[Note that this review contains a spoiler]
This is one of the quintessential krimis, part of a select group along with The Hexer and The Sinister Monk that would inspire sequels or remakes. It is also noteworthy for having a relatively famous predecessor in the form of the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Dark Eyes of London, one of the few pre-war Wallace adaptations to reach a wider audience; here we might have a quick straw poll on how many have heard of the Weimar German versions of, say, The Hexer or The Squeaker, or have seen them?
It is also important for being the series debut of Alfred Vohrer, who would go on to direct approximately half of all the titles in the series, far outstripping his closest rival Harald Reinl. Putting it another way, Vohrer was to the krimi what Terence Fisher was to Hammer horror, or Mario Bava to the giallo: the man without which the genre would otherwise be just about impossible to imagine.
As Tim Lucas and others have noted, Vohrer and Reinl's directorial styles are different, each man putting his own particular stamp on the material. The thing that really stands out here is how much fun he and his team appear to be having with all sorts of trick shots.
Though some, like the impossible POV shot from inside a man's mouth as he cleans his teeth with a water pick, exist purely as moments of cinematic spectacle, others, like the repeated use of anachronistic irising effects; the device of having a character move in front of and away from the camera in lieu of an obvious cut; or the reflection of one character in another's mirror shades, are more neatly intertwined with the theme of vision running through the film.
Another of Dead Eyes's merits is the sadistic glee with which Vohrer handles the murder set pieces, ranging from the burning of a man's hands with a lighted cigarette so that he plunges to his death down an elevator shaft, to a strangulation to a shot-through the eye a la Argento's Opera some 26 years later. (The killer, along with almost everyone else, wear black gloves, extending the 'fashion to fetish' trajectory identified by Gary Needham in relation to Bava's The Girl Who Knew too Much and Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; giallo fans will also appreciate some loving close-ups of gleaming knife blades.)
Plot wise it's the usual clotted affair, where just everyone who shows up on screen is improbably inter-related and involved in one way or another, beginning with the recruitment of Karin Dor's Eleanor Ward - a meaningful surname in the Wallace universe, where very few young women appear to have been brought up by their natural parents - to read a barely legible Braille message on a scrap of paper. Said scrap was found in the pocket of a wealthy Australian gentleman fished out of the Thames, an apparent accident of a type that has been occurring with alarming frequency of late, leading to well-founded suspicions of foul play.
But there are also those near certainties you can use to make sense of it all; I say near because as the series wore on the film-makers would occasionally experiment with casting someone against type for an added frisson.
To wit: Joachim Fuchsberger's Inspector Larry Holt is above suspicion and reproach, as is Eddi Arent's comic relief, Sergeant "Sunny" Harvey, while Klaus Kinski's Edgar Strauss is either a suspect or red herring and Dor's foundling the woman-in-peril cum love interest for Fuchsberger. (Is it just me or would anyone else like to see a krimi where it's the Scotland Yard man who is behind the conspiracy as a means of capturing the love interest and the fortune she typically seems about to inherit.)
The nature of Ady Berber's Blind Jack, the henchman who provides the murder gang with muscle is also of interest. A mentally subnormal ape-like throwback, with a tendency towards violence and a string of previous convictions behind him, he's the type of somewhat un-politically correct 1920s Wallace character whose existence in a 1960s German krimi seems daring, naive or something of both in the light of the Nazi period with eugenics, extermination und so weiter.
Since we see Blind Jack in the pre-credits scene, bundling a victim into a van, his role is not a mystery, rather it is the identity or identities of the leaders of the gang, the ones controlling him.
[spoiler warning]
On the krimi-giallo connection it also worth noting here the occupation of one of the gang's leaders, as a presumably Protestant counterpart to the Catholic priests and fake priests who pop up with alarming regularity in the giallo.
[spoiler warning]
Heinz Funk's score again mixes the conventional and the unusual, with some of those not quite sure what they are, or are supposed to be, timbres. It's all in good fun, nonetheless, just like the rest of the film.
Showing posts with label klaus kinski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label klaus kinski. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 December 2008
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
Der Rächer / The Avenger
The Avenger is one of the odd films out amongst the 40 odd krimis made between 1959 and 1972, as the sole film within the cycle to be produced by Kurt Ulrich Filmproduktion rather than the more familiar Rialto or CCC.
