#022 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE FORGER OF LONDON aka DER FÄLSCHER VON LONDON (1961)]

“Who isn’t mad now? Even I might be insane.” Genre darling Karin Dor gives one of her most compelling performances, as the conflicted society-bride Jane. She is strikingly beautiful in the film, and plays a wholly impenetrable character from the start. She is skeptical of her husband's past, skeptical of his reasons for marrying her, skeptical of the possibility of real love ... that her love seems to grow in direct proportion to the likelihood that her husband is a money-forging hammer-killer is just one of the strange, even perverse, elements of the film. She is also remarkable here for how she takes the genre's stock “ingénue-in-distress” character and gives her agency, sustained power, in the face of dominating and ruthless men. She fends them off, bats away their advances, and finds a smirking kind of elan in the face of all her travails.

[This is the thirty-seventh 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. For links to all the other Krimi reviews I’ve posted, go here. For all Giallo reviews, here.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5 stars) 
Subcategory (if any): 
      i. Inheritance Scheme Krimi 
     ii. Ingénue-in-Distress Krimi 
    iii. Heist / Master Criminal Krimi 
    iv. Old Dark House Krimi 
     v. Past Trauma Krimi 
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
        Siegfried Lowitz (official) 
Who's the Ingénue: 
        Karin Dor 
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): No


[NOT EVERYTHING IN THE KRIMI IS A PUNCHLINE]
I’ll always feel indebted to Kim Newman for my formal introduction to the Rialto Krimis, via his invaluable, 30-page Video Watchdog review of the German box sets, as that article came into my life at a time when I was just starting to wrap my head around the genre. (A time, not really that long ago, when I had zero clue for instance that the German Krimis are as responsible as anything else in the world for what we now call the Italian Giallo.) 

The more Krimis I’ve seen though (74 and counting), the more I think his intro and capsule reviews tend to overemphasize one single aspect of the Krimis—and at the expense of all others: I.e., the Krimi’s broadly played comedic elements. And, how these elements take shape—first in the form of stock, “joke characters” (played most often by Eddi Arent), and then in a kind of cartoon aesthetic that manifests itself in set design and décor. (The easiest example of this are those supposedly, screamingly, fake “English” castles and the way they make a mod-but-already-outdated joke out of the Gothic tradition.)  

The danger in weighting one’s understanding of the genre so lopsidedly toward its comedy, though, is that fans—new fans esp.—are in danger of missing the other tones (thriller tones, horror-mystery tones, Giallo tones) that get struck from film to film. It runs the risk of reducing the popular understanding of the genre to nothing more or less than the genre’s camp value—a danger I see borne out in review after review. Newman, in his VW review, frames the story in these terms:

“Harald Reinl’s film of the novel THE FORGER aka THE CLEVER ONE (1927) opens at Ascot [horse track], with Oberinspektor Burke (Siegfried Lowitz) in the crowds on the look-out for counterfeit money and der Königen making a guest appearance in grainy news footage. (Actually, if you count portraits on the walls of Scotland Yard, Elizabeth II is in more of these films than Klaus Kinski.) The imaginative title sequence features a magnifying glass passed over a snide note and a jaunty, catchy Martin Böttcher theme. As is often [the case] in the series, an ordinary racket which would have done for a documentary-style crime movie ... leads the investigators to an overdecorated (lots of antlers) and echoey English country house (Longford Castle) and a twisted uppercrust family—not to mention a Mabuse-alike who issues orders over an intercom in an ominous office with two-way mirrors. A SUSPICION element is added as the new bride Jane (Karin Dor) worries about the possible guilt of her high-born husband Peter Clifton (Hellmut Lange). A scream in the night brings her to the balcony, from which she sees her husband sleepwalking suspiciously in the garden. The next day, Peter wakes up covered in blood, having suffered one of his periodic amnesia spells, and an angry ex-suitor of his wife’s is found battered to death in the early morning mist. All this, like the printing press in the cellar, is a dead giveaway as to the innocence of Herr Clifton.”

In some ways his review suggests—again, esp. to someone unfamiliar with the genre—that tonally the Krimis can’t ever be taken seriously. That, on balance, they are ridiculous, “camp” concoctions whose empty calories are incapable of sustaining dramatic weight, thriller weight, any weight that doesn’t include its own punchline & pratfall routine. 

