Reel Politique: DVD Review, Edgar Wallace krimis
If you’ve never heard of Edgar Wallace, don’t feel alone, but do feel culturally illiterate. The prolific British mystery writer, and the co-author of the script to King Kong (he died before the film’s release; see Video Watchdog No. 126 for the full story), is, or at least is reputed to be, more popular in Germany than his homeland. In Germany he forms a sort of one man crime wave, what Karl May was to the American-set westerns that so influenced the Hitlererian view of the world, Wallace’s mysteries and African adventure series festooning airport “bookstores.”
More important, Wallace’s books formed the foundation for a popular series of films in the late 1950s and through the ’60s and beyond, called krimis . These movies didn’t bear much export, but did influence the Italian gialli and may have inspired a producer to convince Fritz Lang to revive his Dr. Mabuse series in 1960 for one last entry ( Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse). Samuel Fuller’s Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street may be a form of homage to Wallace and his films. German cult film viewers still like them. A couple of years ago, a German DVD distributor issued a set of over 40 of the krimis , covered throughly in issue No. 134 of Video Watchdog. There were in fact two competing producers of Wallace adaptations, and the article walks the reader through these complexities.
Though of obvious low budget and sometimes awkward in production these prove to be fun films, but only a few of them have come into the American market. The color College Girl Murders was released a few years ago, and a double bill without portfolio that collected Monster of London City and Mystery of the Red Orchid. In January, the company Retromedia initiated the Edgar Wallace Collection, with a gathering of Mad Executioners and Fellowship of the Frog (apparently the first of the German krimis, released by the German studio Rialto), and now comes Edgar Wallace Collection, Vol. 2: Curse of the Yellow Snake/The Phantom of Soho (Retromedia, single sided dual layered disc with both features in black and white, no supplements).
Curse of the Yellow Snake or Der Fluch der gelben Schlange (1963), supposedly based on Wallace’s 1926 novel, follows two narrative tracks. The first concerns the search by one Cliff Ling, or Lynn (Joachim Fuchsberger) for the Yellow Snake, an ancient Chinese artifact whose possessor can, if he begins a war on precisely November 17, achieve world domination. Meanwhile, Joan Bray (Brigitte Grothum), is a London woman whose marital status is apparently up for commerce. First she was going to be palmed off to the unseen-by-her Joe Bray (Fritz Tillmann), foster father to Cliff (if I follow the plot correctly) and biological father to mixed-race industrialist Graham St. Clay (I’m guessing here, but possibly played by Pinkas Braun, whose character thus also goes by the name Fing-Su). Joe had the Yellow Snake back in Hong Kong before it was ripped off in the opening scene by two thieves. There is also some kind of tension between the two faux brothers, and the second Graham sees Joan, he wants to “buy” her, too. Graham, it turns out, is the prime thief of the Yellow Snake, and plans, from his huge London warehouse where hooded acolytes gather, to conquer the world.
As an action thriller, Curse of the Yellow Snake mostly makes sense, is well photographed, by Siegfried Hold, and minus some pacing problems, bears a modicum of suspense. The film also seems to feature many of the facets that dictate content for other Wallace krimis : the primarily London setting, though manifested mostly as library shots of notable London exterior landmarks (otherwise the films are shot in German studios); the presence of Scotland Yard as an institution that sets right threats to universal order; hooded villains out of a silent serial; rather older men as the heroes, Fuchsberger looking like a seedier George Clooney; periodic assassinations, usually of witness just before they are to be questioned. The slaves to Graham running about the factory put one in mind of Goldfinger and Cliff Ling has a bit of the Nayland Smith about him. The eerie electronic score, which also provides sound effects, and the occasional quick zoom ins onto someone’s face, evoke the gialli. St. Clay, ranting about world domination, might have struck contemporaneous viewers as a cheap citation of Hitler, but such demagogues are the currency of villainy in this type of film from the silent through the sound serials to the Bond films.
Both Curse of the Yellow Snake and Phantom of Soho are produced by CCC, the main production company competing with the Rialto Wallace’s and even occasionally using the same stars, such as Fuchsberger. Both are produced by Artur Brauner, and Phantom of Soho, or Das Phantom von Soho (1964), plays the trick of being adapted from a book by Bryan Edgar Wallace, the master’s son who makes a cameo in the film’s credits. Shot in black and white, both film have a noirish feel, with Soho having a score out of Touch of Evil and an opening out of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, with sexy street hookers popularing an unlikely London street. With its killer POV shots, masks, gloves, notes attached to chest with big knives, also evokes the look and sound of the Italian giallo films getting started around the same time.
Phantom of Soho offers a complicated story about a series of murders of prominent elites in the hooker-flourishing streets of a noirish Soho. Into the mix are Joanna Filiati (Elisabeth Flickenschildt), a wheelchair woman who operates one of the Soho clubs called the Sansibar, and who bears a horrific scar on her face and a mysterious past, her plastic surgeon and seeming partner, the generally quaking Dr. Dalmar (Werner Peters). Investigating the crime(s) are Chief Inspector Hugh Patton (Dieter Borsche), deemed to have a special flair for the case since he served in Africa like the first victim, and his buffoonish assistant Sergeant Hallam (Peter Vogel), who serves a similar function as Ling’s gay and hysterical artifact collector best friend in Yellow Snake, i. e., comic relief.
As mentioned both films are in black and white, and also wide screen. Both films come from rough prints, with lots of breaks and perhaps a little bowderlizaton of violence in Soho.
Edgar Wallace Collection, Vol. 2: Curse of the Yellow Snake/The Phantom of Soho hits the streets Tuesday, October 7, 2008, and retails for $19.98.