2.01.2015

#017 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [MARK OF THE TORTOISE aka WARTEZIMMER ZUM JENSEITS (1964)]

From the restrained, dirge-like piano theme that opens the film (a marked counterpoint to the jaunty, breathless, sometimes overly orchestrated themes that we usually get from Böttcher, Thomas, and co.) to the noticeable lack of a pulpy, blood-riddled prologue, Alfred Vohrer's 1964 Krimi telegraphs to us that it's going to be operating on an altered wavelength re: what we've come to expect in the genre. A wavelength that broadcasts "melancholy," "postwar," and, above all, "malaise". A tone and mood that is nothing if not antithetical to Vohrer's other 1964 Krimi, the meta and playful DER HEXER. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it's based not on work by Edgar Wallace, but a play by the prolific (and oft-adapted) James Hadley Chase.
The film opens with the pre-credit title card that director Alfred Vohrer was afforded in almost every Rialto film, but it dispenses with all the other familiar prologue touches that audiences would have come to expect by 1964: There is no pre-credit murder. No bullet-hole sound effect to punctuate the appearance of Wallace’s name. No voice-over of Vohrer saying “Hier spricht Edgar Wallace!”.


[This is the twenty-third 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 stars)
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Heist / Master Criminal Krimi

Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Götz George (amateur)
Who's the Ingénue: 
    
There isn't one.

In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): No (Letterboxd link)

 
Vohrer’s Krimis are maybe most known for their ostentatious (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) trick shots; their canted angles and endlessly stylized transitions; their pulpy verve and crackling energy; and, most of all, their establishment of so many of the stock conventions that these films would follow. But there are exceptions to his genre-defining rules; there are examples of him deliberately about-facing and finding another Krimi channel to communicate through. 

One, SCHOOL OF FEAR, is a later, non-Rialto example. Another is the Rialto “ringer” entry, directed by Vohrer, adapted from a story “in the tradition of” Edgar Wallace: 1964’s THE MARK OF THE TORTOISE. It is, like SCHOOL, tuned to a different Krimi frequency. And, also like SCHOOL, it features many genre-familiar touches (a mysterious criminal mastermind named after an animal; a blackmail scheme that targets the uppercrust of England; an amateur detective who eschews Scotland Yard and solves the case himself, etc.). Plus plenty of familiar faces in the cast (Klaus Kinski, Carl Lange, Jan Hendriks, Richard Münch [he who plays Jerry Cotton's chief in that series of films], Hans Clarin). But the cartoon zest and pop-art sensibilities of so many entries have been dialed down. Familiar movements, but tuned to a new frequency altogether. It is a melancholy one, an at least marginally more “realistic” one, one that smacks of a kind of tragic postwar malaise that reminds me more of THE THIRD MAN than THE SQUEAKER.

(Another movie I kept thinking about was Jacques Deray’s THE OUTSIDE MAN, a very European, very laid-back, even “existentially” hopeless version of noir, where recognizable types [hitman, femme fatale, corrupt and conniving crime boss] move through recognizable situations [a man called in to do a job, only to be double-crossed by those who are paying him, forced to go on the run with help from underworld characters as desperate in life as he is], but with the tone of everything pitched noticeably *down*.)

The lion's share of this melancholy resides in the performance of the lead female, refreshingly for once not an agency-less ingénue-in-distress, but the mistress of the crime organization coming to London to blackmail its elite. Played by Hildegard Knef, she delivers a performance (esp. via her eyes) that feels profoundly, unfixably sad. As I hadn't seen her in anything else, I looked up her biography out of curiosity. Certainly the details of her life couldn't help but have contributed to her ability to play such profound hopelessness:

"During the Battle of Berlin, Knef dressed as a soldier in order to stay with her lover Ewald von Demandowsky, and joined him in the defence of Schmargendorf. The Soviets captured her and sent her to a prison camp. The prisoners of the jail where she was helped her to escape so she could come back to Berlin ... Her two best known film roles were "Susanne Wallner" in Wolfgang Staudte's film DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS (THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US), produced in 1946 by the East German state film company, and the first film released after the Second World War in East Germany; and "Marina" in DIE SÜNDERIN (THE SINNER), in which she performed a brief nude scene, the first in German film history, which caused a scandal in 1950. The film was also criticized by the Catholic Church which protested against the nude scene. Knef stated that she didn't understand the tumult that the film was creating. She wrote that it was totally absurd that people reacted in that manner and made a scandal because of her nudity as Germany was a country that had Auschwitz and had caused so much horror. She also wrote, "I had the scandal, the producers got the money."

