#018 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE AVENGER aka DER RÄCHER (1960)]

And so the movie opens: The mysterious archfiend The Executioner emerges from a hidden lair to seed the English countryside with the head of his latest victim.

[This is the twenty-sixth 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. Kinski-as-Grotesque 
   iv. Old Dark House Krimi
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Heinz Drache (official)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Ina Duscha
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): No (Letterboxd link)



[TACKLING WHAT'S UGLY IN AN OF-THE-PERIOD GENRE FILM] 
I'll start by admitting that I find 1960's DER RÄCHER tough to write about. On the one hand, it is undeniably a "key text" in the Krimi genre because of its place in history: 

Following on the heels of Rialto's inaugural FACE OF THE FROG, desperate to re-create its boffo box office, a rival production company (Kurt Ulrich Film) sought to "steal a march on" Rialto and be the first to create a successful series based on Edgar Wallace's work. Rialto, in retaliation, sued, locking up the work of the elder Wallace for themselves, and also "adopting" several actors who first appeared for Ulrich, and who went on to considerable Krimi fame. (This group is primarily represented by the Big Three of Klaus Kinski, Heinz Drache, and Siegfried Schürenberg, but also includes less-ubiquitously cast Krimi players like Friedrich Schoenfelder, who has supporting roles in both THE BLACK ABBOT and ANGELS OF TERROR).
 
And it was a movie I'd wanted to see for some time, for many reasons, not the least of which because it contained this shot: 

In art, in history, in literature, I find myself endlessly fascinated, in a non-Freudian way, by the various representations of beheading: From paintings of John the Baptist's on a platter staring stupidly upskirt at Salome to Brad Dourif's badly green-screened head hurtling down an elevator shaft in Argento's TRAUMA. To be able to find Kinski's distinctive features employed in this pose seems almost too good to be true ... and, in the context of the series, it prefigures the rash of beheadings (and over-the-top violence) in 1963's THE STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE.

Infamous author Yukio Mishima, after his attempted coup and (very public) "assisted" suicide.

SALOME AND THE APPARITION OF THE BAPTIST'S HEAD by Gustave Moreau

SALOME WITH THE HEAD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST by Caravaggio

 But it is also a movie that contains these shots:

Which is the film's unavoidable problem: A key character in the film (and the lead suspect) is this character called Bhag. Played by Al Hoosmann, Tim Lucas (in his review of the German disc) describes him as "a hairy, domesticated, ape-like subhuman creature brought back to England from Borneo". He is the chief servant of another one of the film's suspects, the boorish and obscenely wealthy Sir Gregory Penn (played by Benno Sterzenbach). And, in the English dub that I watched, he is referred to variously as a "negro," an "animal," and "the best servant in the world".

So the question becomes: What does the 21st-century Krimi viewer do with material so inexcusable, even unthinkable, in a modern context?

A number of the story's elements look forward to future Krimis: Here, the opening of the movie onto the "film-within-a-film" section consists of a box truck—with the name of the movie studio in extreme foreground—filling the frame. The truck then drives away, making a physical "wipe" that reveals the actual film-within-a-film's set. This technique reminds me of the opening of Alfred Vohrer's THE INDIAN SCARF (1963), which begins with a painted theater curtain being lifted to reveal the actual film going on behind it. Also the opening shot of Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964), which foregrounds the sign that bears the name of the fashion house that will become the scene of much of the action. Too bad there's not more of this meta-style to inform DER RÄCHER's otherwise conventional execution. (Coincidentally, both Krimis also prominently feature a horse in these reveal shots.)

[FIRST THE PLOT]
The story opens, as the caps at top show, on the latest crime committed by the mysterious "Executioner". A gate opens in a darkened passage and a car, via its headlights, advances on the camera. We watch it travel the countryside and, rounding a corner, eject a cardboard box out of one its doors. Two bicycling women, flush with the idea that the box might contain "something valuable," greedily open it. Only to find the decapitated head of an unidentified man. In short order (after a series of title cards identifying the key players in the mystery; a technique that looks forward to Rialto's always heavily designed opening credits), we learn that the decapitated head belonged to one Francis Elmer, a man in the "cipher department" of England's Foreign Office. He'd been missing for three weeks and had come under suspicion for passing state secrets to a foreign power. Siegfried Schürenberg, playing his first "Sir John" role, has called back his no. 1 agent from Istanbul to investigate: None other than soon-to-be-series-regular Heinz Drache.

What will he find in his investigation? What does it have to do with a movie being shot on the grounds of Sir Gregory's estate? Or with an unknown actress, Ruth Sanders (Ina Duscha), who is suddenly elevated to the lead in the troubled production? And don't forget about the shifty, frustrated wannabe director played to the perfect hilt by Klaus Kinski, in his first Krimi role ...

Kinski sets his series mold ...

