Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People

The second krimi to be made for Rialto by director Harald Reinl, Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People begins much where his first, The Fellowship of the Frog, had ended, as the mysterious master criminal Shelton who has hitherto run rings around the police is captured at last.






In case anyone doubts that we're really in London, England

Gunning down a policeman in a desperate bid to escape Shelton is sentenced to death by hanging. Facing the executioner in prison, Shelton seems remarkably calm, indicating that he will have his revenge on those present and the others he holds responsible for his death.




The hanged man's revenge?

Believing Shelton's warnings to be nothing more than an idle threat, Inspector Long (Joachim Fuchsberger) is about to resign from the force and take up a job in his father's Lord Long's bank.

Two things put paid to this plan.

The first is the Inspector's promotion to Chief Inspector, received on account of his bringing Shelton to justice. The second – far more important – is the question of whether Shelton, who apparently took his own life with poison to cheat the hangman, is in fact dead as a series of apparitions and accidents ensue.

Not believing in ghosts, Long orders the exhumation of Shelton's body, revealing a coffin filled with bricks and a hit list of targets, some already effectively crossed off and the remainder including himself and beautiful young bank worker Nora Sanders (Karin Dor, Reinl's wife at the time).

Though things get somewhat bogged down at this point with a confusing number of characters and subplots and a locked room mystery as another victim is somehow shot in the head in his hotel room – the various individuals having been gathered there to better allow Long to protect them whilst contuining the investigation – they pick up for the third act with a suspenseful game of cat and mouse between hero and villain(s) in the latter's trap-laden hideout.






Shelton's appearances and disappearances are well executed

If there is perhaps already a sense of deja vu about some of the characters and situations, the more Mabuse-like figure of Shelton provides Reinl more scope to play Langian games than the Frog did, pointing the way towards his actual Mabuse films, whilst the introduction of Eddi Arent's soon to be patented comic relief figure – here a police photographer who habitually faints at the sight of blood or a corpse – points the way forward for the Rialto series as a whole. (Arent had appeared in Der Racher, but it was not a Rialto production and proved to be a one-off from Kurt Ulrich Studios.)

Visually the film presents an advance on its predecessor, with some pronounced expressionist touches around the phantom Shelton's brief appearances in the shadows and / or fog, various chiaroscuro effects and some attention-grabbing but nevertheless restrained compositions alongside the elegant dolly work.




The good-humoured Long responds to the phantom's note by correcting his rank to Chief Inspector

There are also some repeated visual motifs such as the frequent Langian clocks – Reinl tellingly overlaying the first with his credit and cutting away from it at the exact moment of Shelton's intended execution – and the sudden appearance of a noose before the hangman in an ironic reprise of the noose he had placed before Shelton. (Reinl's way of introducing the nooses into the frame is also somewhat reminiscent of Leone's in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly)

The process shots, featuring racing cars and speedboats, are less satisfactory unless we work on the possible but unlikely seeming premise that this was intentional on Reinl's part, as a way of giving the film more of a 1920s or 30s feel, or of further drawing attention to its filmic nature beyond Arent's character. (Here it's worth remembering, however, that some of critics who would likely have taken Reinl to task here may well have been more sympathetic to the equally obvious process work in Hitchcock's Marnie, indicating the difficulty of drawing a clear distinction between bad filmmaking and Brechtian distanciation.)






Shelton as Mabuse

Heinz Funk's score is more experimental than its immediate crime-jazz predecessors, featuring some suitably disquietingly weird timbres and effects alongside the more usual suspense cues.

There is no ende gag yet, nor any Hier Spricht Edgar Wallace, though the Goldmann's novel is specified – nummer 11 in the series.

Edgar Wallace - Der Frosch mit der Maske / The Fellowship of the Frog / Frøen med masken

To quote Frank Booth: “This Is It!”

The it in question being the beginnings of the modern krimi film, the first of some 40 odd works based on the work of Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace to be made in West Germany between 1959 and 1972.

But whilst many such European genre film firsts are necessarily somewhat tentative, as with the 25 or so Italian westerns made before A Fistful of Dollars that imitated rather than transformed the pre-existing American models, it emerges as a surprisingly confident production whose imprints can still be felt in many a later entry in the series.

Certainly the missing elements, such as stock footage establishing that the film was 'really' shot in London – or more to the point wasn't – the colour credits sequence, and the twelve gunshots followed by the “Hier spricht Edgar Wallace” announcement are in the minority and only really become evident when the film is considered in the light of hindsight.

