#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)

#012 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE SINISTER MONK aka DER UMHEIMLICHE MONCH (1965)]

A remarkable prologue in a genre chock-full of them. We get the death of a wealthy patriarch, the introduction of his scheming children, a death-bed change to his will, his lawyer's death-by-rock-to-the-windshield, and a sudden eruption of color (in the form of a flaming car) in an otherwise black-and-white film. (Also the introduction of Darkwood Hall as a Gothic character in itself.)

 

The family waits outside the death room. From left, Dieter Eppler (who plays Sir William), Hartmut Reck (Ilse Steppat's son Ronny, who happens to be an unrepentant murderer-rapist), and Steppat, the dying man's conflicted daughter. She is the headmistress of a girls' boarding school housed in Darkwood Hall, and hopes that her father's death won't mean that she will lose the property.

The dying man, dictates his last will, giving everything to his disgraced granddaughter Gwendoline (played by series superstar Karin Dor).

The dead man's solicitor leaving in his car. Krimi fans are sure to know that he'll be stopped from making his destination before the opening credits roll.

A mystery man launches a rock at the lawyer's windshield, causes the car crash, and escapes into the night with the will. As the car erupts in flame, so does the film (in color). It's the first (and last) Krimi to use this trick, as far as I'm aware; the following year's HUNCHBACK OF SOHO would become the first full-color Rialto film.

[Note: This is the sixteenth 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.]

[Note: I returned to one of the dwindling number of black-and-white Krimis that I hadn't seen, as a kind of palate cleanser for the depressing retreads that start happening once the series switches to color (those that I've been writing up of late). It also gave me the chance to write about a third entry that features comedian Eddi Arent as the head villain. I watched the film twice (including when I did the capping), and found myself developing a genuine appreciation for what it does right, covered below under four headings.]


My Krimi Rating: ★★★★☆ 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Boarding School Krimi
     ii. Ingénue in Distress Krimi
     iii. Masked Monk Krimi
     iv. Inheritance Krimi
     v. Arent-as-Villain / Arent-as-Human-Being Krimi
    vi. Old Dark House Krimi
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Harald Liepnitz (official)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Karin Dor (who passes the baton in this movie to Uschi Glas) 
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd link)

 
[ARENT AS VILLAIN; ARENT AS HUMAN BEING]
This is now the third Arent-as-Villain entry I’ve written up, and it feels like the most human, in terms of his characterization—the most potentially satisfying, esp. when trying to view him not as a vaudeville character (his usual level of believability) but as a functioning person whose motivations both make narrative sense and elicit some sympathy in the viewer. His primary persona in the film is the overly helpful butler who is overly concerned with Karin Dor’s well-being. And though Arent is known for playing some version of a “comedy butler” in more than one series entry, it's refreshing how restrained he plays it for this one. There’s no (or, not much) Arent mugging at the camera as he tells tired jokes. Not much physical comedy—no Arent standing on his head doing leg-scissor exercises while his Scotland Yard partner tries to question him; no Arent being shot in the back with an arrow that (literally) attaches him to the film’s “Ende” gag. Generally, he feels like a human being here. One who has a deep (if unexplained) devotion to Dor. Everything from his understated, toned-down body language, to his beaming and enthusiastic expressions, to the lines visible on his face in closeup—he's not his usual one-note comedy routine. (Just goes to show, I guess, that Arent did have range, and, when given the opportunity, could layer his performance in believable ways.)

Arent is the resident butler at Darkwood Hall. He is inexplicably concerned with Dor's safety, from the moment she arrives. Instead of playing this extreme of concern for laughs, or for a creepy red herring, the film chooses to play it as a genuine human emotion.

Even when it’s revealed that his desire to keep her safe is (maybe) a mask for a kind of obsessive-compulsive longing for her—how else are we supposed to take the fetishizing he does of her “death” mask, hanging it all alone on a wall in his lavish den?—he still feels more sympathetic than creepy. His death at the end almost makes me feel bad for him (or, at least, for the unfixable tragedy that his life had become), and it shows a welcome depth in the characterization of his “good half”.


