#015 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE aka DIE BANDE DES SCHRECKENS (1960)]

From the moment we watch master criminal Shelton glide into the bank with his puffs of white hair and his bowler hat sitting on top of his head like a cartoon, it’s clear that this Edgar Wallace entry is going to showcase characters that all seem slightly off, that all seem (at times esp.) nightmarishly wrong in their accessories and defining characteristics (also line readings, and physical performances). An overall atmosphere you might find in a “weird menace” pulp.

Everything about the way the bank robbery prologue is edited seems designed to disorient. Once the action starts—Shelton trying to escape, being tackled to the ground, gunshots ringing out from guns that don't seem to exist in frame—every cut feels like it comes several frames too soon, too fast. (I thought of Peter Hunt's dropped frame technique in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, for one.) Editing that, in the details, futzes with rational continuity. With the resulting effect being that, though you understand on a head level the gist of what happens—master criminal Shelton was foiled in his attempted bank robbery—you have a nagging feeling that you're missing the real meaning of the scene. And this turns out to be true on a couple of levels: 1. several of the passers-by in the bank lobby turn out to be key characters to the plot (including some who are revealed to be working for Shelton), and 2. as you do piece together the "truth in the gaps," the film just proves more elusive.

Like with so many key moments in the film, the presentation of visual "facts" is always slightly obscure—skewed so that the key details you most want (or need) to see are inaccessible, even out of frame; beyond your ability to apprehend them.

[Note: This is the twenty-first 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: ★★★★★ 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Heist / Master Criminal Krimi
     ii. Ingénue in Distress Krimi
     iii. Inheritance Scheme Krimi
     iv. Proto-Giallo Krimi 
     v. Arent-as-Comedy-Routine   
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Joachim Fuchsberger (official)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Karin Dor
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd link)


[THE PRE-INTRODUCTION]
Though I'd been marginally aware of a genre called the Krimi—and its potential influence on the Italian Giallo cycle that flourished after it had mostly died—it took a list on Letterboxd to get me serious about tracking down the films. Using Holger Haase's Rialto list as my starting point, I watched my first “official” Krimi back in February. Since then, I've upped my total to 43, and have compiled a Master List that tells me I've got at least 40 more to go. This 2014 “Krimi Quest” spawned not only a series of Letterboxd reviews, but this blog. I wanted a space where anything and everything related to the Krimi and Giallo could be compiled, analyzed, enjoyed, accessed. I've greatly enjoyed the comments, feedback, and info that's been sent my way since August—here's hoping 2015 proves even more productive (and collaborative). 

With the time I have remaining before New Years, I'm going to (hopefully) finish up a couple more items: 1. The first chronology page for the Giallo Master List (listing Gialli and Proto-Gialli from 1934-1969), 2. a return to the “Sleaze-Art-Sleaze” Giallo reviews, and 3. some thoughts on those Krimis that are my most (and least) favorite, starting with this review. My perspective may change (the more Krimis I watch, the more I re-evaluate my ratings for the ones I've seen), but this will hopefully be a reference point, if nothing else, re: where my Krimi mind was at the end of December 2014. Thanks to all who took the time to read, comment, post links, etc.—I hope you'll stick with the site as it expands into 2015. Cheers!

[INTRODUCING THE GROTESQUE]
Though there are other Krimis that feel more modern, other Krimis that are more transgressive, more directly a precursor to the psychosexual/trauma model that would later become the dominant shape taken by the Italian Giallo, there is no Krimi I adore more than 1960's THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE. It is a movie that does its best to resist this adoration. On a first watch, its plot is convoluted to the point of incoherence, with a cast of obliquely interrelated characters that really can't be kept track of (at least, not very easily). It is also, on its surface, one of the most “dated” Krimis—from Karin Dor's ingénue-in-distress, lacking as she does almost all agency (though her staunch refusal to either be forced into marriage or to betray Fuchsberger's character—even under threat of some Fulci-level eye violence—should be noted), to the potentially old-fashioned Agathe Christie “Drawing Room Mystery”-type inheritance plot, it seems like its presentation of premise will be, no matter what else, quaint. Even, as some call the genre, a bit too “Scooby Doo”.

But:

Watch it more than once, and these apparent marks against it recede into the background, reveal themselves to be a reductive misunderstanding of a Krimi that is, perhaps more than any other, structured like something out of a dream. A story deformed so that it pushes past its a-b-c mystery plot, past the frame of its black-and-white 60s-vintage, to follow associative and unexplained rules that look like dream logic. AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by way of a MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY nightmare.

G.K. Chesterton's THURSDAY is a good touchstone for understanding the Krimi. It is a highly stylized, action-packed, detective story—a globe-trotting chase between undercover Scotland Yard detectives and crooked-faced anarchists—that is *also* a metaphysical mind melt. More than Father Brown, it grapples head-on, head-back, and howling with the notion of a “terrible-good” Christian deity who maybe, just maybe, is more nightmare than anything else. Considering Chesterton's own religious and philosophical leanings—he did, after all, write a book called ORTHODOXY—it feels esp. problematic and challenging. There is little comforting about a deity who, when first glimpsed, is described like this:

“[Detective] Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.

