Gothic Originals / Exploito All’Italiana: Nosferatu in Venice (Augusto Caminito et al, 1988)

 The tragedy of ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ is that, under more favourable circumstances, it could so easily have been great.

The character of Nosferatu - first seen of course in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece and resurrected in the form of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake - remains a potent, genuinely terrifying and comparatively underused figure in the horror pantheon, whilst the city of Venice meanwhile remains one of the best places on earth in which to set a horror movie, its atmosphere of decaying, historical grandeur seeming to elevate the quality of pretty much any film project lucky enough to shoot there.

Just imagine, the grand spectacle of the Doge’s winter carnival, the bridges and alleyways thronging with depraved revellers vainly clinging on to the remnants of Italy’s moribund aristocracy, whilst below the water level, in the ancient sewers and catacombs, Nosferatu lurks, rat-like, spreading fear and death through the blood-lines of their errant daughters and abused servants... amazing. The damned thing writes itself.

Given that producer, screenwriter (and eventual director) Augusto Caminito wrangled a fairly lavish budget for the production (bankrolled at least in part by future despot Silvio Berlusconi), as well as gaining a remarkable level of access to some of the city’s most evocative shooting locations, ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ should by rights have been a sure thing - a last gasp triumph of Italian horror cinema’s twilight years. Needless to say though, that’s not exactly the way things turned out.

It would be all to easy to blame the project’s collapse into infamy and disaster entirely upon the mayhem perpetrated by Klaus Kinski (of which more shortly), but in truth things seem to have been going awry before he even arrived on set. By that point, Caminito had already hired and fired two directors (Maurizio Lucidi and Pasquale Squitieri), and - if the version of the film which was eventually released is anything to go by - the wafer thin narrative and bamboozling morass of expositional blather which comprise his screenplay are not exactly suggestive of a lost masterpiece.

Suffice to say though, if Caminito didn’t exactly have his ducks in line here, it was blood and feathers as far as the eye could see as soon as Kinski made the scene. Tales of the actor’s outrageous conduct during the 1980s are, of course, legion, but, clearly aware that ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ lived or died on the basis of his participation, this particular shoot seems to have found the actor scaling ever greater heights of maniacal narcissism.

This was made immediately evident upon his arrival, when, infamously, he refused point blank refused to wear the Nosferatu make-up which had been prepared for him, declaring instead that he would play the vampire, sans prosthetics, as a more ‘romantic’ figure, complete with his own long, thinning blonde hair.

Not only did this make a mockery of evoking the Nosferatu name in the first place (and indeed of hiring Kinski specifically to reprise his role from Herzog’s film), but even more gallingly for the producers, the crew had already shot and edited twenty minutes of footage - filmed at great expense during Venice’s winter carnival - featuring a double wearing the full Nosferatu make-up.

Consulting the sketchy contract Kinski had signed for his appearance in the film, it was determined that there was nothing in place to actually compel him to wear the make-up… and woe-betide anyone who cared to try. With a substantial chunk of the budget already in the truculent star’s pocket, there was nothing to be done but surrender to his whims, ditch the pre-shot footage, re-jig the script and try to find something else to inexpensively fill all that empty screen time.

The next disaster was quick to arrive when the film’s third director, “safe pair of hands” industry veteran Mario Caiano (best known to horror fans for 1965’s Nightmare Castle) quit after less than a day on set, walking out after a violent altercation with Kinski. Thereafter, Caminito took the reins himself, with significant (uncredited) assistance from second unit director / special effects supervisor Luigi Cozzi [also see: Paganini Horror].

We could continue discussing the difficulty Kinski provoked on set at some length here, but one anecdote related by Cozzi will hopefully prove sufficient. At one point it seems, he and Caminito left the set for ten minutes, to make a phone call and buy some cigarettes. Returning, they found Kinski sitting alone in an empty room, the entire crew having apparently packed up their equipment and left with the intention of boarding the next plane back to Rome, so heinously had the star managed to offend them during the producer/director’s brief absence.

All of this though pales into insignificance compared to the rumours surrounding Kinski’s abuse of his female co-stars, which cast an ugly pall over whatever enjoyment may still be gleaned from ‘Nosferatu in Venice’. Again, we don’t need to labour the point here - the grisly details are easily google-able, and, if true, they’re pretty horrendous.

In summary though, it seems that actress Elvire Audray (who plays the wife of the movie’s supposedly heroic doctor character, woodenly played by Yorgo Voyagis) left the film with immediate effect when - as per Cozzi’s recollections once again - Kinski disregarded an instruction to bite her on the neck during filming, and instead subjected her to what can only be described as a violent and sustained sexual assault.

Even taking into account the progress which has been made on such matters since the dark days of the 1980s, it seems extraordinary to me that Kinski was not behind bars within hours of this incident, having apparently assaulted a woman in front of multiple witnesses and a rolling camera, but… who am I to speculate on the whys and wherefores of the situation?

Be that as it may, Kinski remained on the loose, and tried the same tactics on the film’s ostensible leading lady, Barbara De Rossi, allegedly molesting her off-camera whilst shooting close ups for a scene in which Nosferatu seduces her character in her bedroom. Reportedly, De Rossi only agreed to continue work on the film after receiving a promise that she would never again be placed in close proximity to Kinski… thus necessitating further rewrites. (1)

Meanwhile, the star seems to have found what we must assume was slightly more willing recipient of his attentions in the shape of a young woman named Anne Knecht, who apparently caught his eye when she visited the set as Voyagis’s girlfriend. Despite Knecht having no prior acting experience, Kinski insisted she was cast as a hastily-scripted new character. (No wonder the female characters in the finished film are so ill-defined and interchangeable.)

Presumably to the great relief of the other cast members, Knecht went on to dutifully provide the bulk of the film’s requisite nudity, most prominently during the lengthy ‘love scene’ (I use the term loosely) which comprises the film’s the finale. Therein, we see a shockingly haggard looking Kinski groping and clambering around on Knecht’s impassive naked body for what feels like hours, whilst, in a particularly grim irony, the footage is intercut with shots of her real life boyfriend Voyagis grumpily stomping about in ineffectual ‘vampire hunter’ mode.

And so the chaos went on, until - thankfully for all concerned, I can only imagine - Caminito called principal photography to a close after six weeks, despite having only acquired around two thirds of the footage he needed to complete the scripted film - in addition that is to ten solid hours of material ‘directed’ by Kinski himself, featuring his character stalking alone through Venice’s pre-dawn streets. (Ironically, these shots actually comprise some of the best stuff in the finished film.)

In view all the palaver outlined above, it’s hardly surprising that ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ emerged as an extraordinarily disjointed mess. Unreleased for several years after shooting was completed, the film’s editing (credited to Claudio Cutry) comprises the cutting room equivalent of a dazzling high wire act, splicing together pieces of mismatched, discontinuous footage into some semblance of narrative order, with… mixed results, in spite of what I take to have been herculean efforts on Cutry’s part.

The tragedy of it all is though, there are bits of the film - sequences of shots here and there, or even entire scenes during the first half - which are genuinely excellent. 

The deep shadows and subdued, Gordon Willis-esque lighting favoured by DP Tonino Nardi lend a pungent, foreboding atmosphere to the Venetian location footage, whilst interior scenes featuring the film’s better actors (Christopher Plummer, Donald Pleasence, and Maria Cumani Quasimodo as ‘the princess’), apparently filmed in a genuine, suitably palatial Venetian villa, achieve a sense of brooding menace, reminiscent of such art-house horror staples as Borowczyk’s ‘Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes’ or Tony Scott’s The Hunger. “Terrible things happened in these chambers two hundred years ago,” we are repeatedly told, and for a moment there, we can believe it.

Even the disjointed / discontinuous editing rhythms sometimes work in the film’s favour, bringing a murky, opiated haze to proceedings, suggestive of some incorporeal, space/time warping evil which feels entirely in keeping with the symbolic/metaphysical aspect of the Nosferatu character, whilst the thinly sketched, comic book weirdness of the, uh, ‘plot line’ invests everything with a haphazard surrealism which surpasses even the ‘80s output of directors like Cozzi or Lucio Fulci for sheer bewilderment.

So, speaking of the plot, let’s try to get this straight, shall we?

A perpetually silk-clad young woman, who lives alongside several other young women in a crumbling Venetian villa belonging to an elderly princess afflicted by a cursed bloodline, invites a Van Helsing surrogate vampire expert to come and see her, because she has found an iron-bound coffin in the villa’s basement which she believes, for some reason, must be the resting place of the dread Nosferatu, who (it is apparently well known) was last seen in Venice exactly two hundred years earlier.

But, this cannot be so, the vampire expert (Professor Catalano, played by Plummer) insists, because Nosferatu actually perished in a shipwreck somewhere far away, and now rests at the bottom of the ocean. But, everyone at the villa still feels some kind of psychic ‘connection’ to the bad ol’ vampire (reflecting both the cursed bloodline business, and the fact that he committed assorted atrocities in the villa back in 1786). So, what else do do but call in a medium and hold a séance with the intention of contacting the spirit of Nosferatu, thus prompting him to awaken from his slumber and bust out of his dusty coffin way over yonder in… some other place. (Not the bottom of the ocean, at any rate.)

