[REVIEW-CAST #11] MASSACRE GUN (1967)

[NOTE: Since a few days ago I posted about how related the particular mood of this film was to the worlds of the Giallo and Krimi, I thought I’d also post a brief write-up. This is the eleventh in a series of reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

[GENRE]: Neo & Noir  [>exploitation]
[VERSION WATCHED]: Arrow Video Blu-ray 

Before my cinematic world got swallowed by all things Italian, German, and Eurocult, my first serious gateway into movies—into movies being a real *thing* in my life—was the work of a half dozen or so Japanese directors:

Seijun Suzuki (esp. YOUTH OF THE BEAST and BRANDED TO KILL); Shôhei Imamura (VENGEANCE IS MINE and THE PORNOGRAPHERS); Yasuzo Masumura (MANJI, and the Yukio Mishima-strutting AFRAID TO DIE); Koreyoshi Kurahara (THIRST FOR LOVE and THE WARPED ONES); Hiroshi Teshigahara (FACE OF ANOTHER and PITFALL); and, though it’s true his filmography is congenitally uneven, Takashi Miike (putting Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY into a Japanese blender and getting GOZU; also the performance he gets from the lead in his remake of GRAVEYARD OF HONOR).

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Japanese movie that reminded me how I felt watching the work of those formally innovative, ero-guro-tinged (sometimes not just tinged, but *drenched*) directors. Watching Yasuharu Hasebe’s MASSACRE GUN gave me just that reminder. Partially, I’m sure, because he worked under Seijun Suzuki for part of his career, but more because his film manages to do what so many noir-influenced Japanese films of the 60s did: to marry flawlessly composed black-and-white, with noir nihilism, with a particular sense of that country’s tradition (notions of “honor” and “brotherhood” that get pushed to the point of self-destructiveness) with a nightmarish, ero-guro violence that one-ups and perfects everything else.

Though maybe not as off-the-charts bizarre (nor transgressive) as something like BRANDED TO KILL, MG still satisfies on the same levels.

The movie opens with a mostly wordless five-minute prologue where we watch Jô Shishido (literally the chipmunk-cheeked face of this genre for so many years) get pressed into self-destructive service: his yakuza boss orders him to murder the woman he loves (who certainly loves him). It’s wrenching in the sense that S.’s face shows us the inner turmoil he’s struggling to keep swallowed. Wrenching because when he goes to pick her up, she is blissfully happy in his arms, in the mistaken belief that they will be escaping by plane from this price on her head. Wrenching because the murder when it happens twists everything around in the scene so quickly—her joyous face contorted by the terror of the gun; the sudden burst of action that changes the contemplative, jazzy pace so far (S. leaps from a car containing her body as he drives it into a lake).

This scene cuts to the club Shishido runs, introducing us to Ken Sanders, whose deep-throated singing of a wordless dirge not only comments on Shishido’s headspace in the previous scene, but cues us for the tone of the rest of the movie. What follows is a series of gangland power plays that increase in intensity and offensiveness. And that show how hopeless any opposition to the yakuza's grip on society is (note how the focus on Sanders hands delicately playing the piano is repeated with the focus on the FISTFUL OF DOLLARS-like mutilating of a boxer’s hands by a rival gang).

The film becomes a parade of striking images:

• Shishido’s friend-in-the-uprising being delivered to his club in a casket (complete with hidden ticking time bomb tethered to his corpse);
• the erotic (and surprisingly modern-feeling) floor show at S.’s club, where a barely dressed man and woman do interpretive dance that could just as easily belong in an art film on another continent;
• the way S.’s surgically enhanced cheeks suck on a cigarette when he gives orders like a boss;
• a tense conversation between man and wife, shot upside down and in the reflection of a bar counter;
• a sudden skewer through the finger;
• an extreme long shot showing two people silhouetted by enormous sky, walking as they talk through their unfixable relationship;
• a rusted-out cargo ship used as the site of a gangland trap whose litany of guns give it strobe-lighting;
• even the boat scene that references the “youth in revolt” movies.