Of course there’s something to this. One need only experience the bright colors and slapdash, comic-book mechanics of something like THE HUNCHBACK OF SOHO (1966), or THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS (1967), or THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE (1969) to understand why reviews so often boil them down to nothing more than a wink and a nudge re: how crazy and campy all these weirdo West German mysteries are.

But what you discover, once you get past the proverbial “first row,” is that for every HUNCHBACK OF SOHO, there is a melancholy, moody, experimentally shot Krimi whose existence seems wholly unknown to the average reviewer. Krimis that possess a complexity of style *and* substance that the average review seems incapable of acknowledging. Something like the truly troubling, truly envelope-pushing SIEBEN TAGE FRIST, which is, in its own way, as sexually taboo as WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? and as formally innovative as Argento’s OPERA.

That is, for every camp, masked monk (COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS), there is a broken, complicated *human* villain wearing that same mask (THE SINISTER MONK). And, for every passage of vaudeville-style comedy, there is an equally (if not *more*) persuasive passage of what David Sanjek calls Stimmung***: 

That peculiar, and indelible, and overriding *mood* that the best Krimis achieve. A grotesque mystery-horror world built out of mixed-and-matched pieces of pulp from who knows how many different cultures—the popular West German cinema’s invention of a made-up 1960s-era London, which is itself, in turn, based on the writings of a hustler-writer Englishman whose novels were already 40 or 50 years old at the time they were being reused.

What is achieved—again, in the best examples of the genre—is something akin to the “imaginary” Italy that Argento achieves in his Gialli, the ones seeded with transplanted, dislocated, even invented chunks of “real” architecture and landscape as a way to world-build the Giallo into its own time and space ... or the way that De Palma invokes, simultaneously, a thriller world that is both real and imaginary, through his obsessive doubling of images and characters, his obsessive layering of misleading soundtracks, his trick-behind-the-trick-behind-the-trick. (For my tastes, DRESSED TO KILL and BODY DOUBLE are his two most perfect examples of this ... two films whose guts also often get glossed over, by critics and their misunderstanding of the “humor” up there on the screen.).

BONA FIDE GOTHIC ATMOSPHERE: Though many reviewers seem to roll their eyes at the "old dark house" castles that populate this strain of the Krimi, FORGER is chock-full of atmospheric and moving shots that remind me of the Gothic work of Bava / Freda / Margheriti; shots that deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms.

[WHAT COMES AFTER COMEDY]
So. What reviews of Harald Reinl’s THE FORGER OF LONDON most often seem to mention is how *different* it is from all those endless yuck-yuck examples of the Krimi. What an outlier it is, because it tries to “play things fairly straight”. Because it deliberately ignores the winning box-office formula of a joke Krimi, and instead has a violent, potentially troubling story to tell.

Compare it for instance to the same year’s GREEN ARCHER, also starring Karin Dor. There a mugging, schlubbing Eddi Arent plays a cartoon of a journalist named Spike Holland. He opens the movie by jokingly breaking the fourth wall, insisting that this Krimi can’t start because there hasn’t been a murder.

And he ends it by becoming the butt of the genre’s oft-used “Ende gag”: He ends the movie by taking an arrow in the back. But like any good Three Stooges routine, the arrow doesn’t wound him mortally, it only pins the word “Ende” onto the back of this ass, a hokey signal to the audience that their time in the Krimi-verse, for the moment at least, has come to an end.

(The persistence of the Ende gag makes for an interesting echo, when you watch the Lang MABUSE movies that are so key to the staging, styling, and storytelling of the Krimi. In the MABUSE movies, the expressionistic and exaggerated appearance of the Ende-sign Lang uses tracks with the overall feeling of disorientation and unease. In the Krimi, they mostly invite a reading that is hokey and watered down.)

But there are no such gags in FORGER, where Eddi Arent’s reduced to little more than a forgettable cameo, and the well-familiar inheritance plot plays cover for a complicated, even perverted critique of what it means to enter into the marriage bed ... a critique that gives us a window into what unsettles these otherwise “jokey” mysteries.