After taking time out to engage in some lusty dancing with a group of gypsies who - in an interesting, if politically questionable, throwback to Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ - appear to hold him in high reverence, the revived Nosferatu employs a rather vague supernatural methodology to transport himself back to Venice, where, needless to say, he sets about biting necks, leching over ladies and indulging his inexplicable passion for throwing people out of windows.

Brilliant! All makes perfect sense, right? Italian horror movie logic, god how I love it.

Also hitting that late-era Italio-horror sweet-spot, consistently undermining the film’s intermittent attempts to achieve a more ‘classy’ feel, is Luigi Ceccarelli’s score, which - perhaps reflecting the lack of funds/enthusiasm which remained for this project during post-production - sounds as it was recorded on the cheapest synthesizer available, and transferred to the film via a warped cassette tape left for too long in direct sunlight. Whether the fact that I still enjoy the music speaks to Ceccarelli’s talents or just my personal fondness for such lo-fi aesthetics, I’ll leave readers to judge for themselves.

So, for my purposes at least, this is all pretty amazing as far as it goes - but, each time we’re ready to settle back and surrender to the intoxicating, oneiric groove of the whole thing, something completely stupid happens, crashing us straight back to reality. Again and again, the film catapults us from the sublime to the ridiculous in a matter of seconds, which proves a real buzz-kill.

Nosferatu’s aforementioned return to Venice proves a good case in point. A disconnected series of images sees him gliding across unguessed at landscapes before he is seen stalking recognisable Venetian landmarks in the eerie glow of the rising/setting sun, temporarily imbuing him with an ethereal, nameless menace matching the baleful rhetoric which has previously spouted about him in the film’s heavy-handed dialogue.

When he appears, silently, in the bedroom of the elderly princess, grinning like some imp of the perverse - or like Robert Blake’s white-faced man in Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ perhaps - the effect is truly horrific. Utterly malevolent, Kinski is all too convincing here as the personification of death, pestilence and misfortune, come to wreak cold, impersonal suffering upon all who cross his path.

We can only savour this exquisite dread for a few seconds though, because… then he jumps up and throws the old lady out of the window! An unconvincing dummy goes SPLAT on the inevitable spiked railings which surround a small patch if garden below, and we cut to an unedifying insert shot of the 78-year-old Maria Cumani Quasimodo - evidently not impaled upon the railings - with some stage blood dribbling down her chin.

Unbelievably, this exact same defenestration gag - a ridiculous way for a supposed master vampire to deal with his prey, aside from anything else - is repeated, equally unconvincingly, several more times during the film, as if someone on the production was convinced that a few good railing impalements was all it would take to win over a post-‘Omen’ horror crowd.

Even in terms of its gory horror business though, ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ is wildly inconsistent - consider for instance a frankly incredible shot elsewhere, when Nosferatu is hit point-blank in the chest by a shotgun blast. In what was apparently a green-screen effect orchestrated by Cozzi, we see Kinski raise his arms in a mocking, Christ-like posture, revealing a perfectly spherical hole in his chest, through which we can see traffic slowly passing on the canal behind him. It’s a pretty great moment.

Essentially anchoring the first half of the film, Christopher Plummer initially seems determined to bring his A game to a frankly dreadful script, lending an admirable amount of gravitas to the rambling passages of cod-vampiric lore he is called upon to recite. As the film goes on though, and the situations get sillier, we can almost see him disengaging, his patented “ah, I see now - this is a load of shit” expression becoming increasingly difficult to hide.

And indeed, his facial muscles have a point. Entirely dismissing the accepted ‘rules’ for vampirism, Caminito’s script instead opts to just, well… make up a bunch of random shit, as Plummer’s dulcet tones are employed to inform us that, amongst other things, the illegitimate children of illegitimate parents (and/or plague victims) will inevitably become vampires, that the only surefire way to destroy a vampire is to use bullets filled with liquid mercury, and that - rather like Waldemar Daninsky - a vampire’s spirit can only achieve true death after receiving the pure love of a virgin. (Boy, I bet Kinski must’ve loved that last one!) 

I wouldn’t mind so much, only… none of these novel innovations actually seem to have much of an impact on the film’s storyline?

Back in the real world meanwhile, I’m guessing that Plummer must have also left the production before shooting concluded - having presumably completed his contractually obligated number of days, or whatever - meaning that his all-too-noticeable absence from the film’s final act is rationalised by means of a hurriedly slapped together montage of unconnected shots, which attempt to visually convey the idea that, having despaired of his ability to defeat Nosferatu following a heated argument with Donald Pleasence’s priest character, Professor Catalano has committed suicide by jumping from a bridge into the canal!

Largely avoiding such indignities meanwhile, Pleasence (who seemed to have been specialising in bringing a touch of class to creaky gothic horror movies starring hell-raising sex-pests at this point in his career) here provides good value for money as usual, playing a weak-willed, gluttonous priest who attends the elderly princess.

As has been mentioned, Maria Cumani Quasimodo (who may be recognisiable to euro-cult fans for small roles in ‘Femina Ridens’ and ‘All The Colors of the Dark’), does fine work here too, as does Clara Colosimo (a wife, mother & maid specialist in Italian movies since the early ‘60s) as the medium. It’s interesting in fact to find two such strong roles for older women in a project which otherwise seems awash with misogyny on both sides of the camera. (One shot of Colosimo cruising through the canals in her private gondola, hair defying gravity, proves particularly memorable.)

So where, ultimately, does ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ sit within the cultural hinterlands of late ‘80s Italian horror? Even assuming we can temporarily put aside the legends arising its nightmarish production, is the weird, beached husk of a movie which remains ultimately worth our time?

Well, as difficult as it may be to defend from any objective standpoint, what can I say? We still watch ‘The Lady From Shanghai’ and ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, don’t we? We still listen to Big Star’s ‘Third/Sister Lovers’ and The Beach Boys’ ‘Smiley Smile’. So why not ‘Nosferatu in Venice’?

The difference, I suppose, is that each of those works had the hand of a legitimate creative genius behind them, and seeing that hand slip or fail or tear itself apart carries a fascination which can sometimes even surpass that engendered by the greatest of artistic triumphs.

By contrast, ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ provides us with an equally fascinating example of a creative work which reached completion (in a manner of speaking) with no one at the wheel. Cruising into harbour like the empty, cursed ship which carries Nosferatu to shore in Murnau’s original film, there is a black hole at the centre of this movie - a void where the vision or direction provided by even a mediocre guiding light would normally be found.

Kinski may have established himself as the dominant presence on set through sheer force of will, but at the same time he was clearly happy to see the film crash and burn, interested solely in the opportunities it provided for him to pamper his ego and indulge his demonical lusts. Caminito meanwhile was obviously way out of his depth with regard to all aspects of on-set filmmaking, whilst everyone else simply kept their heads down and prayed for the damn thing to end.

Nardi’s lighting, Cutry’s editing, and the steadfast presence of Plummer, Pleasence and Quasimodo - these things came through to deliver 86 minutes of tangible celluloid which we can watch today without physical pain, but beyond that… the closest thing the movie gets to an auteur is probably Venice itself, the riches of its architecture and atmosphere infusing nearly every shot, pretty much cementing my long-held suspicion that literally anything shot in this extraordinary city will to some extent be worth watching.

 

 

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(1) Widely repeated around the internet, the film’s Wikipedia page sources the accusations concerning Kinski’s abusive behaviour on set back to both Roberto Curti’s book ‘Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1980-1989’ (2019) and Matthew Edwards’ ‘Klaus Kinski: Beast of Cinema’ (2016), whilst the stories are also reiterated to some extent by both Cozzi and soundman Luciano Muratori in the excellent documentary ‘Creation is Violent: Anecdotes from Kinski’s Final Years’, which accompanies Severin’s recent blu-ray edition of ‘Nosferatu in Venice’. We here at BITR can of course make no claims either way regarding the accuracy of these tales, especially if there are any legal professionals in the room. 

Exploito All’Italiana / October Horrors 2019 # 2: Death Smiles on a Murderer (Aristide Massaccesi, 1973)

 ‘Death Smiles on a Murderer’ [a direct translation of the domestic release title, ‘La Morte Ha Sorriso All'Assassino’] is a 1973 Italian horror film so narcotic in its effect that I have now watched it three times – and read the booklet, and listened to the audio commentary – and I still have no idea what happens in it.

I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I don’t understand the plot” (that’s only to be expected), I mean - I actually remember very little about the nature and order of the events which are portrayed on screen.

Quite an achievement for gifted cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi, here making the first and only proper feature film he would direct under his birth name before taking on the better known (nay notorious) alias of Joe D’Amato.