All of this would be enough to make the movie an indelible example of 60s Japanese surreal-o-noir. But then you get the reality-stretching end, the “massacre” in MASSACRE GUN. It’s a shootout on an abandoned stretch of highway system that feels ported in from some future, post-apocalyptic movie. Wrecked cars look like ships crash-landed into the pavement. Shishido scales (and then escapes, before it implodes) some kind of alien scaffolding that looks built out of a nightmare (which it is for his enemies, as it’s the vantage point he first uses to kill them long-distance with his sniper rifle). It feels like the least rational section of the movie, as the increasingly vented violence of the film finally erupts the rest of the way.

Shishido proceeds in “battle-damaged” mode, stalking his final opponent (his one true “brother,” who’s been forced by his gang affiliations to break ties and hunt S. down), circling around each other’s gun, drawing beads on each other on this impossibly abandoned highway—it’s really something. And recalls, more than once, that long sequence in BRANDED TO KILL when Shishido drags himself beneath a car (tied to a rope no less) in order to use the car as cover from the snipers trying to kill him.

It adds up to a hyper-violent, weird climax to what’s been, up till then, a noir mood piece. Def. looking forward to seeing more of Yasuharu Hasebe's work.

Leonard Jacobs

July, 2015 

#021 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [NYLON NOOSE aka DIE NYLONSCHLINGE (1963)]

OUR BELOVED ADY BERBER: Though much of NYLON NOOSE suffers from it feeling a bit too much like “Krimi-lite,” the menacing bulk of Ady Berber can’t help but make an impression on the viewer.

[This is the thirty-fourth 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: The run time of the version I watched was ~71 minutes. IMDb lists the run time as 74 minutes. This discrepancy—plus the fact that the opening credits were in English—makes me assume that I was watching a shorter, export version of the film. So it's possible that some of my analysis might change, if a longer version does indeed exist.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★☆☆
Subcategory (if any):
     i. Inheritance Scheme Krimi
    ii. Ingénue-in-Distress Krimi
   iii. Proto-Giallo Krimi
   iv. Old Dark House Krimi
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official):
     Dietmar Schönherr (official)
Who's the Ingénue:
     Helga Sommerfeld
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): No


[SETTING SOME TERMS]
NYLON NOOSE—a non-Rialto Krimi from 1963—plays as, perhaps more than anything else, a less-stylized (and slightly degraded) version of Alfred Vohrer’s Rialto production  of THE INDIAN SCARF (also 1963). It is, like too many of the non-Rialto examples, a bit light on the peculiar, mesmerizing, enlivening mystery-horror mood that most marks Krimis as operating in their own imaginative space—what Sanjek calls, as I’ve discussed at length here, their Stimmung—and is perhaps most remarkable for the way it plays off what had become by then the basic clichés in the genre.
 
These variations show up in a couple of ways. One, we get familiar cast members being used in potentially unfamiliar ways (this device—audience familiarity with an actor being used to overturn their expectations for that actor—would be used to even greater effect in later Krimis, most notably in the way that Eddi Arent’s comedy persona was used as “cover” for him being the villain). Second, the movie recognizes and reuses chunks of plot and staging that had already become “stock-in-trade” for the Krimi. An nth-example of the way that the Krimi grew to remix and -match every possible variation of its original, core elements. 

[RE-PLOTTING WHAT’S FAMILIAR]
The opening credits feature the “Bustling London City Nightlife” stock footage montage found in so many German Krimis. Their purpose seems to have been a surface attempt to convince audiences that the film’s action was set in England, not Germany. Neon advertising (Coca-Cola is well-represented) and flashing bulbs spelling out the names of hotels and bars give a sense of a bustling, *non-German* city setting. The same technique is used for any number of other Krimis, everything from THE MONSTER OF LONDON CITY (1964) to THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE (1969, where it is, hands down, used to its best effect).

The same technique in THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE. By this entry, the actual credits were stylized so that they appeared to be part of the neon landscape.

This flashy montage gives way to the interior of a slightly saucy nightclub act, the camera cutting first to a closeup on the sinewy, snake-like hand of a woman. And then tracking down to reveal the rest of her, scantily clad and in the middle of a striptease act. As we get glimpses of her routine—rolling and cavorting on the floor, slowly stripping off her veils—those shots are intercut with a series of shots laying out the physical geometry of the club. And the camera introducing us to several shifty, mysterious characters:

There is the wary-looking man sliding a sealed envelope onto the bar. There is the man in a goatee using one of the club’s sets of decorative blinds to keep himself hidden from view while he spies on that man. Etc.