The melancholy femme, at the airport after arriving by plane. The stock footage shot of the "Finnair" passenger jet landing (as device to signal her arrival in the story) reminded me of the stock Giallo convention of opening and/or closing films with key characters coming or going by plane. In the Giallo it's usually the story's hero-slash-amateur sleuth, often a non-native character who is coming to a foreign country and gets embroiled in a mystery that threatens their life  (think Letícia Román arriving on the plane at the beginning of THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH or Tony Musante and Suzy Kendall, safely on the other side of their ordeal, finally able to fly out of Italy and into their future in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE). Here it's the malaise-ridden partner-slash-lover of the film's main villain, the Tortoise. She comes not to be embroiled in a murder, but to pay to have one done. She comes not as a stranger in a stranger land, on vacation, just visiting, but with the sole purpose of bleeding as much money from English titled society as possible.




There is a world-weariness in her, a kind of foregone stateperpetual resignation when it comes to the movement of her character's life. Though she is the second-in-command (and lover) to the leader of a worldwide blackmail ring (according to all indications, a wildly successful one), anything exciting or enlivening about the life she leads has long ago left her. Been drained out of her daily experience, so that though that "daily experience" remains, the life that once animated it has fled. We find that she is no longer in love with her mastermind partner, but has neither the energy nor the drive to break ties with him. (When it comes to lead females in the Krimi, she is much closer to the Elisabeth Flickenschildt end of the spectrum than the Karin Dor one.)

Once she arrives in London, she meets another of the gang's operatives, the scar-faced thug Crantor (Carl Lange), and explains that she knows the first blackmail attempt will fail, that they will have to kill the first victim they've threatened because he will refuse to pay ... and that that's exactly according to plan. They don't want him to pay blackmail money; they want him to die:








Carl Lange, here playing a brass-knuckle-wearing thug whose face has been horribly scarred in some past caper. It’s refreshing to see him playing not a mostly inert, “respectable” villain (I think of his role as the “General” in the Louis Weinert-Wilton adaptation THE CARPET OF HORROR [1963]), but a grotesque thug whose physicality seems to precede him onscreen, more than ready to mete out punishment with his own scarred face and hands.


Everything about her physical performance is languid, measured, morose. Even in times of stress, of disaster for the scheme she's come to London to orchestratewhen the man that Crantor has employed to murder Bradley, an alcoholic knife thrower played by Klaus Kinski, breaks protocol and frantically admits that somebody saw him commit the murder, she puffs on her cigarette and calmly regards his wreck of a man. She paces around the motel room as he thrashes and shouts. Her lack of panic (or passion) feels like it comes not from her being an old hand at this scheme, but from an extreme malaise that has settled into her body, her worldview, her ability to care, really, one way or the other about anything. (In this scene with the spastic, rattled Kinski, she is the slow, steady counterweight to his outbursts.)




Though Kinski's character is inherently more interesting (more damaged, more unhinged) than the rattled lock-pick he plays in THE DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS, both films give him short shrift when it comes to screen time, his presence in the film amounting to barely more than a cameo (and, drawing attention through its absence, later in the film, when the lead male actor is so milquetoast and forgettable). Another Krimi echo is CURSE OF THE HIDDEN VAULT: in both movies he's used as a peripheral hired killer whose enigmatic presence is never fully explored. His introduction in TORTOISE is one of the highlights of the film:














Where the film suffers in its laid-back vibe is, perhaps, in its lead. In the Fuchsberger/Drache role we get Götz George. He lacks the gravitas or charm to be found in the best Fuchsberger performances; his attempts at cockiness wilt beside Drache's most self-congratulating characters. He is, more than anything, milquetoast and forgettable as a clean-cut, generically cocky, trust-fund kid who decides, on a lark, to play detective after his uncle is knifed to death by Kinski. Nowhere moreso does this come through than in the opening narration that sets the ground story (and his back story) for the audience:

"The young man driving is Don Micklem. He is a law student at Cambridge and will soon be taking his final exams. That is, if his luck holds up and if nothing unusual happens. Don isn't a particularly brilliant student, he is just about average. Like his friend Harry Mason sitting next to him. Don is an ordinary young man, except for that car. But don't hold that against him, it's a gift from his uncle. Sir Cyrus Bradley, one of the richest and most influential men in London. It's a foregone conclusion that Don will one day inherit his immense fortune. But he doesn't know how close he actually is to that day, as he greets his aunt, Lady Helen Bradley. He received an urgent call from her. Something has happened, and she is no longer her usual calm self."


Hans Clarin, who was put to such creep good use as the damaged genius in Vohrer’s THE INDIAN SCARF, is another blank. For the second half of the film he does little but lay on his hotel room bed and flip through magazines, as his buddy Don is (unbeknownst to Clarin’s character) being held against his will in the Tortoise's villa. Even when he’s in action, trying to help Don escape (or, earlier in the film, tracking Kinski from the scene of the murder to a motel), he betrays little of his trademark weirdo-ness. He plays it straight, the second-tier sidekick hero, and is all the more forgettable for it.

The one exception for Don (George) is in the “death room” scene, where his performance reaches a pitch and frenzy that's absent from him for the rest of the film. He and Knef are imprisoned in a room whose hydraulic roof is going to be used to crush them to death. She attempts to kill herself by first giving her gun to one of the Tortoise's thugs (played ably [also slimily] by series regular Pinkas Braun) because, she says, she would rather be shot than crushed. When this fails, she attempts to poison herself. Don stops her, and promises to shoot her "when the time comes". Their attempts at trying something, anything, to stop it from crushing them is the most harrowing in the film, and the most desperately staged: 


















The violence of this scene spills over into the rest of the film, with the last 15 or 20 minutes—after the measured, careful pace up till that pointgetting crazy brutal violent. Familiar face Jan Hendriks, who plays one of the Tortoise's righthand men, gets gunned down by the Tortoise himself, via machine guns hidden in the handles of the mastermind's wheelchair:







The Tortoise is a sunglass-wearing, white-haired, wheelchair-bound *urbane* villain. Often given over to pouting. Less a colorful Krimi villain and more like Stellan Skarsgård’s duplicitous character in John Frankenheimer’s RONIN. His love for Knef's character is the only attracting force in his life that rivals the pull of his criminal schemes. His increasing awareness that she has thrown him over for George's character alternates with his longing to secretly watch her, via closed circuit television, in her bedroom. When he does finally decide to murder her in his hydraulic death trap, it seems that this decision (one that he's been fighting since his first scene in the movie) opens the lid and lets out the violence that overruns the rest of the movie.

He employs Cranton to help him escape, by boat, from his exotic seaside villa. But the outbreak of violent double-crossing does not subside:








Emerging from their intended death trap, George and Knef part: She takes the boat that was meant for her murderous paramour. He stands on dock, seemingly finally sobered by all that's come to pass:





Leonard Jacobs
February, 2015

[SHOW NOTES]
VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release in Vol. 5 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets. | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Alfred Vohrer  | WRITER(S): James Hadley Chase, Eberhard Keindorff, Johanna Sibelius, Will Tremper  | MUSIC: Martin Böttcher  | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Bruno Mondi  | CAST: Hildegard Knef (Lorelli); Götz George (Donald "Don" Micklem); Richard Münch (Mario Orlandi di Alsconi, aka The Tortoise); Heinz Reincke (Inspektor Dickes); Carl Lange (Crantor); Pinkas Braun (Felix); Adelheid Seeck (Lady Helen Bradley); Hans Paetsch (Sir Cyrus Bradley); Jan Hendriks (Carlos); Joachim Rake; Klaus Kinski (Shapiro); Hans Clarin (Harry Mason)

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