#019 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW: Bumper Edition [JERRY COTTON x 2]

Part of the credit sequence for JERRY COTTON: THE TRAP SNAPS SHUT AT MIDNIGHT (UM NULL UHR SCHNAPPT DIE FALLE ZU [1966]). Would that the rest of the movie's elements were so stylish.

[This is the twenty-seventh post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. It is also the first "Bumper Edition" installment (see below for details). AS WITH ALL POSTS ON THE SITE, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

I watch a lot of Krimis and Gialli. Some of them feel, for whatever reason, like they don't warrant the full-on review treatment that I give, respectively, in the Pocket Review and Identikit series. And yet I still feel the need to write *something* about them. So far, most of that writing has ended up over at Letterboxd, as I didn't have a place to slot it into here. 

(Starting the Review-Cast and Pulp Art Idea Mill series was an attempt to include and/or document, for posterity's sake, some of my less-in-depth reviews, but the idea was to use those series here to highlight the non-Giallo/non-Krimi material that wouldn't otherwise get posted.)

So, from time to time, I'm going to do "Bumper Edition" reviews for the Krimi and Giallo portions of the site. These posts will cover multiple Krimis, or multiple Gialli, with write-ups that'll usually have lower individual word counts for each film (the full-on reviews tend to range anywhere from 2500-4500 words per film), and will be more scatter-shot in terms of what is and isn't covered. They will be, if nothing else, a way for me to document every entry in the two genres that I've seen, in capsule form at least.

This first Krimi installment, then, will cover two Jerry Cotton films; films that, though they have come to be included under the umbrella of Krimi, don't possess the same Stimmung** as the best-known examples. 

[JERRY COTTON: THE TRAP SNAPS SHUT AT MIDNIGHT (UM NULL UHR SCHNAPPT DIE FALLE ZU; 1966)]
I understand that the term Krimi was (or is now) plastic enough to include a whole array of pulp adaptations. There's the detective-spy thrillers of the KOMMISSAR X series; the weirdo horror-mysteries of the best-known Rialto pictures; even the two-fisted, “men's adventure” FBI stories like this one.

But it's still a tough go, moving from the psychotronic heights of an Alfred Vohrer or Harald Reinl Krimi-proper to this fairly by-the-book procedural. The Stimmung—the particular mood that, according to David Sanjek, defines a Krimi—is wholly missing, as this one's aim is to alternate between a pseudo-documentary style cataloging “the crime problem” in America (the opening voice-over here, which reminds me more than anything of Jack Webb's intros for each episode of the '60s version of DRAGNET) and nail-biting action sequences that, more often than not, involve Jerry Cotton dangling from a great height: 

He poses as a window-washer on the side of skyscraper in order to get the jump on a gang hiding inside the building; he climbs down the side of a bridge so he can stop a dangling can of nitroglycerine from blowing up the traffic rushing above; etc.

These are all well and good (if a little dated), but they mostly fail in their attempt to hold your interest (well, at least my interest, in the larger context of the Krimi Quest I've been on). The one thing that does hold my interest—and that suggests this one's got more in common with the Rialto pictures than it would seem at first glance—is the character played by Horst Frank.

Frank is probably best known to genre fans as the cosmopolitan Dr. Braun in Argento's CAT O'NINE TAILS. He frequents the St. Peter's Club, is a dealer in corporate espionage secrets, and has, we come to find out, broken Umberto Raho's heart. Here he plays the head of a criminal gang who accidentally stumbles on a missing shipment of nitroglycerin and uses that shipment to hold the FBI (and New York City) hostage. What's interesting is the form his character takes.

We're introduced to him in his penthouse at the beginning of the movie. He is floating on the surface of a pool of water (it looks to be no more than 6 or 8 inches deep), in pants (maybe capris?) and an open shirt, piloting a remote-control toy boat around his body as one of his associates fills him in on the details of the developing heist. He sighs a lot, and generally gives off an air of being both exceedingly tired (he comments over and over about how hot NYC is, all while swabbing sweat off his body; strangely, he seems to be the only person in NYC who feels this way) and exceedingly bored.

We find that he conducts many of his criminal interviews this way, lounging in the manmade body of water built into the floor of his condo, insisting that his henchmen take orders from him, half-asleep in the water, even as he splashes them with his feet.
 
And he has other odd habits: When interrogating a rival gang member he further insists that the questions he asks are repeated by his right-hand man before the guy being questioned (also: roughed-up) is allowed to answer. Like Horst's character is some form of royalty and cannot deign to speak directly to someone as coarse as this.