“The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of [President] Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.”

It, like THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE, is grotesque in the best and most fascinating ways, grotesque because it is “strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting,” full of “weird shapes and distorted forms” that “simultaneously invoke in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity.” 

Like Philip K. Dick's VALIS (with its heartbreakingly weird narrative), or Patrick McGoohan's “bitter hero raging against a nightmare system of universe that is both malevolent and hopelessly stacked against him”-spy opus THE PRISONER, or the unfixable oblivion that overwhelms David Foster Wallace's story of the same name, what I find most frightening, most touching, most indelible about the Krimi is not when it's camp (and thus can be easily or ironically laughed at), not when it's bogged down in detective mystery mechanics, not when it's lifelessly repeating itself, but when it's impossible not to acknowledge the grotesque flicker of its film.

[THE PLOT THAT MAKES SPACE FOR NIGHTMARE]
The plot seems straightforward enough: Clay Shelton, a master criminal notorious for the shadowy network of operatives under his control, is foiled during a bank robbery. He is foiled by Chefinspektor “Blacky” Long (Joachim Fuchsberger), but also by a handful of bystanders in the bank who seem to accidentally gum up his attempt to shoot his way free. In his cell, on the eve of his execution, he gathers all those he deems responsible for his death sentence and vows that his “Gallow's Hand” will reach beyond the grave and murder them, one by one. 

(There’s an old MURDER AT MIDNIGHT radio episode called “No Grave Can Hold Me” that uses a very similar plot, an executed man who appears to return from the grave to murder all those responsible for his execution. In this case, the man, a professional mesmerist, manages to hypnotize his death-row guard into disguising himself as the executed man and carrying out the murders. Both this story and Wallace's contain a key scene where the executed man's grave is opened, in order to confirm whether or not he's really dead.)

From that point on, the movie is a series of murder attempts on those that Shelton has marked for death, each scene somehow prominently featuring the clutching death hand itself. Even when the murder attempts fail—as in the first attempt on Long’s life—the attackers make sure to flash the hand sign even as they die. Being an Edgar Wallace story, there are also subplots involving banking irregularities, blackmail schemes, a stolen inheritance, and an unknowing heir. These specifics are less important, though, than in some of the other films, and what sticks with me are the nightmare details.

The Gallow's Hand, again and again ...

Back projection as mood.

[THE FIRST KIND OF NIGHTMARE: THE GALLOW'S HAND]
Shelton's reach from beyond the grave, his “Gallow's Hand”: We get this both as the key detail of his ghostly appearances (a phantom haunting each crime scene) and as a clutching, inexplicable sign thrown up by each of his operatives when they try to kill someone on his list. The first murder attempt, on unbelieving Inspector Long, begins when his tire blows. He wrestles the car to a stop and gets out, only to discover that someone has put a nail-studded board in the road. While examining this, someone shoots the end off his pipe (instead of a hole in his head), and Long takes cover to return fire.

An unexplained puff of smoke seems to be the first glimpse we get of Long's would-be sniper.

The next glimpse we get of the killer is his clutching Gallow's Hand. Though he's too far away from Long (Fuchsberger) to have been shot by him, the man appears to be in his death throes, without any rational explanation why. Even if, after the fact, we assume it was one of Shelton's other agents who shot this one, so he wouldn't be able to talk (a theory briefly mentioned by Long, and never pursued), it makes no sense. Why not wait for Long to wade blindly into the woods, and then pick him off from his well-hidden sniper's nest? The narrative pattern instead skews toward more disorientation, the feeling of missing or skipped information. Intuitive meaning whose details we, as viewers, still can't grasp.

[THE SECOND NIGHTMARE: A CRUEL PICTURE]
There are a handful of exceedingly cruel Krimis. Cruelty that feels like it puts the characters at a kind of metaphysical disadvantage—that suggests there are forces in the universe that simply cannot be prevailed upon. In the face of them, your only possible outcome is cruel and unusual death. (When I write up Vohrer's DEAD EYES OF LONDON I'll come back to this theme, spending some time on the elevator murder for one [where a man's hands are both smashed by the killer's heel and burned with cigarettes to get him to fall].)

In TERRIBLE PEOPLE, it begins with the death-by-faulty-staircase murder of the judge who presided over Shelton's case. Inspector Long makes a late-night visit to the judge, to make sure he's still alive. The judge emerges from his bedroom and stands at the head of the stairs, talking to Long, who asks him to come to headquarters and allow himself to be placed in protective custody. As he goes to descend the stairs, they fall out from under him, their boards sawed so that they'll not only not support his weight, but guarantee his death by broken neck. It's a setup that makes no rational sense—we've just seen that the judge has a housekeeper who answers his door and is still up—how did the stairs manage to support her weight but not his? And how could anyone but a ghost slip into the house and loudly saw through a solid wood staircase without being detected? (Only in an irrational, inexplicable world.)

It reminds me of the quote that Maitland McDonagh uses to open her introduction of BROKEN MIRRORS/BROKEN MINDS. She uses the quote to get at the “dislocation” found in Argento's work. But it applies here just the same:

“A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned ... Here's what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not in step, with life.”