...

I will say that, on the first watch, the thing I found unsatisfying about his character was the time I was given to appreciate him *as the villain*. Though the hooded Monk makes many appearances in the movie—always quickly and expertly dispatching another unlikable member of the cast with his unerring whip-snapping skills—unless you’ve guessed early on that it’s Arent under the mask, you have little time to contemplate him as a villain. Until the final reveal, which feels like it happens maybe too quickly after such an agonizing build-up (the time the film spends on sheer delay—postponing the arrival of the Monk's unmasking while Dor stays stymied in an unfamiliar house, hosted by a new butler who isn't "allowed to say" who his master is [or where he is] ... she is shown to the den, finds her death mask hanging on the wall, and is left to wait ... and wait ...). When the climax finally comes, and the hood is peeled off Arent's face, I was immediately wishing that I'd had more time to take all this in. That he hadn't lost his ability to function as a villain at almost the same moment the audience began to think of him as one.

On my second watch, knowing all this going in, I have to say that I appreciated everything more. And found the ending not so much anti-climatic (or frustrating), but sadder, and more impactful. (More on the ending, and Arent's *other* appearance as a killer monk, below.)

[THE CRUEL NATURE OF THE FILM'S OTHER VILLAINS]
So, as you would expect, the machinations of the plot get a little convoluted. What overrides the confusion for me (in my recall of the movie) is how breathtakingly callous the family of villains are, as they seek to steal Karin Dor's inheritance.

A rogue's gallery of familiar faces. Facing, from left, Gwendoline's (Karin Dor's) cousin Ronny (Hartmut Reck, whose face btw reminded me more than once of Phil Hartman's), Uncle William (Dieter Eppler), Aunt Patricia (Ilse Steppat), and Uncle Richard (Siegfried Lowitz). Fans of the genre will recognize at least three of these four actors, with Lowitz usually playing one of the regular stable of detectives (more on the detective merry-go-round below).

Ilse Steppat, daughter of the dead man, wants to keep Darkwood Hall at all costs, as it is the site of the girls' boarding school that has become her life. Dieter Eppler, her brother, is content to inherit as much London property as possible. Third brother Siegfried Lowitz (who wasn't present for the prologue death, as he was likely orchestrating the car accident and theft of the will) takes his father's death as an opportunity to threaten blackmail for all involved. Steppat's rapist son Ronny is just looking for whatever lifetime meal ticket will be easiest to punch. And … the wild card in all this scheming is the dead man's granddaughter, our heroine Karin Dor (Gwendoline), who is the missing will's sole heir. We learn that her father, the final brother of this scheming trio, has been imprisoned for murder … a murder that (of course) his siblings pinned on him, leaving Dor to live the mistaken shame of being the daughter of a murderer, and to assume that her lot in life will involve anything but enormous inheritances and the opportunities of privilege. 

One remarkable thing about these secondary villains in the movie is just how callous they are when it comes to manipulating Dor's character out of her money—by turns they want to hide her inheritance from her, extort her inheritance from her, and/or force themselves romantically (also, it need not even be said, sexually) in order to make her think she has no choice in life but to join one of them in a prison of forced matrimony. Their interactions are low on humor and high on just how incapable these four are of functioning as moral human beings. They represent a clear and felt menace for Dor. They don't find their abuse of Dor questionable, but tiresome—tiresome because it's taking so damn long, and they're ready to be done with it already so they can exercise total, malicious power over her. 

They come across as really awful people, and infuse the movie with a cruel streak that seems ahead of its time (or an echo of genre outliers from an earlier one: The jaw-dropping psychic cruelty of the satanists in Val Lewton's THE SEVENTH VICTIM comes to mind).