Setting the action in a nightclub—and including a stripteaser’s act (and the stripteaser herself) as a key plot point—places the film in a long line of such Krimi scenarios. Think the gruesome razor murder after the floor show in the “Highlow Club” in ROOM 13. Or the use of the singer / dancer / temptress who works at the “Lolita Club” and betrays a “wastrel” prodigal son in the first Rialto, THE FACE OF THE FROG (1959). Or the over-the-top scorpion-ring murder of the “Zombie Club’s” singer in THE ZOMBIE WALKS (1968). Or, even, all the way back to maybe the first Krimi of them all, THE GIRL WITH THE CAT’S EYES (1958), where the confused daughter of drunkard Gert Frobe is offered a job in a nightclub floor show, just so the club’s owner can find a way to molest her … you get the idea …

Here, the dancer’s act culminates with her on the stage, on her back, opening the clasp in the middle of her bra. As it releases, a faceless man cuts the spotlight and the room goes dark. Depriving the audience of a clear view of the woman topless. And providing an opportunity for someone to murder the mysterious man at the bar.

(If this were a Vohrer or Reinl film, all of the above would be done with splashy style. One can imagine Vohrer’s habit of using showy match cuts put to good use here, matching the visual signatures of the stripping woman and soon-to-be-murdered man in ironic or winking ways. As it stands, Laya Raki, who plays the dancer, serves little more than the role of onscreen eye candy.)

THE FIRST MURDER SET-PIECE: Set in a well-familiar Krimi nightclub, the first murder introduces key characters and the titular murder weapon.

THE OLD SWITCHEROO? One clear continuity gaff comes when the lights come back up on the stripteaser’s act: It seems clear (even with the mediocre visual quality of the DVD presentation) that we’re watching a different actress slink away in her bra and panties (a noticeably different set of bra and panties, and a different haircut altogether).

Nightclub dancer Laya Raki returns later in the film for more eye candy, cavorting in secret with the man with the goatee. Though the time the camera spends on her has its erotic meaning, the film feels naive in comparison to the sensuality of any number of entries that would appear the following year. Most esp. DER HEXER, MONSTER OF LONDON CITY, and THE PHANTOM OF SOHO.

RE: THE OTHER OGLING BUILT INTO THE MOVIE: There’s also a brief bubble-bath scene, which features another female character. It feels very truncated, though, and made me wonder again if perhaps I was missing something cut for the export version of the film. This chastity when it comes to onscreen envelope-pushing is also a bit surprising, given the film's producer: one Erwin C. Dietrich. He who would go on to produce any number of softcore films starring Brigitte Lahaie (not to mention equally explicit Jess Franco films).

Turns out the man killed at the bar was a Scotland Yard inspector, who had agreed to pose as a blackmail victim in the hopes of smoking the blackmailer out. Instead, Scotland Yard finds their man murdered with a nylon noose, a “sinister weapon” (as the inspector’s replacement, played by Dietmar Schönherr, calls it in the immediate aftermath of his assistant trying it on him): 

The replacement Scotland Yard Inspector, played by Dietmar Schönherr, is on the case.

Schönherr is a Krimi genre familiar (if not exactly a genre star). Fans will recognize him from MONSTER OF LONDON CITY, where he played the suspicious Scotland Yard doctor who may or may not be taking part in the resurrection of Jack the Ripper-style murders. He also plays one of a gaggle of smugglers in the Men’s Adventure Krimi MOZAMBIQUE (1966), acting alongside world-weary, sad-eyed Hildegard Knef (who was herself such an effective presence in the atypical Rialto Krimi, MARK OF THE TORTOISE [1964]). 

His assistant, who is clearly meant to be cast in the Eddi Arent comedy sidekick role, is played by Edi Huber. He wears the same style bowler hat that Arent made one of his trademark accessories in the early Krimis (in THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE and THE GREEN ARCHER, among others) and provides most of the film’s “hijinks” quotient (e.g., he plays a knock-kneed rube when, early on, he thinks the murderer has returned to the scene of the crime to murder him in a garage; turns out, what he thinks is the killer keeping a hold of him from behind is really just his coat caught in a car door). Add in that the English voice dubbed for him is the same used for both Arent (and another Arent analogue, Peter Vogel in PHANTOM OF SOHO), and it’s impossible not to see him as Arent’s watered-down stand-in.