I.e., because so much of the humor (and the attending distraction it causes) is stripped away in FORGER, we’re left to really focus on the fate of the lead female character played by Karin Dor, here playing one of her umpteen versions of the genre’s ingénue-in-distress. Because the stock ingénue character shows up so often in Krimis, it’s no surprise we get one here—no surprise that much of the plot is driven by some grasping man’s attempt to both steal her inheritance and dominate her mentally. But that's the rub:

Usually this unctuous, repugnant attempt to dominate women—orchestrated here by what Newman so brilliantly calls a “Mabuse-alike” villain in the cast—gets tempered, even canceled out, by the jokes. So it's easy to laugh off the otherwise disturbing implications of a world filled with shrill, abusive men who use their power to do nothing but dominate—socially dominate, sexually dominate, emotionally dominate—the female characters in the film (and female characters, it must be mentioned, who are most often decades younger than their assaulting men, an age difference that adds a certain level of obscenity to the crime).

In short, FORGER gives us an insight into the genre that goes past the thumbnail reviews and headline reductions—past the surface understanding and surface appreciation—and lands us securely into the uneasy position of grappling with what I’ll call (for lack of a better term) the genre’s “Male Menace”.

(Arent is so MIA from the movie that I started to seriously wonder if they were saving him, waiting to reveal him as the faceless villain pulling everyone’s strings. The “Arent-as-Villain” sub-genre of the Krimi did take off later—with him giving us interesting and layered takes on the Krimi villain in THE SINISTER MONK, CIRCUS OF FEAR, HUNCHBACK OF SOHO, THE TRYGON FACTOR, etc. But here he’s a shadow of his usual shtick: a bumbling neighbor who lives next door to one of the crime scenes. He gets some brief, and pointless, physical comedy in his first scene, and then doesn’t show up again until film’s end, in an even briefer cameo.)



[THE MALE MENACE]
So what am I talking about when it comes to this overriding threat, coming from the Krimi’s veritable parade of possessive, violent, even sexually abusive men? In FORGER we get it from the start, first in a kind of existential dread that both Dor and her husband suffer on the eve of their marriage: Dor’s character fears that, in her world, “love” can never be enough for her troubled husband. And he fears that the mysterious secret that haunts his past will also, by way of their marriage, come to haunt and dominate her. 

THE MARRIAGE KNOT: From the start, the “wonderful couple,” whose union is the “envy of all of London,” doubt that anything of the sort could be true. Instead they suffer under a total lack of intimacy (not to mention: sexual desire) that makes things between them icy, awkward, and hard to watch.

And then, walking parallel to their troubled marriage, is that parade of hideous men. There’s the high-society gadabout who openly propositions Dor (even though his manners—and human decency—should prevent it), and who more than once threatens the life of her husband. There’s her ailing father-figure, who uses her love for him to guilt her into a marriage she doubts from the start. There’s the second-in-command police inspector, who seems happy to find Dor and her husband guilty of the crimes he himself has committed. And there’s her husband’s oily old doctor, who takes every chance he gets alone with Dor to try to entice her with his silver-fox (but sagging) charm.

MALE MENACE NO. 1: We’re introduced to Robert Graf in the film’s racetrack prologue. There he hits on Dor’s character—even though her much-feted marriage is imminent—and openly mocks her engagement. His mental / emotional abuse of her even gets some air, as he suggests he possesses secret knowledge of her fiancé that will ruin the both of them. On their wedding day he shows up at the reception sloshed, makes loud, inappropriate comments about her “role” as future mother and wife, and is thrown out. Later he enters Dor’s bedroom as she sleeps, chokes her, then kisses her, and then escapes. He is a smug, slimy male—so hurt by Dor’s rejection of him that he’s determined to have her at any cost.

MALE MENACE NO. 2: Krimi regular Walter Rilla plays Dor’s seemingly well-intentioned uncle. He uses his excuse of poor health as a way to guilt trip her into marriage, even after she confides to him that she thinks the marriage will be an emotional sham. In the sublime ROOM 13 (1964), he played another father-figure in Dor’s life, her actual father, a wealthy upper-cruster whose past sins have come to be visited upon his daughter’s head. In both films, he betrays Dor, using his status as “father” to further leverage her will.