An unstable melange of gothic horror and giallo tropes with some additional envelope-pushing gore, ‘Death Smiles..’ lingers in my mind rather like a frustrating, three-quarters forgotten dream – a formless haze of pink cheeks and red lips, huge, dewy eyes, creased silk sheets and hyper-real green grass photographed in crisp, bright sun-light; of spatially disorientating extreme close-ups, looming low angle shots, languorous palacio exteriors, psyched out fish-eye madness, occasional bursts of garish blood-letting and an overriding feeling of claustrophobic immobility and confusion.

Further suffocating my rational senses meanwhile is Berto Pisano’s exquisitely languorous, melancholic main theme, which plays more or less constantly throughout, and which sounds like the accompaniment to a ballerina suffering from tuberculosis expiring during her final dance and witnessing the dust of her bones reforming itself into the shape of a gliding, celestial swan.

Though occasionally interspersed with the obligatory searing fuzz guitar stings and hideously jaunty ballroom dancing music, this remarkable melody tunnels its way into the viewer’s brain across the course of the film like a flower-bearing, funereally-garbed earwig, and indeed, the double LP soundtrack release which was recently issued alongside Arrow’s blu-ray upgrade of the film contains about 156 variations on it, all equally wonderful.

Trying to piece anything together beyond that feels like dipping into some deep and unsavoury region of the unconscious mind, but if I recall correctly, things might get underway with ubiquitous blond-mopped wild man Luciano Rossi, who is even more wild than usual here, playing a character who I think is the unhinged brother of a woman who may or may not have been murdered by the residents of the palacio, so he is running around like a madman and suchlike.

Then I think we switch to a flashback, or flashforward, or something, bringing us to a bit of business cribbed from LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (or perhaps indirectly from Hammer’s ‘The Vampire Lovers’), in which a young blond girl in a black and red cloak (Ewa Aulin) is rescued from a coach accident, and invited into the nearby palace to recover.

Disconcertingly, Klaus Kinski plays the doctor overseeing her recovery, and, when no one is looking, he pulls out a big needle and sticks it directly into her eyeball (I certainly remember that bit). Kinski, it soon transpires, is actually a Frankensteinian mad scientist, and before long he’s down in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine, in the finest tradition of such characters.

There is some kind of sub-plot about an ancient Inca medallion(!?), which Ewa seems to have brought with her, and which Kinski declares contains the secrets of life and death within it, or something. So, he goes to work trying to reanimate a subject on his operating table, but sadly he doesn’t get very far with this, as he is promptly killed – possibly by Rossi, or possibly by his creature… or perhaps Rossi IS his creature, I really don’t remember – but either way, this regrettably spells the end of both the mad science plotline and the thing with the medallion, which I don’t think is ever mentioned again. Au revoir Klaus!

Meanwhile, we spend loads of time with the rich occupants of the palace, characters who feel so ephemeral that I’m still not really sure who they are. Are the man and woman husband and wife, or brother and sister? And, does it even MATTER in a movie like this? Inevitably, the man (Segio Doria) gradually falls in love with Aulin’s character, who, vaguely following the ‘Carmilla’ blueprint, also seduces the woman (Angela Bo) too. I mean, you’d think I’d remember THAT scene at least, but no dice.

I think Aulin is probably a ghost who is seducing these folks in order to take revenge upon them after they murdered her in an earlier time period, but I’m not entirely sure about that. There is also some stuff with a maid, who is being haunted and/or menaced by Rossi, who is possibly also a ghost, or just a bad memory?

At one point, Giacomo Rossi Stuart (whom you’ll recall as the male lead in ‘Kill Baby Kill!’, alongside a wealth of other Italian genre credits) turns up, playing Doria’s brother or father or something, but as their characters look fairly similar and neither of them have any actual personality traits, it kind of just seems as if the ‘man’ character has split in two.

At another point, the maid character flees the palace in terror, and gets her face blasted off with a shotgun, in full on blood-drenched papier-mâché Eastman colour glory. Again, I remember that bit!

Then there’s some stuff with Ewa getting bricked up behind a wall, Poe-style, a lot of torch-lit running around in the catacombs, and, towards the end, Rossi gets his eyeballs torn out by an enraged cat (a scene memorably depicted on the film’s visceral Italian poster design).

And there my friends, my recollection ends.

Describing a film as a “mood piece” usually implies that it will slow and stately, but ‘Death Smiles..’ is quite the opposite – indeed, Massaccesi’s directorial approach here is fairly deranged, cutting relentlessly between exhausting close-ups of over-wrought, rose-cheeked faces expressing mad emotions we’ve either forgotten the significance of or never understood in the first place, and throwing in every kind of disorientating photographic effect he can think of along the way, as if convinced that he was still essentially a cameraman, treating the film as a head-spinning show-reel to try to impress potential employers.

Perhaps ‘Death Smiles..’ does actually anticipate later Joe D’Amato horror films to a certain extent, in the sense that it intersperses long, languid passages of nothing-in-particular with startling moments of grotesque, rub-yr-nose-in-it gore, and also in the way in which the whole feels imbued with an inexplicable aura of diseased wrong-ness, but from my own POV, I certainly found this one much livelier and more watchable than the likes of ‘Anthropophagous’ (1980) and ‘Absurd’ (1981).

Though much of what transpires within it may be pretty mystifying, it’s too loud and visually restless for even its most meandering moments to be written off as “filler”, unlike D’Amato’s later films, in which he often seemed to be killing time waiting for the next outrageous incident to occur. By contrast, it feels as if he is always trying to put SOMETHING worthwhile on the screen here, even if the question of what exactly that ‘something’ was supposed to be often hovers unanswered like a bluebottle above a sugar bowl.

Despite having apparently been driven to watch it three times, I’m not even really sure whether or not a would consider this a good film. I can’t really think of a conventional measure by which it may be certified as such, and, even when assessed using the less rigorous criteria of a ‘70s Erotic Castle Movie, the film’s anxious, volcanic instability, bright, weirdly hyper-real photography and distracting sado-gore moments all mitigate against the kind of languorous, psychotropic sensuality I favour in such ventures.

But nonetheless, I seem to keep watching it, so I suppose I must enjoy it? I’m sure I’ll find cause to watch it again too, trying again to penetrate its secrets. And each time, I know I’ll feel more and more like William Hurt in ‘Altered States’, descending into his isolation tank to plumb the primordial depths of consciousness… who knows, maybe I’ll eventually turn into Luciano Rossi and go on a rampage in the zoo or something? Watch this space.

Krimi Casebook: Das Verrätertor / ‘Traitor’s Gate’ (Freddie Francis, 1964)

BLOGGER’S NOTE: It was actually a complete coincidence that I had this post, which discusses the intricacies of a curious Anglo-German co-production, scheduled to appear on the day of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union. As a strong believer in co-operation between nation states, open borders and the breaking down of cultural & economic boundaries, I’m unsure at the time of writing whether I’ll be weeping tomorrow morning or merely putting the whole sorry mess behind me and moving on, but – checks watch – I believe there’s still time to get to the polls today, so would urge all UK citizens reading to please consider rejecting petty nationalism and doing the decent thing. And hey, why not let this tale of zany Germans running around idyllic 1960s London waving guns about guide your hand..? (Ok, maybe not.)

[Political mithering ends. / Movie review begins.]

By late 1964, Copenhagen-based Rialto films had been churning out Edgar Wallace ‘krimis’ for the West German market for nearly five years, and had released no less than seventeen entries in the loosely connected series.

Given this level of productivity, and the creative burnout it must inevitably have incurred in the studio’s small stable of writers, directors and actors, it makes sense that someone in Rialto’s boardroom must have sat up one day and realised that the film industry in the UK – where all of these films were ostensibly set – also boasted its own, equally efficient, genre movie production line, as exemplified in particular by Hammer studios, whose unprecedented international success in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s could scarcely be ignored by other European producers.

Perhaps those fuzzy stock shots of Big Ben and Trafalgar Square were starting to get a bit ragged, or constantly redressing those ‘Scotland Yard office’ and ‘cobbled East End back street’ sets was getting a bit tedious - or perhaps Joachim Fuchsberger and Harald Reinl just REALLY needed a holiday - but whatever the reason, feelers were extended, hands shaken, and when ‘Das Verrätertor’, the 18th entry in Rialto’s Wallace series, went into production, it did so in actual, real life London, with Freddie Francis (fresh off ‘The Evil of Frankenstein’) in the director’s chair, and a script provided (under a pseudonym) by Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster.

Sadly, the eventual result of all this bold co-productionin’ sass is an odd mish-mash that basically plays out as if a few of the more distinctive faces from the ‘krimi gang’ (Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent) had accidentally blundered into a mediocre British thriller in which everyone inexplicably speaks German - but nevertheless, it is not without its merits, and it remains vaguely interesting as a historical curio, at the very least. (1)

Things certainly get off to a good start, with an edgily shot prison break from a joint that I suppose is supposed to be Dartmoor (eventual destination of all krimi ne’erdowells). Bleak, wide angle overhead shots are here mixed with juddering, handheld footage and a tense, mod jazz soundtrack, as our protagonist (British actor Gary Raymond) scrabbles across scrubland with armed guards in close pursuit, only to find himself rescued by a Luger-toting Kinski, who ushers him into a waiting helicopter in which the pair make their getaway.