It is also the reason why Arent's unmasking as the main villain carries with it the possibility of so much sympathy—why his performance seems so human: It stands in contrast to how inhuman Dor's oppressors are—they who want to rob, murder, and/or molest her, whose necks Arent has spent the movie snapping in order to *protect* Dor and her inheritance ... that he also did this in the hopes that she would, out of gratitude (or even love) eventually marry him is where the audience identification with his tragic character starts to trail off, and instead aligns him more with later Slasher/Giallo killers, insecure and addled men who undertake their murders so they can dominate (or impress) a woman they “love”.

(Beyond the subplot of someone else trying to take revenge on Ronny because of the rape he committed, there are others: Chief among them being that the girls at Steppat's boarding school are being systematically kidnapped by a white-slaving ring. As in ROOM 13, the overemphasis on these other plots only dilutes what should be the real strength of the material [in R13 it's the proto-Giallo/proto-Slasher plot; here it's the identity and motivation of the masked Monk re: Dor]. It encourages the viewer to spend too much time sorting red herrings, and not enough time focusing on the more psychotronic aspects of the story.)

Just one of several sequences that focus on the conniving family and their attempts to dominate and/or hoodwink Dor.

[THE MURDERS THEMSELVES]
Both in the measured, almost ritualized way the Monk dispatches his victims (Craig J. Clark, in his Letterboxd review, put it best: "After each murder, I found myself looking forward to the expert way he coils up his whip in preparation for the next victim."), and how effectively staged his appearance comes off, he makes for one of the most satisfying Krimi villains I've seen:

[EMBEDDED CHUNKS OF OTHER KRIMIS, DEPLOYED IN WAYS THAT ACTUALLY WORK]
The film works if you're a Krimi fan, because it looks both forward and backwards in the genre:

1. What else can be said about Karin Dor's influence on the genre? As far as I’m aware, this is her last appearance in a Krimi (11 in all), and one where she symbolically hands off her ingénue baton to Uschi Glas (who plays one of the kidnapped schoolgirls here, and who would go on to play similarly menaced characters in THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS, THE GORILLA OF SOHO, THE CORPSE IN THE THAMES (aka, ANGELS OF TERROR), and SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS [also, the “Giallo-that’s-really-an-unofficial-Krimi,” Antonio Margheriti’s NAKED YOU DIE]).

She had at this point in her portrayal of Krimi female leads run a richer gamut than most other female cast members (save for Elisabeth Flickenschildt, who, because of age, was perhaps given the chance to do more with her undeniable screen presence than just play a damsel in distress … it’s also possible Barbara Rütting may eventually join this rarefied group, but I still have too many of her performances yet to see). She’d played the Giallo-killer in ROOM 13—effectively embodying Yolanda from THE SCREAMING MIMI, effectively foreshadowing Monica Ranieri from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. And she’d played the most stock version of the ingénue character in one of the absolute most perfect Krimis, THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE. She’d even played an ingénue-lite in “imitation” Krimis like THE INVISIBLE DR. MABUSE.

She is, as much as Joachim Fuchsberger, Eddi Arent, or Klaus Kinski, part of the very DNA of these films, one of the integral reasons that they succeed. Her absence from later entries is just that: an absence. One that the films largely failed to fill for the rest of their run. 

2. A welcome use of the expected grotesques: Grotesque characters (and character traits) had become the norm in the series by 1965, and SUSPIRIA's Rudolf Schündler plays a creep artist who lives in the attic and spends his time making death masks. Though he figures into the white-slaving plot, the more interesting sections of his screen time come when he's interacting with Dor's character. He invites her into his studio and puts on a record, which turns out to be the same piece of music that Rose's brother Mark listens to while in class, in Rome, in Argento's INFERNO.

Later, he takes a plaster cast of her face for his collection, in a scene that reminded me of Kinski doing the same to Ady Berber in THE INDIAN SCARF:

3. The latest installment of the Detective's Club: Harald Liepnitz is the film's resident detective. Liepnitz also appears as detective in CREATURE WITH THE BLUE HAND and as a psuedo/assumed detective hero in CURSE OF THE HIDDEN VAULT. What's most interesting about his turn as detective is that he is only one of at least eight different actors who would play the chief sleuth for the films.  