—THE MALTESE FALCON

This sense of dislocation links TERRIBLE PEOPLE to the world of the proto-Giallo. Because, unlike the “traditional” Krimi that reinforces “[f]aith in the dependability of the social order which the detective figure … embodies” the judge's murder is just one of several that suggests something deeply broken in the social order of Inspector Long's world. After all, the judge who is murdered in his own home by an impossibly falling staircase was innocent, at least as far as Shelton went. Shelton's conviction was a just one—he was guilty of the bank robbery and many worse crimes that he'd masterminded before the start of the film. In a just, dependable world, the judge would have lived. Even with THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE's seemingly “happy ending”—the characters played by Fuchsberger and Dor are destined to marry, a last shot showing them able to laugh in the face of what they've been through—the film's actual events hew much more closely to a Giallo mystery whose resolution “fails fully to restore either the viewers' or the characters' faith in a coherent moral or perceptual universe.” (Do we really believe the smile on their faces ending the film? Or are we more likely to think of the downbeat, suicidal, spiritually hopeless ending of another Reinl masterwork, ROOM 13, where Fuchsberger's ingenuity as detective does nothing but drive Dor to suicide.)

The next excessive, cruel murder is that of Shelton's hangman. He comes to Long's house, frantic and drunk. Having heard of the death of those on Shelton's list, he fears he'll be next. Long puts him in an upstairs bedroom and posts a guard outside his door. And yet … not only is he murdered, but in a surrealistically violent way—he is hung while he's still lying on the floor. The killer somehow scales the outside of the house, enters the hangman's second-story bedroom, and places a noose around his neck. Before the hangman can get free, the killer (apparently) jumps out of the second-story window and uses his own body weight (attached to the noose) to drag the hangman across the room, against the window frame, and snap his neck. (It sounds even weirder the more I try to describe it.)

When I went to cap this, it was the first time I noticed that Shelton (or one of his gang) is hiding in the curtains before the hangman gets the noose. As the camera pans right, Shelton pivots in the opposite direction, appearing to melt into the curtains even more.

For our heroine Karin Dor, there's the threat of eye violence that looks forward to the fate suffered by Olga Karlatos' character in Fulci's ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS:

For one of the members of Shelton's gang, there's being tied to a chair and plunged into an open shaft several stories tall (by other members of Shelton's gang no less, while Dor's character is made to watch):

[NIGHTMARE #3: SOMETIMES THE MOVIE IS JUST INSANE]
Nora (Karin Dor) plays Mrs. Revelstoke's (Elisabeth Flickenschildt's) secretary. Throughout the movie she is hounded by Flickenschildt's lawyer, Mr. Henry (Ulrich Beiger, playing a sleazy, distrustful attorney not unlike the one he played in THE RED CIRCLE). At one point, Henry corners Nora in her hotel room and attempts to force her to marry him. When a police officer, drawn by Nora's shouts, bursts into the room and demands to know what's going on, Henry comes suddenly unhinged:

Mr. Henry goes from petulant and slightly embarrassed to batshit in the blink of an eye. Instead of answering the cop's question with words, he begins pealing with laughter, appearing for a moment to have gone quite insane. In these moments you feel both menaced by him and sorry for him.

The insanity seems to orbit around the two female leads—Flickenschildt and Dor. In a genre full of ace casting, I really can't overstate how important their presence is to the gravitas, the frisson and success of a given Krimi. Whether it's Flickenschildt as the wheelchair-bound, block-toothed club owner Joanna Filiati in the proto-TENEBRAE Krimi PHANTOM OF SOHO, or Karin Dor as the nuanced, world-wearied victim of her family's ghastly attacks in THE SINISTER MONK, these two actresses always elevate the Krimis they exist within.

Dor's character is the one that the nightmare gets written upon—Flickenschildt's character is the one doing the writing.

The film lives and dies by its status as a pulpy weird love letter to the genre, a genre that is, at its best, as much associative nightmare as solvable mystery. And, as Inspector Long says: “Love letters are always menacing.”

Leonard Jacobs

December, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release offered in Vol. 1 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs, though it surprisingly has problems. About two-thirds of the way through, the English translation suddenly reads as though translated by a machine. It's an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise solid presentation of the film. | DIRECTOR: Harald Reinl | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, J. Joachim Bartsch, Wolfgang Schnitzler | MUSIC: Heinz Funk | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Albert Benitz | CAST: Joachim Fuchsberger (Chefinspektor Long); Karin Dor (Nora Sanders); Fritz Rasp (Lord Godley Long); Dieter Eppler (Mr. Crayley); Ulrich Beiger (Mr. Henry); Karin Kernke (Alice Cravel); Ernst Fritz Fürbringer (Sir Archibald); Eddi Arent (Antony Edwards); Karl-Georg Saebisch (Bankier Monkford / Lehrer Monkford); Alf Marholm (Richard Cravel); Elisabeth Flickenschildt (Mrs. Revelstoke); Otto Collin (Clay Shelton)