Back in London however, it soon becomes clear that this going to be another one of those creaky old “plan to steal The Crown Jewels” type heist capers, with all the discussions of alarm systems, guard duty rotas and unspeakably tedious footage of Beefeaters trooping about exchanging keys that that invariably entails.

Perhaps this might have all carried a bit more of a sense of novelty to German audiences than it does to us Brits, but it’s more likely that ‘Das Verrätertor’ simply suffers the kind of narrative structure that – much like that of the routine whodunit – has withered particularly badly under the glare of our somewhat different 21st century entertainment expectations.

I mean, first off, hands up who really gives two shits about the Crown Jewels? I suppose back in the ‘60s they probably still carried a certain mystique and cultural importance vis-à-vis British identity and so on, but now… well, you tell me when concern for their security last crossed your mind. And do any of us *really* care that much about the rather routine and unsurprising methods by which some fictional crooks might go about stealing them..?

No, what we really want to see in a story like this is the excitement that ensues during the after the heist, as things go wrong and people get hurt, as the perpetrators flee the law and double-cross each other, and so on. The jewels themselves should be little more than a McGuffin to set up the human drama. Unfortunately though, this is a point that Sangster and Francis (and perhaps Wallace, assuming anything in this yarn can actually be traced back to him) largely fail to appreciate, instead choosing to take us again and again through the not-terribly-riveting aspects of the gang’s planning whilst saving the big jewel-grab itself for the final reel.

Normally, Sangster was a writer who could be relied upon to put a cynical new twist on the formulaic genre material he was assigned to work on, but, perhaps playing it safe for a co-production aimed at an overseas audience, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ is an uncharacteristically bland effort, hitting the expected beats of its plotline with nary a trace of surprise or innovation. (A shame, as the twisted aesthetic of the krimis might in other circumstance have made for a perfect match with the black humour and imagination of Sangster’s better writing.)

Elsewhere in the film, Eddi Arent pops up as – I bet you never saw this one coming - a bungling German tourist, who gets inadvertently involved in the heist gang’s plans when, in the course of his day-to-day bungling, he accidentally visits a pleasantly authentic-looking Soho strip joint, the “Dandy Club”, wherein he witnesses triggerman Kinski doing away with a snitch – the gunshots muffled by the drummer in the house band playing a roll on the snare.

Slickly staged by Francis, this episode is just as much fun as it sounds, and indeed, there are some lovely bits of authentic London street footage to enjoy here too, largely shot around Piccadilly and Soho, all of which serves to make the corresponding passages of ‘changing of the guards’ / ‘buggering about with the beefeaters’ type material go down a little easier. (2)

In fact, Francis’ direction is probably the film’s strongest suit. He keeps things brisk and visually interesting through even the dullest stretches, occasionally experimenting with bold techniques and stylish moments which, it must be said, do not really equate to anything found in the British horror films he was directing at around the same time. This leads me to wonder whether he was in fact simply following the dictats of his producers in tailoring the look of the film to fit Rialto’s preferred “house style”, incorporating the kind of tricks (wide angle and deep focus shots, use of on-screen camera lens and mirrors, handheld shots and the like) that we have previously attributed to ‘krimi’ specialists like Reinl and Alfred Vohrer.

As you might have expected given the plot-line, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ features absolutely none of the macabre or fantastical elements that have livened up the others krimis we’ve thus far examined in this review strand, but as a straight-down-the-line crime caper, it is executed with what must have passed for a somewhat glamorous, high-tech sheen in 1964, exhibiting a particular fascination for camera lenses, telescopes, hidden tape recorders, clocks and so forth, verging momentarily into the realm of total ridiculousness for one particularly enjoyable moment in which the film’s heroine falls afoul of a specially modified taxi that fills the back-seat with knockout gas at a simple button push from the driver.

For the most part however, ‘Das Verrätertor’ is disappointingly down to earth. Presumably due to the fact that it was actually made in the UK with the participation of British personnel, the “bizarro world London” flavour that gave films like ‘Dark Eyes of London’ such a unique, out-of-time atmosphere is entirely lacking here, as the more buttoned down, English way of doing business vis-à-vis low budget thrillers leaves us instead with a far more quote-unquote “realistic” portrayal of London in 1964, completely devoid of psychotic masked villains, knife-wielding vagabonds, subterranean gangster hideouts, blood-thirsty fetishized murders and the like, although the presence of Kinski does at least bring a hint of this kind of thing to the table.

Spending much of his time obsessively licking his fingers and dispassionately threatening people with guns as only he can, one particularly surreal scene back-stage at the aforementioned strip joint sees Klaus lurking about near the head of a pantomime horse, whose teeth he at one point pretends to examine. In fact, I’d say that Kinski’s presence alone makes ‘Das Verrätertor’ worth seeking out, were it not for the fact that the unspeakable bastard made so many other films through the ‘60s in which he similarly delivers the goods, making such completism unnecessary for any but the most dedicated fans of his unique brand of strangely hilarious psychopathic menace.

Above and beyond the various drawbacks I have outlined above, there is one central fault that I feel stops ‘Traitor’s Gate’ from overcoming them and hitting home as a decent bit of entertainment, and that is the fact that no one else in the film is remotely interesting. With the exception of Kinski and Arent (who are both basically just goofing on their established screen personas), there is not a single character here who will stick in your mind after viewing – in fact I can barely remember a thing about any of them, and I watched this damn thing twice for review purposes.

A far cry from the sweaty-palmed blackmailers, seedy servants and playboy detectives we expect to find rounding out a krimi cast-list, in ‘Das Verrätertor’, the crooks, the innocent lead couple whom the persecute and the cops who peruse them barely have two character traits to rub together, and the blandly professional cast play out their assigned roles within the story as if they were simply experiencing a mildly stressful day working in an insurance office.

As a result, there is simply no suspense, and nothing beyond the occasional nice shot or visual flourish to even keep us awake. Will the heist succeed or not? Will the crooks be brought to justice? What do we even care, when we barely know enough about anyone concerned to decide who we should cheer or boo?

Though the film’s production values and technical credits are solid and the Rialto crew do their best to entertain, it is easy to conclude that ‘Traitor’s Gate’ – which remains one of the more obscure entries within the already obscure krimi canon - has been lost to history for good reason, relevant only to genre historians seeking an easy explanation for the reasons why the rich possibilities for Anglo-German krimi co-productions were never really followed up. (3)

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(1) According to IMDB, Rialto’s only production partner on ‘Traitor’s Gate’ was an outfit named “Summit”, and my assumption is that this must be said company’s only known venture into the film industry, given that IMDB lumps them in with a US distributor of the same name who have no credits prior to 1983.  (Actually, it’s a fair bet that the IMDB page in question amalgamates the credits of at least three different companies, but it’s scarcely our business to complain about that here.)

(2) Outside of central London, one particularly lovely establishing shot captures the riverside beer garden of the London Apprentice pub in Ilseworth, Middlesex, which remains largely unchanged to this day.

(3) In so far as I can tell, only other Rialto krimi to feature significant UK input was 1966’s The Trygon Factor, which was directed by Cyril Frankel (‘The Witches’, ‘Never Take Sweets From A Stranger’) and starred Stewert Granger and Robert Morley. Again, no actual UK production partner is listed, and I’m not aware of the film being much of a hit on either side of the channel.

Krimi Casebook: Der Schwarze Abt / ‘The Black Abbot’ (F.J. Gottlieb, 1963)

I don’t know whether or not anti-clerical sentiment played a role in Edgar Wallace’s writing, but it certainly seems to run rampant in Rialto Films’ series of 1960s Wallace adaptations, to an extent that goes above and beyond the blanket cynicism with which these films treat all forms of human endeavour. Even aside from the assorted crooked priests who tend to lurk around the corners of krimis as secondary characters, my own relatively small krimi library already includes such titles as ‘The Sinister Monk’, ‘Monk With A Whip’, and tonight’s feature presentation, ‘The Black Abbot’.

In contrast to the two ‘urban’ krimis we’ve looked at thus far in this review strand (#1, #2), ‘The Black Abbot’ provides an example of another major genre variant – the ‘country estate’ krimi. The estate in question on this occasion is Chelford Manor, wherein a casual visitor (assuming such a thing can possibly exist in krimi-world) could easily mistake the suave Dick Alford (Joachim Fuchsberger) for the house’s dashing young scion. Certainly, Dick seems to enjoy cultivating an aristocratic demeanor, sporting tweeds, plus-fours and an ever-present pipe as he spends a leisurely afternoon riding across the estate’s grounds in the company of – AHEM - Lord Chelford’s far younger fiancée (Grit Boettcher). Generally striding around as if he owns the place, Dick very much giving the impression that his inheritance is already ‘in the bag’, as it were, pending perhaps only one or two snags (of the living, breathing variety, natch).