MALE MENACE NO. 3: One of my favorite Krimi players, Ulrich Beiger. He plays the second detective in the film, who may or may not be trying to frame Dor and/or her husband. He’s on the Krimi scene from the first “official” entry, 1959’s FACE OF THE FROG, where he is one of the Frog’s knife-men. He makes his most delirious, menacing impression in Harald Reinl’s near-flawless THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE (1960), including a scene where he tries to force marriage on Dor (the scene is one of the weirdest in the entire genre, esp. as he seems to have a kind of psychotic break in the middle of it) … he also helps throw a woman, who’s tied to a chair, down a three-story hole to her death (extensive review, including caps of those scenes, here).

MALE MENACE NO. 4: It doesn’t take long for the silver-fox doctor—who’s been doping Dor’s husband while also seeding his mind with delusions of mental illness—to go into full-on creeper mode and proposition Dor. While visiting the couple to minister to her husband’s strange blackouts, his “missing time,” he comes right out with it once he has Dor alone. Even though she clearly wants none of it, and is offended that her husband’s confidante would so quickly go rotten on him ... so many male characters in these movies do nothing but betray—callously betray—the confidences they’ve been given. (Note also those thoroughly modern paintings, as visual counterpoint to the film’s “old-fashioned” Gothic tones.)

In short, like so many Krimi males, their overriding function in the story is one of domination—the sneering, indefensible urge to dominate the female characters. That can mean, in the genre, the urge to dominate them socially / financially, manipulating events so that they’ll give up any and all rights to their proper inheritance (and the social independence it affords). 

Think Marisa Mell’s unexpected inheritance in THE PUZZLE OF THE RED ORCHID, and the way that warring gangsters (and their surrogates) seek to “relieve her” of it. Or Sabine Sesselmann’s unsuspecting character in THE DOOR WITH THE SEVEN LOCKS, where a whole cadre of Wallace grotesques—Werner Peters playing a child-sized version of his usual no-good, Pinkas Braun playing a low-rent and ridiculous Dr. Moreau, Hans Nielsen playing a lawyer with a wooden hand—are conspiring to keep her from knowing of the enormous sum of money that should be hers.

Also: To dominate them sexually. As touched upon above, this often takes the form of a much older man who uses his “worldly wisdom” and father-figure status to convince, under duress, the ingénue-in-question to marry them. One of those enslaved-for-life marriages that they’ll never, for the life of them, be able to escape: think Brigitte Grothum in INN ON THE RIVER, and the way she’s manipulated by a criminal syndicate (and one man old enough to be her father) into an arranged marriage that she most assuredly does not want.

There’s also Reinl’s staging of this theme: Though not quite the same caliber as those famous breakfast table scenes in CITIZEN KANE, where the length of the table and passage of time goes to show the increasing marital divide between Kane and his unhappy wife, Reinl’s version is a nice riff that gives us the clearest of windows onto this married life. The first night of their honeymoon, dining in Longford Castle, finds them already at arm’s length. The scene suggests no love, no intimacy—a suggestion that only gets underlined when, on her way to bed, alone, Dor stoically invites her husband to accompany her by conceding that a husband “has certain rights”. In this instance, he does not claim them:

And, once alone, asleep in her room, the lack of intimacy between her and her husband leaves her open to further abuse. A shadowy figure scales the side of the Castle, enters in through her balcony, and proceeds to attack, both with choking hands and a forcible, unwanted kiss. The men in her life nothing but a menace; their default position one of attack.

It also seems a pretty damning comment on marriage: Dor is attacked in her sleep by a man who chokes her as he forces his lips onto hers, and he is only able to do this because she has rejected her husband on their wedding night. We get a version of a world where, no matter their standing in society, the female characters exist under that constant threat of attack. If they reject their husbands “rights,” they also lose any chance to be protected by them. And if they submit to their husbands—in situations where they are not truly in love, guilted into a marriage they did not really want—it is its own kind of attack. An attack on their sense of self, their individuality, their right to exist autonomous in the world. 