... and the once-and-future Sir John makes his maiden voyage: A noticeably more svelte Siegfried Schürenberg plays his first version of Sir John here. With less comedy and more procedural oomph than his later roles, but still clearly the same character from here all the way to his swan song, 1971's ANGELS OF TERROR.

And don't forget the ingénue: Turns out that Duscha's character is the niece of the beheaded man—*and* that she's the unknown wannabe movie starlet who is suddenly elevated to the film's lead.

The Executioner's other moniker in the film is "The Benefactor," because he sees his beheadings as a form of assisted suicide for those who fear they will be unpardonable in the afterlife if they kill themselves (or at least that's his cover story). His tactic of soliciting depressed victims through the classifieds put me in the mind of Conan Doyle's THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE.

[BACK TO BHAG]

Lucas, in his review, rightly suggests that the character of Bhag foreshadows the hairy-armed murderer that Tor Johnson-lookalike Ady Berber would play, definitively, in Vohrer's DEAD EYES OF LONDON (1961) (he also seems to be making connections to the fact that Edgar Wallace penned the script for the original KING KONG). And taken from this viewpoint, a purely genre-specific viewpoint, the character can at least be understood as a variation on a stock Krimi character who would undergo more than one iteration before the series petered out in the early 70s. 

David Sanjek's essay ties Berber's character to "that eerie mood ... carried over from German Expressionism ... the practice of Stimmung." He goes on to write about the effect of Berber's character in Vohrer's 1961 film:

"Henchman to the bogus minister, Reverend Dearborn, and leader of the "blind killers of London," Blind Joe (Ady Berber) memorably contributes to the film's Stimmung: corpulent but powerful, his burly, almost anthropoidal physique seems at once less and more than human."

And Sanjek also sees the link between Berber's series persona and Bhag, briefly tracing the character's history back to Wallace's original writing:

"Originally an actual orangutan in Wallace's source novel THE HAIRY ARM (1925), Bhag in the film is not only depicted as a conventional monster figure, but also as the racist embodiment of degenerate otherness, 'an animal from the jungle,' as the hero contemptuously dubs him. Thick black hair covers Bhag's anthropoidal features [just like it does for Berber's Blind Joe]. He grunts rather than speaks, and his eyes bulge stereotypically in moments of distress or when he threatens the heroine."

Also, it's true that Bhag's employer, Sir Gregory, is clearly painted as the most repugnant, irredeemable character in the film. Beyond his exploitation and "possession" of this, his "world's best servant," Gregory is clearly in the running for Colonialist of the Year. In addition to bringing Bhag back from his travels abroad, he has kidnapped an Indonesian woman (played by Maria Litto)—he keeps her locked in the attic for purposes only hinted at in the script. (Purposes that seem more than clear when we get repeated scenes of him harassing Ruth in an attempt to force himself on her sexually.) 

The racial othering also exists in the depiction of Litto's character, as Drache's discovery of her imprisoned in the upper recesses of Gregory's estate can't help but make you think of the "Madwoman in the Attic," an archetypal character that presumably started life as a Gothic convention embodied by "male writers' tendencies to categorize female characters as either pure, angelic women or rebellious, unkempt madwomen."

Its most famous iteration in literature is perhaps Bertha Mason, Rochester's wife in JANE EYRE (1847), a character whose back story and p.o.v. were extensively re-created in Jean Rhys' "postcolonial" WIDE SARGASSO SEA (1966), where the patriarchal pattern of "othering" is made explicit: an "English gentleman" marries Bertha, "declares her mad, and requires her to relocate to England." All as a way to exercise colonialist and patriarchal power over her. Working within a power structure that gives him license to control and imprison another human being he has declared as somehow less-than-human; dangerous, insane, untrustworthy outside of the power structure of the cultured, moneyed male.

The "Madwoman in the Attic" connection is both made literal—and made into a bridge to the thematic obsessions of future Gialli—when the film crew alerts Drache's detective to an unexplained image caught on some of their test film. Something lurking in a window at the top of Sir Gregory's "castle". They can't make it out until they take out the film and use a magnifying glass (literally blowing it up, in proto-, if exceedingly basic, BLOW-UP nod). Like BLOW-UP, and Argento's relentless obsession with the inability of his characters to properly perceive, see, or "read" what is actually going on in their surroundings, this section of the film feels absolutely of a piece—part of the genre through-line—from Gothic, to Krimi, to Giallo.

Once Drache finally sees what's hidden in the frame, he breaks into Gregory's home under cover of night and attempts to rescue the woman being held against her will.

As mentioned above, Gregory's power-fueled obsessions with the women in the film seem to peak with the character of Ruth the ingénue. In a leery, uncomfortable scene, we watch Gregory late at night in his fire-lit den. Another woman (presumably also being held against her will) is dancing for Sir Gregory, who sits and watches her in the dark with a lecherous, half-tranced look on his face. At one point during her dance, he picks up a photograph that sits on the table next to him, a photo of Ruth Sanders wearing a costume from her film. It is clear who he is thinking about while watching this woman dance.