As we soon learn though, the only position Mr. Alford actually holds within the estate than that of a humble ‘administrator’ (oh, the shame of it), hired by the still-very-much-alive-and-kicking Lord Chelford (Dieter Borsche) to attend to the day to day running of the house, whilst he concentrates upon his (apparently entirely obsessive) research into his family history.

In fact, far from the bed-ridden vegetable or weak-minded has-been common to this kind of “who’s got the will?” scenario, Lord Chelford is actually quite an intimidating figure, in spite of his preference for solitude – a bitter cynic whose approach to life epitomizes the old “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you” adage - thus making him perfectly adapted for survival in the back-stabbing world of the krimi.

In spite of Alford’s persistent attempts to convince Chelford that he is mentally unbalanced, insisting the old boy avoids undue excitement and trying to dull his senses via the dubious medicinal cocktails proffered by white-haired Dr Loxom (Friedrich Schoenfelder), the Lord wisely consigns these concoctions to the wastepaper basket as soon as his would-be ‘keepers’ are out of sight, before returning immediately to his painstaking investigations into the precise nature – and, more to the point, location – of (you knew it was coming) the legendary horde of treasure said to exist somewhere within the walls of the estate.

Whilst Lord Chelford is evidently very much on the ball vis-a-vis his assumption that these rumours of hidden riches will inevitably attract all manner of unwelcome and acquisitive interlopers toward his estate, his canny policy of universal suspicion has sadly been somewhat undermined by his poor staffing policy. Not only does he now have the unbridled ambition of Dick Alford to contend with, but Klaus Kinski, “fresh from a long stretch in Dartmoor Prison”, no less, has recently been appointed as the family butler, which can’t possibly be a good idea, let’s face it.

If you’re wondering where the titular Black Abbot fits into all this, well, naturally he is the ghostly spectre said to stand guard over the Chelford Treasure. If you were to guess at this point that the Abbot will turn out to be comprised of more solid flesh & blood than his ghostly rep would suggest, you’d be spot-on, and if you were to suggest that perhaps he might soon be returning to his old stomping ground to begin clobbering any suspicious characters found wandering around the estate after dark, you’d be doubly spot-on. And, this being a krimi, if you’ve got an inkling that by the end of the movie there will most likely be multiple Black Abbots running around contributing to the clobbering, you’d be, well - triply spot-on I suppose.

I’m unsure whether any real life Abbots ever wore the kind of identity-concealing black executioner’s hood favoured by the Black Abbot, but… who cares, frankly. It makes a perfectly sinister outfit for a movie heavy, especially with the addition of robes that, conveniently, remain sufficiently loose and voluminous to potentially hide the figures of just about any of our human cast members.

Predictably, our involvement in this whole mess begins at the moment the first body hits the ground. Do we ever get the back story on who the victim was? I’m not sure. Does it really matter? Point is, Lord Chelford, Dick and Klaus are all observed by each other furtively sneaking back to the house shortly after the deed is done, and so propriety demands that a call be placed to The Yard – much to the annoyance of all three of them, I should imagine.

Eagle-browed Detective Puddler (Charles Regnier) is soon on the scene, and it is with a sense of crushing inevitability that I must tell you he has also brought along one Horatio W. Smith (Eddi Arent), a bow-tied tosspot with a habit of constantly speaking about himself in the third person, thus insuring that ‘The Black Abbot’s allotted quota of comic relief is delivered with all the finesse of lumpy gravy from a college canteen.

As the plot proceeds to thicken quicker than the aforementioned gravy, the usual assortment of suspicious coves soon emerge from the woodwork to make their play for the loot – creepy-yet-pathetic Werner Peters and the spiv-ish Harry Wüstenhagen foremost amongst them – whilst Lord C’s gold-digging sister (Eva Ingeborg Scholz) simultaneously faces competition in the feminine wiles stakes from the mysteriously resurrected Lady Chelford (Alice Treff), who has seemly emerged from her tomb to wander the ground at night, as a somewhat less lethal counterpart to our hooded menace. Before long, fragments of a newly unearthed treasure map are in circulation amongst the cast, and, well… I hope you brought your hoods kids, for there is much clobbering to be done.

Thus far, we’ve lucky enough to have encountered two exceptionally good krimis (see links above), but to be honest, ‘The Black Abbot’ probably provides a more representative example of the genre’s wider successes and failures, as a wholly satisfactory but basically pretty routine ramble through the established conventions of the form.

Whilst the story as summarised above may sound like a hoot, ‘The Black Abbot’ suffers somewhat from plotting that swiftly becomes unnecessarily convoluted in a not terribly interesting fashion, as the scams and travails of various secondary characters are hashed out at length via static interior scenes that eventually consume a great deal of screen time, thus dragging things back toward the kind of dry tedium found in the British Edgar Wallace adaptations.

With the reliably charismatic Joachim Fuchsberger shifted across to a ‘suspect’ role here, ‘The Black Abbot’s obligatory police duo are also rather unengaging, with the combination of Regnier’s stern frowning and Arent’s senseless wittering never really making much of an impact on the way the story unfolds.

Speaking of which, the film’s ending (which I won’t spoil for you here) also proves a bit of a cop-out, relying as it does on the personalities and motivations of several key characters changing inexplicably, in a way that seems wholly out of keeping with their conduct during the film’s first half.

None of this would particularly bother me if the film instead had some measure of wildness, unpredictability or random fury to offer, but, despite apparently running into trouble with the German censors for some reason (if a trivia entry on the film’s IMDB page is to be believed), ‘The Black Abbot’ crucially lacks any of the moments of transgressive violence and sexuality that made ‘The Face of the Frog’ and ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ feel so bracing.

That said though, if you can keep your attention focused through the duller stretches, ‘The Black Abbot’ nonetheless eventually emerges as a pretty good time. As soon as the various parties concerned find themselves creeping around the dusty ruins and tangled undergrowth at night, pointing guns at each other, chasing sections of the treasure map and tangling with the Abbot, all of the aforementioned drawbacks are instantly forgotten, allowing the film to become what I believe I’m duty-bound to refer to as ‘a delightful romp’.

Directorially speaking too, ‘The Black Abbot’ feels a bit like a film of two halves. Whilst the interior scenes remain bland and workmanlike, things come to life as soon as we move to the shadowy ‘exteriors’ (strictly speaking a mixture of location shooting and sets I think), wherein director F.J. Gottlieb begins to make fine use of the film’s wide scope ratio, employing roving, airborne camera movements and even indulging in a few of the wacky compositional tricks and complex foreground shots seen in Alfred Vohrer’s krimis.

These sections of the film also benefit greatly from taking on a hefty dose of gothic horror imagery, as befits the crumbling scenery and the looming threat posed by the Abbot. The black & white photography is excellent throughout, and things become convincingly atmospheric as the characters begin to stumble around landscapes that could have come straight from a second division Italian gothic. The cut price back garden graveyard puts me very much in mind of the one seen in Terror Creatures From The Grave, and we even get to enjoy an eerie descent into a full on polystyrene-walled crypt set, complete with flickering torchlight and barred, cobweb-strewn grates tailor-made for a leading lady to cling to mid-scream. There are even a few supremely unconvincing fake bats on hand to add to the fun. Good times.

All of this, plus a generous helping of the gleefully cynicism one expects of a krimi and some fine turns from the cream of Rialto’s singular stock company, helps ‘The Black Abbot’ make it over the fence as a movie the majority of viewers will recall with a grin rather than a yawn. Whilst it’s certainly not going to change anyone’s understanding of life or cinema, it’s a pleasantly diverting bit of pulp hokum, somewhat reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13’ (which was shooting in Ireland at around the same time this hit cinemas, I believe), and as such gets a cautious-bordering-on-enthusiastic thumbs up from our panel here.

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Krimi Casebook: Die Toten Augen von London / ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ (Alfred Vohrer, 1961)

Amid the greasy cobbled streets of a “London” apparently stuck in some strange amalgam of the 1890s, 1920s and 1960s, a visiting Australian wool merchant loses his way in the obligitory peasouper smog. Accosted and beaten by parties unknown, we see him bundled into the back of a sinister white laundry van. “Accidents like this happen every time we have this fog”, remarks the coroner after the corpse is fished out of the Thames the next morning, having to all appearances died a natural death by drowning.

Dashing Inspector Larry Holt of Scotland Yard (Joachim Fuchsberger) is unconvinced by the coroner’s verdict however. “It looks like the blind killers of London are at work again!”, he announces after a torn piece of braille text found in the victim’s pocket is revealed to contain fragments of a threatening message, and the game is afoot in another rousing installment of Rialto Films’ Edgar Wallace ‘Krimi’ series.

Whilst ‘Die Toten Augen von London’ (released in West Germany in March 1961) may not be quite as action-packed as Harald Reinl’s Der Frosch mit der Maske, this first Wallace film by the series’ other key director Alfred Vohrer is nonetheless as an equally impressive achievement. Whilst Reinl’s film cruised by on a sense of pure, pulpy momentum, Reinl’s directorial style is slower and more static, but his trump card here is atmosphere, and, as its title rather demands, ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ (also known as ‘The Dark Eyes of London’) has it in spades.