It’s interesting to note that these comedic moments—like the overall stylization of the film—are nothing if not downplayed throughout. On the one hand, it’s nice that they aren’t as obnoxiously intrusive as some of the Arent examples (one thinks of his character in CURSE OF THE HIDDEN VAULT [1964], who starts out as a well-meaning Australian lawyer, but quickly becomes a nerve-grating cartoon). On the other, the humor is so restrained as to make almost no impact at all.

Edi Huber as the “Arent” Scotland Yard assistant.

Another of Arent’s stock character traits is his tendency to use “newfangled” scientific tools to help catch the film’s villain. Here, Huber uses some sort of “footprint spray” that, when sprayed on the floor of the mansion, reveals perfect impressions of the suspects’ footprints. Again, it feels like a half-measure—an absurd element clearly meant for a laugh (like Batman’s Shark Repellant Spray), but existing in so tame a form it’s hard to care whether it plays one way or the other.

Another tweak of Krimi conventions is this film’s version of the ubiquitous “Sir John” character. Instead of making him an exaggerated and comedic presence a la Siegfried Schürenberg’s version, he only exists as an unheard voice on the other end of the telephone. A voice regularly berating Schönherr for his lack of progress in solving the case.

After the murder in the club, the action shifts to another familiar Krimi location: the uppercrust aristocrat’s spooky manse, isolated, in all its baroque splendor, somewhere in the English countryside. Elford Manor becomes one in a long line of “Old Dark Houses” that serve both as a way to strand all the murder suspects-slash-victims in the same location for large chunks of the running time (a la Christie’s TEN LITTLE INDIANS) and a way to introduce any number of Gothic elements that would otherwise be (critics would argue: still are) out of place in what is ostensibly a Scotland Yard detective film.

The most obvious Gothic transplant is the sequence in the catacombs that (of course) exist beneath Elford Manor. The patriarch of the house, a rubber-gloved pseudo-mad scientist (that reminds one of the lookalike, “Mabuse-alike” scientist who gets dispatched in the prologue of THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS), spends his time dissecting the mummified remains he finds in these cobwebbed catacombs. That is, when he’s not tying them up in suspiciously familiar nylon cord.

[ONE MAN’S NOOSE IS ANOTHER MAN’S SCARF]
The TEN LITTLE INDIANS connection is of course one of those that links this film to the aforementioned INDIAN SCARF. In that film, a family is isolated in their ancestral country home after the patriarch is murdered. The family members arrive to divide up the man’s considerable inheritance (another theme common to both the Krimi and a whole subgenre of pre-Argento Gialli) and are forced to stay in the mansion while they are picked off one by one. Likewise with NOOSE, where the Board of Directors of a shady oil firm find themselves being targeted one after the other by the mysterious nylon killer (who, like in INDIAN SCARF, uses secret passages built into the manor’s walls to sneak into each victim’s room).

The third murder set-piece, and the one that most recalls those in THE INDIAN SCARF, where every murder gives us a sequence of the killer’s hands readying the scarf as he approaches his next victim. Both films also show the killer emerging from secret passages in the walls to attack his victims in their room. Note, below, the echo of the killer’s pov shot in each film.

The killer’s pov in SCARF.

A coveted inheritance is also key to NYLON’s story: Helga Sommerfeld, whose character’s parents were killed in a mysterious auto accident, has taken their place on the oil company’s Board. Her uncle, who is also one of the directors, may or may not have had her parents killed—and may or may not be planning just the same for her, in order to get the rest of her money (again, this is very similar to the plot surrounding Uschi Glas’ character in COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS).

Sommerfeld played the leggy, always-lingerie-clad photographer at the Sansibar Club in PHANTOM OF SOHO. There, even in limited screen time (and burdened by having the eye candy role), she’s given infinitely more to do. Here she is meant to be both the ingénue-in-distress character and she who falls in love with the inspector. Mostly she spends her time being menaced in the “Old Dark House”. Or being sexually harassed by all the leery old men on the Board of Directors. Coupled with her limited screen time—and how unimaginatively her role gets fleshed out—it all leaves her character feeling fairly blank.