Seeing the success of The Fellowship of the Frog, Ulrich quickly moved to make an unofficial Edgar Wallace adaptation, beating Rialto's Die Bande des Schreckens to West German screens by a few weeks in August 1960. Rialto had the last laugh however, taking Ulrich to court and preventing his company from making subsequent films – a decision which in turn explains why CCC used the work of Bryan Edgar Wallace rather than his better known father when they began making krimis shortly thereafter.
Though Kurt Ulrich Filmproduktion only made one krimi, it was nevertheless to prove an influential one, featuring the genre debuts of a number of krimi stalwarts in Heinz Drache, Siegfried Schurenberg and Klaus Kinski, along with one of the cycle's more memorable monsters in the form of Al Hoosman's Bhag, a non-too PC primitive type (variously referred to as “a negro”; “an animal from the jungle”; “a demented creature”, and “The best servant in the world: he doesn't think, he doesn't speak, he doesn't answer” brought to England from the wilds of Borneo.
Kinski
Bhag
Additionally, it also pushed the self-referential aspect that bit further than its immediate predecessor by locating the investigation amidst the making of a film, giving Kinski an early opportunity to play the tortured artist as its highly-strung screenwriter.
Though far from this type himself in own approach to writing, Edgar Wallace had started working for the cinema in the 1920s (most famously penning the original story for King Kong shortly before his death) while Bryan Edgar Wallace would subsequently actually work in the film industry, including with CCC on adapting some of his own thrillers.
A painting that may or may not prove important
Besides this, we also see an early – albeit quite possibly coincidental – instance of the krimis influencing the later Italian giallo when the film's director, Mr Jackson, elevates an extra, Ruth Sanders, to the position of lead after getting fed up with the diva antics of his star, Stella Mendoza, in a manner reminiscent of Dario Argento's Opera. It is, as Jackson says, the sort of incredible thing which normally only happens in the movies.
If this connection seems a spurious one, we can also note that the German name for the killer, der kofpsjager, or 'the headhunter', also prefigures that of the maniac in the Italian director's Trauma. (Admittedly here the killer does not keep the heads, however.)
Faces at a window
Similarly while The Fellowship of the Frog had featured covert filming that revealed a vital detail, here we have a similar detail – a woman at the window, no less – being captured purely by chance, much like the murder in the park in Antonioni's anti-giallo Blow-Up.
Some nice old dark house thing lurking in the shadows action
The typically convoluted plot opens in media res: An apparent maniac known as 'The Executioner' has struck no fewer than 12 times, decapitating his victims on each occasion. The last victim was beyond reproach, a fact which seems to have spurred the authorities into action at last, the majority of the previous victims having been incorrigible criminals.
Fortunately special investigator Brixan (Drache) has several clues to work with: the killer is extremely strong, having beheaded his victims with a single blow from a heavy blade; uses a typewriter on which a couple of the keys are distinctively out of alignment, and posts cryptic messages in the newspaper under the name of “the Benefactor”. (Curiously, however, Brixan is not a Scotland Yard man, rather being associated with the Foreign Office.)
Posing as a journalist sent to cover the making of the film, Brixen is quick to uncover a number of potential suspects, including the aforementioned Bhag – albeit as the tool of his white master Sir Gregory Penn, a womanising adventurer type – and Kinski's screenwriter, Voss, on whose typewriter the messages seem to have been written...
Of course this surfeit of suspects only serves to further complicate things, as do the array of quirky supporting characters, such as the harmless old eccentric Longman and – in one especially 'what the' moment – a swordsman who seems to have stepped out of a wuxia, coupled with the inevitable romantic subplot that develops between Brixen and Ruth, herself also another of Wallace's orphans / nieces / wards in peril.
Director Karl Anton was an industry veteran whose career dated back to the Czech cinema in the 1920s. Though clearly a competent filmmaker, his direction here old-fashioned and routine, though he does use the zoom lens to nicely augment / express the undoubtedly shock of finding a severed head in a box on a couple of occasions.
Admittedly, however, a fair evaluation of Anton's contributions is not helped by the overly dark, somewhat panned and scanned copy under review, originally released on video by Sinister Cinema in the 1990s.