Apparently owing less to Wallace’s 1924 source novel than to an earlier British movie adaptation from 1939 (with which I’m entirely unfamiliar), ‘Dead Eyes..’ seems, like many Krimis, to fall into that peculiar category of movies that seem to embrace all of the aesthetic trappings of horror film, whilst not actually being horror films.(1)

Certainly, great effort has been taken here to create a feeling of claustrophobic, Jack-the-Ripper-haunted London as rich and indigestible as that of any film ever made in a similar vein. Dark, overhanging streets, canes tapping on cobbled pavements, squalid slums that seem to hide every conceivable variation on grinding poverty and moral degradation, sinister, elongated shadows stretching across each soot-blackened brick wall as misshapen proletarians cringe in fear - you name it, this movie’s got it (well, minus the top hats and horse-drawn coaches at least), all swathed in enough dry ice to put your average Italian gothic moldering in the shade.

Apparently, this particular ‘London’ houses a notorious brethren of blind criminals, who emerge to commit their misdeeds upon foggy nights when, quoth Inspector Larry, “they can more easily take advantage of their victims”. The coldly oppressive atmosphere of the poverty-stricken religious mission from which at least some of these ne’erdowells operate could have come straight from one of Pete Walker’s unsettling ‘70s horrors, and it is within a vast Victorian drainage duct beneath this institution that we find the lair of the film’s chief representative of this loose ensemble of visually-impaired villainy – a hulking, white-eyed ogre named ‘Blind Jack’, as portrayed by an actor (Ady Berber) whom I can only assume was Germany’s equivalent of Tor Johnson or Milton Reid. (Oh, for the days when each national film industry had a gigantic, lumbering brute on call 24/7.)

Although ‘Blind Jack’ provides the closest thing this quasi-horror film has to a monster, handling stalking, stomping, strangling and gurning duties with admirable aplomb, the cynical nature of Krimi plotting of course demands that he and his sightless cohorts are merely pawns in a game beyond their control, as the net of guilt eventually spreads itself far more widely across the film’s more outwardly respectable characters.

It is this side of the story that allows Vohrer to deepen the film’s sense of seedy urban degradation even further, drawing on a well of comic book noir imagery that mix strangely with the quasi-Victoriana of the ‘London’ setting. This feeling hangs particularly heavily over the scenes that take place within the supremely down-market casino / nightclub where many of our gentlemen of ill-repute congregate – a joint where it perpetually seems to be closing time, and the occupants perpetually exhausted; you can almost smell the stale beer and cigar smoke hanging in the air.

It is here, predictably enough, that we’re introduced to the film’s obligatory ‘bad girl’ (Finnish actress Ann Savo), who once again is violently punished for her floozy-ish ways in cheerily misogynistic fashion, assailed by a faceless, black-gloved assassin amid the classic “neon sign outside bedroom window” ambience of her ‘Soho’ bed-sit, in a highly fetishised murder sequence that, whilst not explicitly gory, couldn’t have anticipated the MO of the Italian giallo any more clearly if it had cut to a shot of Mario Bava and Dario Argento crouching outside the window taking notes.(2)

On the side of law and order meanwhile, ‘Die Toten Augen von London’ sees the duo of Fuchsberger and Eddi Arent reunited, but sadly the good feeling that their partnership generated in ‘Fellowship of the Frog’ is rather squandered here. When left to his own devices, Fuchsberger is just fine of course, delivering a mixture of Roger Moore smarm and Stanley Baker-esque determination that makes him the perfect leading man for this kind of movie, but Arent proves more troublesome, having already settled into the persona that he would go on to embody through the majority of his appearances in the Rialto Krimis – namely, that of a comic relief goofball straight from the pits of movie fans’ very own hell.

Whilst ‘Der Frocsh..’ proved that Arent could be a somewhat charming screen presence when gifted with a moderately interesting character to flesh out, here, as Fuchsberger’s perpetually clowning partner, he’s simply a lead weight dragging against the film’s momentum. Veteran comic relief haters in the audience will already feel a shudder down their spines when his character is introduced as ‘Sunny’ (“a nickname that reflects his disposition”), and it’s all downhill from there I’m afraid, as Eddi does his level best to reinforce every unfair stereotype you might have heard about the German sense of humour.

Altogether more pleasing – if equally predictable - is the appearance of a young Klaus Kinski, here essaying the first of a multitude of highly suspicious characters he brought to life whilst on Rialto’s payroll. This time around, Klaus plays a neurotic secretary at a crooked life insurance company, and is just as much of a fidgety, tormented wreck as you might anticipate, sporting gleaming mirror shades in most of his scenes and – dur dur dur! – a pair of black leather driving gloves that his character likes to take on and off all day long, despite exhibiting no particular inclination toward driving.

Naturally, I will refrain from spoiling things by revealing the precise extent to which Kinski’s character is guilty or not guilty of the film’s assorted outrages, but needless to say, I think an aphorism much in the spirit of Chekhov’s gun could well be proposed, stating that if your murder mystery movie features Klaus Kinski skulking around in a pair of Ray-Bans, you probably won’t be needing that ID parade when it comes to fingering the killer, however elaborate his “obvious red herring” alibi may seem.

Inevitably, ‘The Dead Eyes of London’ features it’s fair share of procedural drag in between these assorted highlights, but, as in all the best entries in this series, touches of visual imagination and black humour often are used to liven up duller moments, as exemplified early in the film when a potentially tedious and exposition-heavy visit to the aforementioned life insurance company is livened up by a flick-knife welding blackmailer and some amusing business with a skull-shaped cigarette holder.

Also keeping things interesting meanwhile is an intermittently hair-raising score, as provided by the supremely named Heinz Funk. Though used only sparingly, Herr Funk’s compositions offer a mixture of beat-inflected suspense jazz and dissonant, primitive electronics that sounds somewhat like the result of John Barry and Pierre Boulez getting their demo reels mixed up in one of “London”s dark alleyways.

As a director, Vohrer’s camera tends to remain fairly static, but he does seem to display a love for odd stylistic twists that tend to make his compositions stand out, including a few fun process shots utilising complex arrangements of mirrors and reflections. In what is perhaps the film’s most bizarre moment, Vohrer utilises a truly odd “inside of mouth” shot, complete with giant cardboard teeth in the foreground, to dramatise the entirely unimportant detail of an old geezer spraying his gob with breath freshener prior to leaving the bathroom.

The time and effort taken to create such a weird shot, with no apparent narrative justification, seems entirely inexplicable within the normal working methods of low budget commercial cinema, but its presence does perhaps go some way toward demonstrating the kind of freedom that Rialto’s directors were allowed in this period – a freedom that possibly helps explain why the best of the Krimis stand out as so much more fun and inventive than most of their competitors in the early ‘60s Euro b-movie stakes.

And, insofar as I am qualified to pass judgment at this relatively early stage in my immersion in the genre, ‘Die Toten Augen von London’ would indeed appear to be a truly exemplary example of Krimi style – a creaky, meandering potboiler enlivened, and indeed even twisted into entirely new shapes, by an admirable combination of cinematic craftsmanship, grisly gallows humour and a rogue’s gallery of strikingly memorable character players; the result being an exquisitely sinister time-waster, enriched with enough weird visual fibre to make it a keeper over half a century after everyone should have stopped caring.

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(1) Other black & white era examples of the not-quite-horror-film that immediately spring to mind include ‘Tower of London’ (1939), Vincent Price’s break-out picture ‘Dragonwyck’ (1946) and the truly peculiar Charles Laughton vehicle ‘The Strange Door’ (1951), amongst many others.

(2) Whilst it is foolish of course to try to assign any direct chains of influence when dealing with vague and general notions such of these, the this scene in ‘Dead Eyes of London’ could be seen as anticipating Bava’s pivotal ‘Blood & Black Lace’ (1964) on several levels - not only via the aestheticised sadism of the murder and the anonymous, black gloved killer, but even the strobing effect provided by the flickering neon sign outside the window seems a precursor to that film’s antique shop sequence. (If you want to stretch the point even further, could even make the case that a memorable death-by-lift-shaft sequence elsewhere in the film could have provided the inspiration for the conclusion of Argento’s somewhat Krimi-informed ‘Cat O’ Nine Tails’ (1972) as well.)

Franco Files: Venus In Furs (1969)

AKA:

‘Paroxismus’ (Italy?), ‘Black Angel’ (pre-release/script title), ‘To Fantasma tis Afroditis’ (“The Ghost of Venus”, Greece).