This recurring racial component of "otherness" (in Hoosmann and Litto's characters) on the one hand brings to mind the power structures and male-female conventions that recur throughout the Gothic. But it also brings up the least-desirable aspect of genre fiction of a certain period. I'm thinking esp. of "men's adventure" pulp stories that featured the white male hero embarking on the domination of foreign lands in a thinly veiled but sexed-up version of colonialism; not every adventure story has this component, but the intersection of Sir Gregory's assumed "authority" over the subjugation of people from other countries (for his own pleasure and profit, it need not even be said) feels pretty hard-coded into the film. All of this adds up to a film that feels uncomfortably (and unthinkingly) of its time, one that is willing to recycle, wholesale, the notion that "uncivilized" people inhabit those parts of the world where rich, titled Englishman go to either rule or adventure in.

That Sir Gregory is painted as the most repugnant character in the film (repugnant for his arrogance, his sexual violence, etc.) is *something*, but only just. (There is also a key moment when Drache sincerely thanks the sword-wielding brother of the imprisoned woman for saving his life; both he and his sister are presented as the rightfully outraged victims of Sir Gregory's arrogance and abuse of power.)


[AND WHERE DID ITS STIMMUNG GO?]

The additional mark against this entry (as novel and important as it is in the larger history of the genre—and completely independent of its treatment of race) is that, *as a film*, it fails mostly to conjure that Stimmung that Sanjek cites as so key to the success of the Krimi. In his essay, he quotes one Norbert Grob, re: the "best" Krimis:

"... [they] play a double-edged game with what happenes on the film's surface and what seems to have happened [think the film's Giallo-like obsession with the hidden, indecipherable image accidentally caught by the film crew]. What glimmers through is the level at which the images take on a third meaning that tell it like it really is: images of the crude and the garish, of the sardonic and the shocking. These crime films punch a hole in the accustomed order of things. They challenge us to see the world differently, to get away from habitual ways of thinking, to clear the way for imagination ... the special ambiance of the series was calculated, a unique combination of crime and horror ... what counted was the atmospheric setting: the dimly perceived threat that undermines every sense of security, the half-darkness, all of which contributed to an eerie mood of nightmare and terror."

But for too much of its running time, DER RÄCHER fails to do this clearing-away work. Instead, in its execution, in its imagination, in its "atmospheric setting," it feels too often deficient. Rote. Not compelling in any key way. Certainly not compelling in the way that the best Vohrer and Reinl entries are. And more in line with the straight-forward, even rational narratives that would keep other films technically called Krimis from truly inhabiting the same realm (the Jerry Cotton films come to mind).

What I can say positive about the picture, though:

• It's the first (if a fairly basic) instance of the Krimi being meta, as most of the action takes place in the aforementioned film-within-the-film that's being shot while Drache investigates the murders. It gets even more meta when we get a scene that was later done (almost to the letter) in Argento's OPERA. In both films the equivalent of the star's understudy gets suddenly elevated to the lead role after the star's diva-ness makes it impossible for her to continue in the production. And in both, the director tells the fledgling actress that what's happening to her "only happens in the movies." (I doubt, despite the evidence of the Krimi's influence on Argento [and Argento's deep-and-wide tendency to "borrow" from anywhere and everybody], that he was riffing on this scene in his film, but the two are uncannily similar.)
• Without it, we likely would have never had the enjoyment of seeing that previously mentioned "Big Three" of acting talent come to be so identified with the later films (even if Drache really is only the poor man's Fuchsberger, he's still almost always one of the key reasons to watch whatever entry he's in).
• The level of violence (also, its "weird quotient") occasionally reaches the pyschotronic heights of later films. And certainly helps to lay the pattern that later directors would follow.

Even with such pluses, it still feels like less than the sum of its parts. With too many and too large a figures looming in its minus column.

Leonard Jacobs

March, 2015

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: Low-quality bootleg | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Karl Anton  | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, Gustav Kampendonk, Rudolph Cartier  | MUSIC: Peter Sandloff  | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Willi Sohm | CAST: Heinz Drache (Michael Brixan); Ingrid van Bergen (Stella Mendoza); Benno Sterzenbach (Sir Gregory Penn); Ina Duscha (Ruth Sanders); Ludwig Linkmann (Henry Longvale); Siegfried Schürenberg (Maj. Staines); Klaus Kinski (Lorenz Voss); Rainer Brandt (Reggie Conolly); Friedrich Schoenfelder (Jack Jackson); Al Hoosmann (Bhag); Maria Litto (Malaiische Tänzerin); Franz-Otto Krüger (Regie-Assistent Frankie)