has been onscreen a total of what feels like less than five minutes), and she appears (though only intermittently) at the faculty meetings in the film. Her character is a real non-entity in terms of importance to (or weight displaced in) the plot. Kurrat's gravitas, his screen presence, seems to suck up any spare screen time that would otherwise be devoted to such characters.

A far cry, then, from the previous Krimis literally built around the idea of this character, whose unknown inheritance, or secret familial past, or any confluence of other potboiler mechanics mean that she will be *the* dominant character re: screen time: the most menaced, most chased, most saved, etc. (It makes me think of an observation made by Holger Haase about how director Harald Reinl seemed to have, ah, “a thing” about tying up his wife [Karin Dor] in every film they did together: “The more I watch movies by Reinl the more I am fascinated by the fact that he just seems to thrive on bondage scenes. Most of his films have characters strung up and often abused or tortured; and a lot of times he seems to share a morbid delight on inflicting this kind of torture on his real-life wife.”)

Marianne Koch (nee Karin Dor) get their ringer. But she's barely a functioning part of the plot. We get an almost throwaway mention that she and Fuchsberger are planning to announce their impending engagement to the school, but she is never in danger, plays no material role in the plot, and gets maybe the least screen time of any named character in the film.

[DEVIANCE No. 3: MORE REDEPLOYMENT OF STYLE]
The Vohrer visual style (which had by this time become heavy with gel-like lighting and artificially pumped-up colors) here is drained of many of these mannerisms, literally bleached by his use of the real-world conditions going on around the filming—a frigid, hard-packed, snow-choked winter. Everything is covered in a fine film of cold. It's a deployment of style that is not so much flash and volume and bluster—visual puns, flamboyant transitions, canted angles and "trick" shots—but the more careful linking of a series of unusually detailed (and staged) images. For instance, take a look at these images from a field trip that Fromm and Kurrat take after the incident with the dog. It feels like Vohrer cycles through his style not so much for novelty's sake (like when he once showed a man eating a carrot as if the camera lived *inside* the man's chewing mouth) but as a way to dramatize the distance (the remove) between the two characters. Here, that remove comes mostly through the use of their still cameras to create additional "screens":

Vohrer continues this strategy throughout, filling the otherwise empty frame with odd, ancillary details that never get explained, that glide by without context or comment. Like, after the boys leave the stripteaser's beach house, we get a sequence showing what appears to be a military regiment conducting night exercises:

This nighttime military exercise isn't (unless I missed it in translation) ever explained in the movie, and instead exists either as a total non sequitur, or a surreal echo of the regimented life the students from the boarding school are in rebellion against. Them as their future selves as it were.

 

Back in the field trip scene, we get repeated shots of two nuns who are traveling across the horizon line in the background:

This wouldn't be so strange normally (could even be some sort of visual joke, a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of his earlier Krimis), except that it connects to Vohrer's repeated tendency here to shoot key characters—in key interactions—from great distances. When Fuchsberger and Tappert engage in a marathon chase of Kurrat through the dead-of-winter landscape, much of the chase is presented so that the actors appear in miniature, insignificant bodies moving through the unbearable landscape dominating the frame:

Though I'm sure it had no influence on the film, I am reminded again of the ending of Bergman's PASSION OF ANNA, and the way that the camera retreats from Max von Sydow in the scene. (Some screencaps of it are included in my review of Argento's OPERA.) It also reminds me of the tilt photography technique used in a movie like Christoffer Boe's EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE.

Vohrer uses the same technique to end the film. In the school's courtyard, the killer has leaped from a window to his death (there's his body, near the upper right), and Tappert and his sidekick stand at their car (apparently the police were issuing VW cruisers in this world), calling in their frustrations to headquarters:

Tiny figures struggling to move hopelessly through overwhelming and barren landscapes. Arriving where they began: Exactly nowhere.

Leonard Jacobs

December, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German Filmjuwelen (Alive AG) DVD | LANGUAGE: English (except for the seven minutes missing English audio) | DIRECTOR: Alfred Vohrer | WRITER(S): Paul Hendriks, Manfred Purzer  | MUSIC: Hans-Martin Majewski | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ernst W. Kalinke | CAST: Joachim Fuchsberger (Hendriks); Konrad Georg (Fromm); Horst Tappert (Klevenow); Karin Hübner (Frau Muhl); Petra Schürmann (Fräulein Gabert); Hilde Brand (Lonny); Bruno Dallansky (Herr Muhl, the Caretaker); Paul Albert Krumm (Stallmann); Robert Meyn (Direktor); Joachim Rake (Beamter); Otto Stern (Kurrat Senior);  Arthur Richelmann (Kurrat Junior)