Context:

Beginning in about mid-1968, Jess Franco spent a couple of years on the payroll of maverick British producer Harry Alan Towers – a typically frantic period that saw the director signing his name (well, ONE OF his names) to a total of nine films. Whilst Towers’ production muscle succeeded in bringing bigger budgets and closer brushes with ‘respectability’ to Franco pictures though, the producer’s overbearing influence also often seemed to stifle Franco’s rogue creativity, leading to a body of work that can be broadly summarised as a load of old rubbish, a few missed opportunities, and at the top of the heap, two or three shining examples of Franco-genius where everything came together just as it should.(1)

And thankfully today, we’re looking at one of the latter. As was the case with most of his collaborations with Towers, Franco had a handful of slumming ‘name’ actors and a wide variety of international locations to work with here, but, unlike the confused literary adaptations and run of the mill genre exercises that comprised much of the rest of their joint output, 1969's ‘Venus In Furs’ gave the director a chance to funnel these attributes into a more personal project, delivering a commercially viable film that also allowed him to work through some of his characteristic obsessions with… well, a certain degree of freedom, at least.(2)

Often singled out as the Franco film that non-Franco fans are most likely to appreciate, and rated by many as his best work, ‘Venus..’ isn’t really a personal favourite of mine, but, taken on a purely technical level, it is certainly one of our hero’s more cohesive and accomplished efforts.

Content:

According to Franco, the seed for what eventually became ‘Venus In Furs’ was planted after a conversation he had at some point with the legendary jazz musician Chet Baker. Therein, Baker held forth about the strange stories & visions that unfolded in his mind whilst he was on-stage playing a solo, and, inspired by this idea, Franco hit upon the notion of making a film about a celebrated black trumpet player in the Miles Davis mould, who falls in love with a ghostly, white woman whilst lost in musical reverie.

As Franco tells it, Towers and the film’s potential American backers knocked hell out of this noble idea, insisting that audiences in the ‘States weren’t ready to accept a black, male protagonist, and so, reluctantly, Franco agreed to reverse the races of the two leads. Later claiming that this decision “tore the guts” out of his original vision, Jess nonetheless ploughed on with developing the project, which somewhere along the line got mixed up with the latest reiteration of his perpetual “avenging ghost of dead woman kills two blokes and a lady whilst falling in love with a living man” story, this time starring Towers’ number one lady, Maria Rohm.

In fact, the variation on that theme here veers so close to the narrative of the previous year’s Necronomicon that ‘Venus..’ practically becomes a slightly refined remake of that film. Seeing as how ‘Necronomicon’ was still doing brisk business in American theatres at the time under the name ‘Succubus’, the US backers were presumably not adverse to this development. ‘Venus..’ was eventually distributed by AIP in the ‘States, and all of Franco’s beloved jazz stuff – though still present – fell increasingly into the background as production went on.

To some extent, the art-house pretentions of ‘Necronomicon’ are revisited here along with the story - witness for instance the elegant “jet set party” in which members of the “Greek Riviera yachting crowd” appear frozen in statue-like still-life - whilst the ponderous beatnik narration of James Darren as the Chet Baker-esque trumpeter protagonist plays just as prominent a role in the English language version as the equivalent voiceovers did in the earlier film. Whilst still peppered with ridiculous nonsense though (“I tried not to remember why I had buried my horn..”), the narration here is nonetheless a lot weirder and funnier than the heavy-handed, self-aware blather of ‘Necronomicon’s English dub, with some pretty entertaining passages of soul-searching hep-cat jive going down, at times almost exactly replicating the loopy, first person drawl of a Bob Tralins-esque pulp novel.

James Darren has a bit of a “guy you get if you can’t get David Hemmings” kinda vibe about him, but he’s young and keen, and he actually emerges as one of Franco’s more engaging male protagonists, mixing lost-little-boy good looks and world-ravaged intensity to great effect. (And if Franco’s vision for the character perhaps didn’t stretch much beyond “BE LIKE CHET BAKER”, Darren certainly does his best to deliver.)

Initially, I thought that this mixed up horn player might be a bit of a one-off character in the Franco-verse, but actually of course, he fits right in: both as a more interesting successor to Jack Taylor’s character in ‘Necronomicon’, and as a direct forerunner of Taylor’s wondering poet in 1972’s ‘Female Vampire’, a film that in many ways is just as much a remake of ‘Venus..’ as ‘Venus..’ is a remake of ‘Necronomicon’ - a perfect example of how the cyclical logic of Franco’s ur-narrative blends and changes while the central riff plays on.

This archetype of the questing male artist whose psychic sensitivity locks him into a doomed love/obsession scenario with the ever-present female ghost/revenger is of course Franco’s way to hook the audience into the idea that is the central thematic concern of all these films (and of all ‘Bride Wore Black’ type revenge stories in general, when ya think about it): the matter of blind, unalterable cosmic fate.

This ever-present theme is particularly strongly communicated by the key scene in ‘Venus In Furs’ that sees Maria Rohm’s Wanda murdered by a trio of jaded aristocrats (Klaus Kinski, Dennis Price and Italian pop cinema regular Margaret Lee, for anyone keeping score). The sequence plays out slowly and theatrically, almost like a fairytale, heavily emphasising the obsession with fate that seems to fixate Franco whenever he wheels out this story. He even throws in tinted ‘flash-forwards’ from Kinski’s pre-murder face to the later scene of his own demise, just to drive the point home: these sadists may think they're in control of their destiny, but whether they know it or not, they're already victims.

Perhaps more interesting though are the repercussions of the fact that James Darren’s character passively witnesses Wanda’s murder – not an aspect of the story I can remember being passed across to many of its other variations.

“Man it was a wild scene,” reflects the trumpeter’s voiceover, “but if they wanted to go that rough, that was their bag”. The notion that Darren’s character on some level enjoys witnessing Wanda’s degradation is raised at several points in the film, and the implication that this romantic ‘innocent’ is thus in some way party to the crimes of Kinski & co. certainly throws some interesting twists into the formula.

Certainly, the strange fate that awaits Darren at the film’s conclusion can most usefully be read as the result of his realising too late that he too has been one of Wanda’s victims all along, rather than the post-revenge love interest he naively assumed himself to be, whilst the implications of his taking pleasure from viewing a sexualised murder taking place, then subsequently believing himself free of guilt, also provides unsettling commentary on the nexus of sadism and voyeurism at the heart of Franco’s cinema, obliquely suggesting that there is a stern moral judgement waiting to be passed on filmmaker and viewer alike.

All of which sounds pretty high-minded I suppose, but, this being Franco, there are of course some glaring flaws that prevent ‘Venus In Furs’ from ever becoming the mythic Franco ‘masterpiece’ that you could screen for your Film Studies lecturer and expect to get away with it.

For one thing, the movie is full of totally pointless, Mondo-esque stock footage of the Rio Carnival (presumably shot when Franco was in South America making ‘The Girl From Rio’ and ‘The Blood of Fu Manchu’ for Towers the previous year). And for another, the a-cappella musical sting that plays after each of Wanda’s revenge murders (y’know, that “Venus in furs will be smiling” one) is just incredibly infuriating - so heavy-handed and inappropriate that it almost kills the effectiveness of those scenes stone-dead.(3)

And the numerous scenes between Darren and his ‘real life’ girlfriend Rita (played by singer Barbara McNair) are also a bit of a drag, to be honest. Presumably the last remaining vestiges of Franco’s original “black trumpeter falls in love with a blonde goddess” storyline, these segments seem to have been preserved long after whatever point they're trying to make vanished from the script. They are interesting in that they play closer to a straight relationship drama than anything you’d usually see in Franco film, but sadly they’re also quite dull, and the ‘love triangle’ aspect of the story never really gels, wasting valuable time with what one suspects is only a pale echo of Franco’s original vision.

Kink:

Whilst ‘Venus In Furs’ has absolutely nothing to do with the Sacher-Masoch book of the same name (AIP insisted on the title for some reason, and Franco grudgingly obliged by having Maria Rohm wear furs in a few scenes), ironically it does to some extent reflect the director’s genuine interest in the works of the Marquis DeSade. The sex & sadism of Wanda’s murder scene in particular is amped up beyond anything else Franco had filmed up to this point in his career, and there's certainly a lot more waist-up nudity and (non-explicit) sex scenes here than I remember seeing in any of his earlier films, whilst the pain/pleasure dynamic of the whole thing is emphasised pretty strongly in Rohm’s grimly ambiguous performance.

Furthermore, it struck me whilst revisiting the film for this review that, between Rohm’s black bob wig, the occasional fetishisation of camera equipment and the extensive use of mirrors and fractured frames amid moments of elegant, stocking-fixated S&M, ‘Venus In Furs’ actually comes pretty close at times to replicating the style of renowned erotic comics genius Guido Crepax. (Despite the frequent stylistic cross-over between their work, I’m not aware that Franco ever admitted to admiring, or even being aware of, Crepax, so it is possible that the similarities are entirely coincidental; after all, they were basically both just horny devils with a good artistic eye and a thing for Louise Brooks haircuts, weren’t they?)

3/5

Creepitude:

Following ‘Necronomicon’s lead, ‘Venus In Furs’ continues Franco’s determination to frame his supernatural horror stories in a manner that completely rejects the clichés of ‘60s gothic horror film-making. As such, it is difficult to really think of ‘Venus..’ as being very “horror-y”, even though the violence is quite strong for the period and the weight of eternal doom hangs heavy over the characters.