To itemise what we do have: a strangely attired master criminal; professional and amateur investigators, the former from Scotland Yard; a Soho nightspot, complete with singing femme fatale; a damsel in distress; a would-be avenger; a comic-relief butler; a blind peddlar who isn't all that he seems; a country house; the criminals' secret base; some neat self-referential touches – one investigator goes undercover as a lighting man and records a crucial crime scene with a concealed camera; a distinct propensity for British bobbies to seemingly carry firearms as a matter of course; and a confusingly large number of somehow interconnected characters to provide intrigue, victims and suspects as and when required.

The master criminal is the titular Frog, the head of a three-hundred strong gang identifiable by their numbers and the brand they all wear. His own identity is unknown, with the quest to unmask him propelling the story onwards at a characteristically breathless Wallace pace, wherein one year of undercover work by Inspector Higgins is telegraphed into a single sentence and a brief scene in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to apprehend the Frog.

As Higgins' body is found, complete with a couple of potential clues, footprints which do not match and a reside of cement dust in the dead man's mouth, the true investigators are revealed in the form of Inspector Hedge of the Yard and Richard Gordon, an American of independent means who affects the manners and lifestyle of an English gentleman – he is also the employer of the butler – and might as well be one.

Gordon and his butler are played by Joachim Fuchsberger and Eddi Arent, soon to become typed as the definitive hero and comic relief figures respectively, although Fuchsberger's heroes would hereafter tend more to be offficial representatives of the law.

With the man with the non-matching footprints soon identified as Mr Bennett we are next introduced to his son Ray and daughter Ella, whom the more attentive viewer might already recognise as one of the Frog's next targets, Higgins being the other.

While Ella is the dutiful daughter, concerned for her father's and brother's well-being – Mr Bennett always seems pre-occupied by his trips into London on unspecified business – Ray is somewhat wayward, with a desire for an easy life that leads him into trouble as in a short space of time he goes on to ignore the advice of the avuncular Mr Johnston at his work; anger their employer, the fearsome permanently be-gloved Mr Maitland, and winds up in a Soho club where he falls for the resident singer, named Lolita.

Sure enough, she is also involved with the Frog; even if we're still no clearer as to his identity – though Gordon suspects he may be wearing the mask to conceal his identity as missing master criminal Harry Lime, on the grounds that some sort of disfiguring mark would be too obvious / straightforward – we at least now have a number of suspects to work through.

Lime, of course, is also the name of 'The Third Man,' the post-war profiteer in Graham Greene's story memorably brought to the screen by Carol Reed, with that Anton Karas zither score and Lime / Orson Welles's speech about cuckoo clocks and the Borgias; there was also a TV series around the time of the film in which he was reinvented as a detective hero.

Whether intentionally or otherwise Ray and Lolita are vaguely reminscent of characters from Weimar German films such as Asphalt, to recall the era of the first Wallace craze within Germany – one swiftly ended by the Nazis – and the way in which the novels and these films, though now coming across as naïve, harmless kitschy reminders of a more innocent-seeming age, were often shocking and controversial enough in their day.

Lolita's song, entitled “Night and Fog on the Thames,” has some interesting connotations here, in suggesting not only the danger of the area as presumably intended by its authors but also the phrase used by the Nazis when they arranged the “night and fog” disappearances of those they deemed undesirable.

Two other shock moments of note here the dispatching of an unfortunate policeman who happens upon the Frog's gang in the middle of a robbery and the way in which the Frog silences an over-noisy female prisoner. In the first, we don't get any POV shots of the attack as we might get in a later film, nor the actual the moment when throat is slit, but do get a surprisingly graphic hands clutching throat shot. In the second the Frog unexpectedly whips out a submachine gun and somewhat needlessly drills the woman full of holes to shut her up for good.

Away from Fuchsberger and Arent two other krimi regulars making their debut genre appearance are Fritz Rasp and Dieter Eppler, the latter also a familiar face from a number of straight horror productions of the time such as The Head and Castle of the Walking Dead.

Coincidentally or otherwise, Castle was also directed by Fellowship of the Frog helmsman Harald Reinl, who would go on to direct a further half-dozen Edgar Wallace entries, making him the second-most prolific director in the series after Alfred Vohrer.

With most of the camera set ups, angles and movements functional and the editing classical, the Expressionistic aspects of the film come primarily through elements within the frame, as this street or that interior is made darker and more dangerous looking or a light source 'just happens' to cast some suggestive pattern; the one time Reinl does break out some Third Man-esque Dutch angles is when a fist-fight breaks out, with this being a scene that also features some more dynamic camerawork and editing.

Willy Mattes's jazzy score is pleasing if comparatively lacking in the quirky qualities.that would came to the fore in later films.