Joachim Fuchsberger and Heinz Drache are the two most used (also: the two most satisfying, appearing as hero-detectives in at least 17 and 8 films respectively), but we also have the somewhat older (and stodgier) Siegfried Lowitz (you can seem him detecting in FACE OF THE FROG, THE FORGER OF LONDON, and DER HEXER); Gunther Stoll, who feels always miscast in such a leading man role, and feels more suited to shifty, deranged killers like the one he plays in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (as detective, he appears in HUNCHBACK OF SOHO and DOUBLE FACE); Horst Tappert, whose lack of charisma I've already written about in THE GORILLA GANG and THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE; and Hansjörg Felmy, who is genially solid in the detective role in movies like ANGELS OF TERROR and THE MAD EXECUTIONERS (and is surprisingly layered as the Jack the Ripper-afflicted actor in MONSTER OF LONDON CITY). 

Also, another name that can be added to the list is Harry Riebauer, who is Inspector in Bryan Edgar Wallace's STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE, and plays a police doctor in the B.E.W. entry THE MAD EXECUTIONERS, as well as more than one shiftless, lecherous red herring (in COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS, he is the unemployed brother of the school's headmistress, who uses his access to the school as a way to sleep with the girls … which is, actually, a kind of re-do of Ronny's character here.)

Get in line, Detective ... Harald Liepnitz fills the requisite role here.

4. End of the mystery, end of the monk. Arent's unmasking here is quite a contrast to the unmasking of “Monk” Eddi at the end of THE BLACK ABBOT. There it's played as an improbable joke (he says he put on the killer monk's mask because he was cold [?!?!]), a jokey bridge to the film's Ende gag. Here, it feels both more serious, and more sad. 

In this moment of unmasking I kept thinking of the wardrobe mistress' unmasking of the killer in OPERA (that black, finely textured fabric and the cut of the eyeholes have a lot in common).

Liepnitz's explanation for Arent's motives, talking to Dor: “A woman must have hurt him deeply when he was young. So he felt only hatred against anything feminine. That would also explain his disguise as a monk. But then he met you. The notes you received came from him. He was a criminal, but he wanted to help you prove your father's innocence. He must have loved you very much.” 

What's weird about this solution to the mystery (other than unexplained bits like his hatred of women would drive him to dress as a Monk [?!]) is the fact that the film also has a strange kind of “double explanation”. After Liepnitz makes this speech to Dor, the solution is immediately explained in even more detail to Sir John (reliable ol' Siegfried Schürenberg). It's hard to say what the narrative reason for this double reveal is, esp. as one scene follows directly on the other. It's a clumsy, utilitarian redo of exposition, which seems to have no effect other than to deaden the sadness of the Monk's death by repeating a series of purely made-up motives that don't, in the end, have much to do with the plot.

Interestingly enough, the first Krimi that casts comedian Arent as the villain also dispenses with the Ende gag altogether.

 Leonard Jacobs

November, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release offered in Vol. 6 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Harald Reinl | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, J. Joachim Bartsch, Fred Denger | MUSIC: Peter Thomas | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ernst W. Kalinke  | CAST: Karin Dor (Gwendolin); Harald Leipnitz (Inspector Bratt); Siegfried Lowitz (Sir Richard); Siegfried Schürenberg (Sir John); Ilse Steppat (Lady Patricia); Dieter Eppler (Sir William); Hartmut Reck (Ronny); Kurt Waitzmann (Cunning); Rudolf Schündler (Alfons Short); Kurd Pieritz (Monsieur d'Arol); Uta Levka (Lola); Dunja Rajter (Dolores); Uschi Glas (Mary); Eddi Arent (Smith)