Helga Sommerfeld, desperately looking for something to do.

Another SCARF echo—and perhaps the most important—is the casting of series golem Ady Berber as not a villainous, sub-human, hulking killing machine (as in THE RETURN OF DR. MABUSE [1961], Vohrer’s seminal DEAD EYES OF LONDON [1961], DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS [1962], STRANGLER OF THE TOWER [1966]) but as a surprisingly sympathetic hero. Both films use Berber’s outsized screen persona as a “beard,” to hide a plot twist that reveals his true nature. 

In SCARF he plays Chiko, a former wrestling champion who is employed as a servant in the old dark house. His introduction though—which finds him lumbering into the mansion through one of the guest’s bedroom windows, in the middle of a raging thunderstorm, scaring the soon-to-be murder victim out of his wits—is clearly meant to reinforce Berber’s villainous, beast-man image. A hulking brute stalking each member of the cast.
 
Likewise here, where he’s introduced sporting burn-victim facial prosthetics and is shown using those aforementioned secret passages to sneak around. Turns out, though, that far from being the film’s killer, he’s actually the faithful servant who saved a young Sommerfeld from the fiery car wreck that killed her parents (which is why his face is now so badly disfigured). And all his sneaking around the house? It’s so he can get Sommerfeld’s character alone long enough to tell her that the car accident was no such thing.  

THE EVOLUTION OF ADY BERBER: Villain ...

... villain ...

... hero?

This reversal of Krimi character types reached its apex in films like THE SINISTER MONK (1965) and THE HUNCHBACK OF SOHO (1966), where years of Eddi Arent playing the buffoon sidekick were suddenly (sometimes a bit brutally) traded for casting him in the role of sadistic killer. It is perhaps most effective in CIRCUS OF FEAR (1966) as he spends most of that film doing his familiar, pratfall schtick … only to be revealed at the end as a bitter criminal mastermind who has been taking revenge on the rest of those in the circus—via throwing knives in their backs—because the death of his knife-thrower father traumatized him in his youth. 

(In SOHO, he plays a priest who turns out to be the head of a white-slaving ring [and who mugs a shot that echoes the villainous Klaus Kinski]); in his most human and fleshed-out role, he plays an unassuming and overly polite servant in THE SINISTER MONK ... who again turns out to be the neck-snapping taskmaster of a white-slaving ring. He also plays a futuristically outfitted safe-cracker in 1966’s THE TRYGON FACTOR ... which remains one of the Rialto Wallaces that lack an official English-friendly release. See the reviews linked above for more on Arent’s screen persona.)

…

NYLON NOOSE is not, despite its stylistic lack (and its flimsy feel), one of the worst examples of the genre (for that see PUZZLE OF THE RED ORCHID [1962] or THE GORILLA GANG [1968]). But because of the lack, it can’t imo be considered anything more than solidly middle-of-the-road. It is also a Krimi that becomes more interesting the more Krimis you’ve seen, as most of its appeal arises from the ways in which it riffs on recognizable characters and plots to create exceptions to those Krimi rules. If a longer version exists, it may go some way in righting the thinly sketched wrongs that currently exist in the film; I’d definitely like to see that version if it’s out there.

Leonard Jacobs

July, 2015

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: VCI’s Eurotrash Double Feature | LANGUAGE: English (no German track included) | DIRECTOR: Rudolf Zehetgruber  | WRITER(S): Fred Ignor, Thomas Engel  | MUSIC: Walter Baumgartner | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Otto Ritter  | CAST: Dietmar Schönherr (Inspektor Eric Harvey); Helga Sommerfeld (Jane Stone); Laya Raki (Nicole); Ady Berber (Henry); Gustav Knuth (Charles Clifton); Ernst Schröder (G.B. Harrison); Kurt Beck (Donald Smith); Hedda Ippen (Mrs. Mabel Wells); Chris Van Loosen (Marilin Wells); Edi Huber (O'Connor); Alex Freihart (Sir David Elford); Walter Kiesler (Van Dorn); Jean Weiss; Erwin Parker (Wilkins); Denis Seiler (Sergeant Masters)