There is no security—let alone sanctity—no matter what they do. Whatever their choice, they find a marriage bed that is as cold, violent, and unsafe as if they went ahead in the world on their own. At every turn men want to possess them, violate them, lord over them (by exploiting the law, societal mores, or just robbing them blind).

Here, Dor’s earnest, honest attempts to connect with a husband who keeps her at arm’s length—her willingness to break the law herself in an attempt to keep him from being punished for a crime she may or may not believe he’s committed—her genuinely conflicted expression of a forward-looking, “modern” woman who has come to believe that maybe the institution of marriage is obsolete, and she would be better off insisting on a life outside it ... all of these layered, at-odds expressions of her character (her “stand-up” if you will) are trampled on by the boorish, pig-headed, abusive men. Men who see her as a possession, an exploitable means to an end.

...

That she and her husband are eventually vindicated (and through no small help from one of the only other non-villainous males in the cast, the chief inspector played by Lowitz) does little, really, to counteract the profound angst that has been radiating from her up till then. In much the same way that the “solutions” to most Gialli fail, really, to solve the existential uncertainty raised by the events of the film, so too does Dor’s eventual “happy ending”—an ending that does little to convince the viewer of Dor’s ability, as a woman in the Krimi-verse, to “win”. 

(For more on the notion of the happy ending in the Krimi, go here.)

...

I realize that, in comparison to the examples of sexual sadism, gang rape, mental torture, etc. made so explicit in modern films, these half-buried, part-implied subtexts—their subtlety—is maybe harder to latch onto and appreciate. But under the Krimi’s bumbling comedy, the Old Dark House setting, the sometimes creaky dialogue and plot mechanic, it’s there. And the more Krimis you watch, the more this nagging, disconcerting trauma insists ... that it too often gets obscured by slapstick and laughs doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Or that it’ll ever get fixed.

Leonard Jaocbs

April, 2016

 
***I’ve covered this concept several times already. For reference sake, here’s the relevant text that I quoted in my review of 1960’s THE AVENGER:

“... [Krimis] play a double-edged game with what happens on the film's surface and what seems to have happened. 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.”

The appearance of a similar strategy in certain Japanese Noir movies has also been discussed by Jasper Sharp, something he calls Mukokuseki. His description sounds very much like he’s describing a Krimi:

“... representative of a more hardboiled strain of Nikkatsu Action movie that became increasingly stylized and self-referential over the next decade. They often deployed the same acting talent, with male stars such as Jo Shishido and Hideaki Nitani moving from supporting to more centre-stage roles, and invoked mukokuseki (‘borderless’) onscreen worlds that, in their embrace of an aesthetic and iconography gleaned from the international language of foreign pulp cinema of the same vein, seemed more and more divorced from any recognisable, lived-in Japanese reality, while simultaneously expressing a sense of cynicism and despair at the path up which modernity was leading the country. When combined with some of the most striking and idiosyncratic monochrome widescreen scope cinematography seen anywhere in the world at the time, certain titles transcended their modest potboiler ambitions to find their place within the loftier echelons of cinematic artistry.”

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: I have the German DVD release, which has significantly better a/v than the bootleg US disc(s); it also seems to be a bit longer. The problem is that it offers no English options. So I watched the film a few times, toggling back and forth between the superior a/v of the German disc and the English dub on the crap US bootleg, which I needed in order to get the gist of the dialogue | LANGUAGE: Very unsatisfying English dub. | DIRECTOR: Harald Reinl | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, Johannes Kai | MUSIC: Martin Böttcher | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Karl Löb | CAST: Karin Dor (Jane Clifton, geb. Leith); Hellmut Lange (Peter Clifton, geb. Welerson); Siegfried Lowitz (Oberinspektor Bourke); Mady Rahl (Marjorie Wells); Walter Rilla (John Leith); Robert Graf (Basil Hale); Joseph Offenbach (Henry); Ulrich Beiger (Inspektor Rouper); Otto Collin (Rechtsanwalt Radlow); Sigrid von Richthofen (Mrs. Anderson); Eddi Arent (Nachbar Stone / Organist Miller); Viktor de Kowa (Dr. Donald Wells)

#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)