[More information on the versions of the film and its relationship to the Wallace text: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-victims-of-der-rcher.html]
Seeing the success of The Fellowship of the Frog, Ulrich quickly moved to make an unofficial Edgar Wallace adaptation, beating Rialto's Die Bande des Schreckens to West German screens by a few weeks in August 1960. Rialto had the last laugh however, taking Ulrich to court and preventing his company from making subsequent films – a decision which in turn explains why CCC used the work of Bryan Edgar Wallace rather than his better known father when they began making krimis shortly thereafter.
Though Kurt Ulrich Filmproduktion only made one krimi, it was nevertheless to prove an influential one, featuring the genre debuts of a number of krimi stalwarts in Heinz Drache, Siegfried Schurenberg and Klaus Kinski, along with one of the cycle's more memorable monsters in the form of Al Hoosman's Bhag, a non-too PC primitive type (variously referred to as “a negro”; “an animal from the jungle”; “a demented creature”, and “The best servant in the world: he doesn't think, he doesn't speak, he doesn't answer” brought to England from the wilds of Borneo.
Kinski
Bhag
Additionally, it also pushed the self-referential aspect that bit further than its immediate predecessor by locating the investigation amidst the making of a film, giving Kinski an early opportunity to play the tortured artist as its highly-strung screenwriter.
Though far from this type himself in own approach to writing, Edgar Wallace had started working for the cinema in the 1920s (most famously penning the original story for King Kong shortly before his death) while Bryan Edgar Wallace would subsequently actually work in the film industry, including with CCC on adapting some of his own thrillers.
A painting that may or may not prove important
Besides this, we also see an early – albeit quite possibly coincidental – instance of the krimis influencing the later Italian giallo when the film's director, Mr Jackson, elevates an extra, Ruth Sanders, to the position of lead after getting fed up with the diva antics of his star, Stella Mendoza, in a manner reminiscent of Dario Argento's Opera. It is, as Jackson says, the sort of incredible thing which normally only happens in the movies.
If this connection seems a spurious one, we can also note that the German name for the killer, der kofpsjager, or 'the headhunter', also prefigures that of the maniac in the Italian director's Trauma. (Admittedly here the killer does not keep the heads, however.)
Faces at a window
Similarly while The Fellowship of the Frog had featured covert filming that revealed a vital detail, here we have a similar detail – a woman at the window, no less – being captured purely by chance, much like the murder in the park in Antonioni's anti-giallo Blow-Up.
Some nice old dark house thing lurking in the shadows action
The typically convoluted plot opens in media res: An apparent maniac known as 'The Executioner' has struck no fewer than 12 times, decapitating his victims on each occasion. The last victim was beyond reproach, a fact which seems to have spurred the authorities into action at last, the majority of the previous victims having been incorrigible criminals.
Fortunately special investigator Brixan (Drache) has several clues to work with: the killer is extremely strong, having beheaded his victims with a single blow from a heavy blade; uses a typewriter on which a couple of the keys are distinctively out of alignment, and posts cryptic messages in the newspaper under the name of “the Benefactor”. (Curiously, however, Brixan is not a Scotland Yard man, rather being associated with the Foreign Office.)
Posing as a journalist sent to cover the making of the film, Brixen is quick to uncover a number of potential suspects, including the aforementioned Bhag – albeit as the tool of his white master Sir Gregory Penn, a womanising adventurer type – and Kinski's screenwriter, Voss, on whose typewriter the messages seem to have been written...
Of course this surfeit of suspects only serves to further complicate things, as do the array of quirky supporting characters, such as the harmless old eccentric Longman and – in one especially 'what the' moment – a swordsman who seems to have stepped out of a wuxia, coupled with the inevitable romantic subplot that develops between Brixen and Ruth, herself also another of Wallace's orphans / nieces / wards in peril.
Director Karl Anton was an industry veteran whose career dated back to the Czech cinema in the 1920s. Though clearly a competent filmmaker, his direction here old-fashioned and routine, though he does use the zoom lens to nicely augment / express the undoubtedly shock of finding a severed head in a box on a couple of occasions.
Admittedly, however, a fair evaluation of Anton's contributions is not helped by the overly dark, somewhat panned and scanned copy under review, originally released on video by Sinister Cinema in the 1990s.
[More information on the versions of the film and its relationship to the Wallace text: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-victims-of-der-rcher.html]
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