The one exception to this rule is the scene of Wanda’s murder, which seems to knowingly wink in the direction of the gothic, taking place as it does in a candle-lit stone dungeon complete with an ornate wrought-iron grating through which Darren’s character observes the action, and a variable light source that seems to flash on and off every few seconds. Whether this is meant to represent some extremely unrealistic lightning, a swinging overhead light fixture (very noir) or simply some wild, non-diegetic stylistic quirk, I’m unsure, but it is certainly very effective, shading us from what we imagine to be fleeting moments of unseen brutality, even as the erotically-charged violence of the scenario is laid bare, setting the agenda for what is basically an inventive and unusual ‘ghost movie’ with suitably ghoulish aplomb.

3/5

Pulp Thrills:

Though it is not really ‘pulp cinema’ in the same sense as Franco’s pre-‘Necronomicon’ genre movies, ‘Venus..’ nonetheless perfectly epitomises the kind of “Mediterranean cocktail lounge erotic apocalypse” aesthetic that would go on to dominate his work for years to come, and that could easily have found itself replicated in some luridly jacketed airport best-seller later in the '70s.

Plus, you know – beatniks, hep-cat jive-talk, etc.

It would have been easy have go with 1 or 2 on this one, but instead I’m gonna give it…

3/5

Altered States:

‘Venus In Furs’ begins as only a Franco flick can, with shaky travelogue footage of Istanbul, and the shadow of a pair of hands resting against the glass of a hotel window overlooking the shimmering sea… by which point fans will have relaxed, safe in the knowledge that Uncle Jess is at the controls, whilst his detractors conversely will be preparing for the worst. Once the film gets going however, both camps may find themselves adjusting their expectations slightly...

For instance, whilst the flashback / flash-forward structure and general atmosphere of freaked out zaniness tend to render ‘Venus..’ a disorientating experience for those watching with one eye elsewhere, attentive viewers will soon cop to the fact that the film is actually a very linear and well-constructed example of Franco’s narrative technique, telling a simple story with circular thematic unity and barely any loose ends, and utilising a system of imagery that, by and large, remains coherent throughout.

Dig for example the way that characters involved in the central revenge narrative are repeatedly framed, tableau-like, against bright red walls. These shots are spread throughout the film, all leading up to a breath-taking concluding image of Maria Rohm stretched out & comatose on a tiled floor, coldly observed by her erstwhile victims as they lean against the walls of a deep red ‘ghost room’, the symbolism of which recalls the otherworldly terror-spaces of David Lynch’s films, as Wanda’s karma is demonstrated to have gone full circle; an idea that is powerfully conveyed without the use of any crude explanatory dialogue or join-the-dots exposition.

Also notable by its relative absence here is the kind of in-camera ‘experimentalism’ that characterised so many of Franco's films. A few of his trademark wobbly zooms and focus-blurring transition shots can still be found, but by and large I think, Towers kept Franco on a tight leash technically-speaking, and as a result most of the footage here is properly framed, in focus and professionally lit, leaving Jess to conjure his preferred atmosphere of psychedelic delirium through more conventional means of jagged angles, kaleidoscopic mirrors, jarring cuts, weird interior décor and wild music – all of which works excellently, elevating central sequences such as the murders of Price and Kinski to dizzying heights of sado-orgasmic revelry, whilst also no doubt earning the director a few box-ticks from viewers who lack patience with his usual diet of wandering zooms, incidental detail and fuzzed out extreme close-ups. (Interestingly, 'Venus..' also utilises a lot of slow-motion, tinted colours, solarized shots, and other post-production tricks that were presumably beyond the director's means as his budgets hit the poverty line and his workload multiplied over the next few years).

The film’s jazz elements also add greatly to its overall success I think. The notion that Franco “makes films like jazz” has become a bit of a truism amongst commentators on his work, but rarely did he make a film that  reflects his love of music as directly as this one – indeed, you can see him right there during the film’s performance scenes, laying it down on trombone, bass and piano alongside James Darren (a genuine trumpet player) and members of Manfred Mann’s late ‘60s ensemble ‘Chapter 3’.

Mann and his long-time collaborator Mike Hugg were deep into their own twisted jazz groove by this point, and hiring them to provide the soundtrack to this movie was an inspired move, even if, as is par for the course in a Franco film, I’m uncertain how much of what we eventually hear during the film’s other scenes actually originated with the credited composers.(4) (The American print of the film under review here includes a bunch of fairly generic sounding orchestral library cues, and then there’s that damn ‘Venus in Furs’ jingle to account for too…).

Anyway, regardless, the film’s jazz scenes are really cool, conveying a smoky, sweaty authenticity that captures the joy and swing of a weed-fuelled late night session via roving camera-work, snappy editing and some hot playing... and there are a lot of other good music moments to enjoy here too.

Barbara McNair’s best scene by far arrives when she delivers a great, ‘Stones-esque tough-ballad entitled either ‘Let’s Get Together’ or ‘I Got A Feeling’ (toss you a coin for it), whilst writhing around horizontally on a blue-tiled nightclub floor as the band rocks out behind her! (Fans will note that this is the closest ‘Venus In Furs’ gets to a kinky nightclub scene, which surely means it can’t POSSIBLY qualify as "the perfect Jess Franco film", right?). My favourite bit of music in ‘Venus..’ though has got to be the demonic, Bruno Nicolai-esque bass pulse that builds into a totally whacked out, atonal horn freakout whilst Dennis Price meets his demise – far out, man! (I'm guessing that one at least  is a Mann/Hugg joint.)

Through use of this musical heavy weather and formalist visual beat-down, Franco’s original idea of a dream / reality disjuncture occurring in the mind of a wigged out jazz musician is actually still communicated pretty well by ‘Venus In Furs’, even as that notion becomes pretty marginalised within the script. With the precise points at which Darren’s external reality blurs into Wanda’s internal dream-space remaining, as they should, extremely unclear, we are left with a film that is as trippy as anything Franco made in the ‘70s whilst also as cohesive as anything made by... well, you know, a ‘normal’ film director. Win/win? You tell me.

4/5

Sight-seeing:

One of Harry Alan Towers’ characteristically insane international co-productions, ‘Venus In Furs’ appears to have been filmed all over the place – Rome (in Carlo Ponti’s house!), Istanbul, Barcelona, Rio, maybe other places besides – but nonetheless, it somehow lacks the strong sense of place that pervades so many of Franco’s other productions.

Though some of it was undoubtedly shot by the man himself, the location-work in Istanbul and Rio feels very much like stock footage, crudely inserted around scenes shot on sets (actual SETS on a Franco film ferchrissake, what’s that all about?), and anonymous interiors that could have been filmed anywhere.

Occasional nice things do still stand out at times: a scene in which Darren and Rohm flee from the cops features a network of ancient, overhanging streets, presumably in Istanbul, that very much recalls the still-unidentified location that was put to such good use back in The Diabolical Dr. Z, and this actually leads on to a brief but snappily edited car chase(!) through some similarly colourful Turkish neightbourhoods.

For the most part though, as our dashing trumpeter himself puts it; “When you don’t know where you’re at, man, I tell ya, time is like the ocean..” - a statement that ironically makes a pretty good criticism of many of the less successful films Jess Franco turned in over the years.

2/5

Conclusion:

Having basically said a lot of broadly positive things about ‘Venus In Furs’ above, I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to trying to express in words why the film leaves me a little cold. Whether viewed from within the Francoverse or outside it, it is certainly a richly accomplished and stylistically daring example of late ‘60s horror/exotica, with a great deal to recommend it, but… I dunno, man. Somehow it just feels a bit emotionally distant to me.

Maybe, speaking as a fan of Franco’s far more ragged and damaged ‘70s work, I just end up seeing this one as the equivalent of his shiny, well-produced major label album; it’s cool as far as it goes, and I can’t really fault it much, but… given the choice, you’ll always be more likely to find me chilling with the rough demos of the same material, or the weird drunken live album, if you get my drift.

(1) That may not sound like much of a compliment, but whatever your opinion of him, I think Jess Franco actually achieved a better hit rate than any of Towers’ other pet directors. Just try making it alive through a double bill of ‘Circus of Fear’ and ‘House of 1,000 Dolls’ if you want to get an idea of the sheer tedium involved in your average, non-Franco H.A.T. production.

(2) Whilst it was Towers’ influence that first brought them together, it is interesting to note that both Klaus Kinski and Dennis Price apparently found working with Franco sufficiently agreeable that they went on to collaborate with him again on some far cheaper productions during the ‘70s.

(3) Who the hell came up with this stupid jingle anyway, and how did it end up in the film..?! Given that Franco disapproved of the ‘Venus In Furs’ name and his claims he lost control of the final cut, it is reasonable to assume it wasn’t *his* fault, and it doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the rest of Mann & Hugg’s work on the movie either, so who knows…

(4) Check out Mann’s overlooked ‘Chapter Three’ LP, also from ’69, if you don’t believe me. It ain’t no ‘Quinn The Eskimo’, but it’s as fine a slice of moody, creeped out jazz-rock as you could possibly wish for, with some definite Italo-soundtrack overtones too. Recommended.