His last appearance in the film is a highly stylized shot of … his chin. It is presented in the extreme foreground of the shot, in the aftermath of Jerry Cotton averting a train wreck that would've blown the nitro (and him) sky high. Frank's last few breaths are laboring their way out of his mouth as he gives up the ghost. The fact that director Harald Philipp has been using a massive amount of back-projection up to this point—including scenes of Frank at the railyard—only adds to the strange stylization of the enormous chin of this dying man shoved as it were in our face. (The stylization he achieves, part of the time, with this use of back projection, reminded me of its use in EUROPA; the other movie that the closeup on a dying man's mouth reminds me of is, of course, CITIZEN KANE.)

As he gives his last gasps, it only makes you wish more of the movie had been like this—weird like this, memorable like this, a world unto itself like this.

ps. Two casting choices of note. THE GREEN ARCHER's Heinz Weiss plays Jerry Cotton's (George Nader's) partner and right-hand man. And late-cycle Krimi regular Ilse Pagé makes a brief cameo as a telephone operator. She plays the long-suffering (and oft-sexually-harassed) secretary to Scotland Yard's Sir Arthur in a handful of those films. 

[JERRY COTTON: MURDER CLUB OF BROOKLYN (DER MÖRDERCLUB VON BROOKLYN; 1967)]
This was my first Jerry Cotton, watched because of its connections to the Krimi-proper, which I learned about through one of Holger Haase's great lists. Its premise, which includes a gang that breaks into an industrialist's home to kidnap his daughter for ransom, positions the movie closest to the Heist/Master Criminal branch of the Edgar Wallace Krimis. Its surprising viciousness, and the eerie (if understated) style, gives at least a few hints of the stubborn weirdness you'd find in the Rialto pictures:

1. The film doesn't shy away from having the gang murder the kidnap victims in cold blood. The first victim, who is actually kidnapped by mistake (she's a shoemaker's daughter, not the rich man's), is found when Cotton leads a sweep of a local park late at night. As he searches, he notices what appears to be a couple on a park bench, necking in the dark. He ignores them at first, but then pauses when he seems to notice they aren't moving. Turns out the "couple" is the corpse of the woman kidnapped and one of the gang members who was blamed for bungling the job. Their pale, inert corpses leaned into each other to look like they're making out (while keeping them just balanced on the bench) feels both a little eerie, and surprisingly graphic. (Surprising, at least, re: what I expected out of these movies.)

This eeriness is extended when the industrialist's daughter finally is kidnapped. Giallo and Eurohorror fans will recognize Dagmar Lassander in the role—she's the doomed real estate agent in Fulci's HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, the sister of one of Stephen Forsyth's victims in Bava's HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, and the titular LAUGHING WOMAN who spends that movie trying to melt Philippe Leroy's stunted and misogynistic mind.

She is kidnapped from her father's mansion (even though the place is crawling with cops to protect her) and found floating in a boat, almost FRIDAY THE 13TH-like, callously murdered. The staging of the scene, with the boat floating among reedy grass, her head and arm hanging over the edge of the boat, as the cops exchange looks confirming that she is lost—it's another sequence that elevates the film's mood to something memorable. (When you find out later that it was in fact her father who orchestrated the murder, in order to bilk millions out of his industrialist friends, the murder goes from "callous" to "breathtaking" and "repulsive".)

2. Another connection to the more familiar Wallace Krimis is having part of the gang pose as Salvation Army chaplains as a cover for their criminal activity (which is just a riff on using boarding schools, charitable organizations, convents, etc. as the same cover in the Wallace movies). When Cotton confronts one of the ringleaders, they fight, and the ringleader ends up getting knocked into a several-story-tall opening in the floor—his body hurtles scores of feet into some industrial sub-basement, pin-balling back and forth off hunks of scaffolding. Again, it feels surprisingly graphic in its violence.

3. Filming the prologue in black-and-white, and then switching to color is a nice touch, a kind of echo of what's done with the opening of THE SINISTER MONK.

4. What threatens to cancel out these moments of style and particular interest is the tendency of the movie to fall into familiar ruts: Too much exposition (delivered in unconvincing English dub); too much lame buddy-cop banter; too many red herring scenes that drag down (instead of add to) the intrigue. There is one extended stunt sequence on a moving train that looks pretty danged dangerous, but the other car chases are generally tame.

5. Also: Though I'm a fan of most of Peter Thomas' work in the Krimis, I've got to admit that his breezy, whistling "Jerry Cotton's Theme" gets just a little *too* much play in this entry.

I know Krimi great Harald Reinl directed a couple of these, but so far those are the ones I can't find in English-friendly form. This one was enjoyable, but doesn't exist in the same hemisphere of personal interest when compared to the "real" Krimis.

Leonard Jacobs

March, 2015

**For a discussion of the particular Stimmung, or mood, endemic to the best examples of the Krimi, see this post.