Terror In The Fog : The Wallace Krimi at CCC – Eureka

Directors: Franz Josef Gottlieb, Harald Reinl, Edwin Zbonek
Based on Novels by: Edgar Wallace, Bryan Edgar Wallace
Country: Germany
Running Time: 460 min (total)
Year: 1963-64
BBFC Certificate: TBC

The Edgar Wallace franchise is a long and complex cycle. So, deep breath, in his lifetime one of the biggest writers not just in Britain but in the world, Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was a massively prolific crime writer and journalist, now remembered in the Anglosphere for being a co-creator of King Kong, and for the 1960s British Merton Park adaptations of his work. However, in Germany, starting in 1959, German company Constantin with initially Danish-based concern Rialto Film made a Wallace adaptation, Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959) after refusing to release the 1952 British Wallace adap the Ringer. The success of this film started a whole cycle of Wallace adaptations and similar films, known as krimi. How many German films were made between 1959-1972 based on Wallace (and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace) is hard, considering German-Italian gialli like Double Face (1969), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969), What Have You Done to Solange (1972), Seven Blood-stained Orchids (1972) and The Etruscan Kills Again (1972) were bought up and retitled by Constantin Film and CCC. Plus Harry Alan Towers made a few German-British coproductions cashing in on Wallace (as well as cashing on the krimi cycle with his own Irish-Anglo-German Fu Manchu series). And there was an independent German adaptation of The Avenger (1960). Now, German producer Artur Brauner, at the same time as making the Wallace-aping nouveau Dr Mabuse films of the 60s decided to start making HIS OWN Edgar Wallace films in the mould of Rialto. To confuse matters, not only were some of these distributed by Constantin but featured the same actors and crews.

Ever since I was a teenager, I was fascinated by the Edgar Wallace films of Germany, but I rarely ever saw them bar Circus of Fear (1967), made outside the Rialto/CCC cycles and What Have You Done to Solange (1972). I would listen to German exchange students’ stories of seeing them on TV.

The Curse of the Yellow Snake (1963) is actually an Edgar Wallace film, not a Bryan Edgar Wallace. It’s made by CCC, but released by the same distributor, Constantin Film, as the Rialto adaptations of the Edgar Wallace films, down to featuring the same contract players. It’s a lively slice of Yellow Peril pulp, beginning with an atmospheric scene where a temple is raided, complete with the Rialto-thieved ‘Hier spricht Edgar Wallace’ narration. Pinkas Braun (in a role intended for Christopher Lee) plays a half-Chinese (ie a plastic forehead) counter-Communist villain. Its version of England is hilarious (i.e. to find an English language magazine, prop masters in Berlin use a copy of Ebony magazine, the famed publication for African-American women) but while silly (Eddi Arent is more grating than usual as comic relief), it’s a passable entertainment.

The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle (1963) is more of a proto-giallo/slasher, but set in an old dark house. It begins with Sir Lucius Clark (former Nazi film actor Rudolf Fernau), a bumptious old colonial about to be given a lordship, being terrorised by a masked fiend who brands his victims with an M. Starring future Bond girl/German genre regular Karin Dor (wife of director Harald Reinl) and Harry Riebauer (one of the Nazis in the Great Escape) as Inspector Mitchell, it is a cash-in on the similar Wallace The Black Abbot. Lord Blackmoor is a fox-hunting, moustachioed Scottish comic relief buffoon in a kilt. It’s an agreeable little whodunnit with a lovely weird view of an English rural pub (with a stripper), and a sinister climax.

The Phantom of Soho (1963), perhaps the most prototypical example, is set in an odd idea of London clubland, A masked killer (we barely see the mask until the climax) is stalking and killing men in a lovely studio-bound Soho, full of peculiar German ideas of Soho sleaze (one reminded me of the Boris Karloff’s Thriller ep The Prediction, which has a similarly dodgy idea of Soho nightlife). The hero is the comic relief bowler-hatted policeman, while Barbara Rutting is a standout as the female detective.

The Mad Executioners (1963) opens with a kangaroo court of murderous Klansmen/Spanish Inquisition type hooded nutters, and then has the kind of Thames-side body recovery common in German ideas of British crime as late as Bloodline (1979) – a film which like this, features Wolfgang Preiss. Here, Preiss, in the prime of CCC’s Dr Mabuse series, plays the stolid boss of Scotland Yard, usually filled by Siegfried Schurenberg’s Sir John in the Rialto series. We see the same dodgy painting of the Queen on the wall of Scotland Yard. We see a Louis Tussauds-level Black Museum full of waxworks (some of whom are alive). Hansjorg Felmy (Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain) and Maria Perschy (later in 633 Squadron) are the romantic leads, a Scotland Yard man (the kind usually played by Heinz Drache or Joachim Fuchsberger) and his girl friday. We have a comic relief journalist named Gabby Pennypacker, played by Chris Howland, a London-born disc jockey who became one of the biggest names in German radio and TV due to his accent, and aside from a brief run on the Home Service, spent his entire career speaking German. Gabby fills the role usually played by Eddi Arent in the Rialto series, but also because Howland was a schlager star, gets a musical number in a pub. It is also even more outre than the usual Wallace, with a plot involving a mummy’s curse and a sexbot. Wax museums, mummies, sexbots – entertainment ahoy. There’s even a mocked-up Punch cartoon.

The Monster of London City (1964), with its story of a London theatre actor playing Jack the Ripper who gets accused of being a Ripper copycat, feels indebted to the superior RKO Blitzploitation murder mystery The Brighton Strangler (1945). It might be the first film to have a specific Ripper copycat, and also in a meta story, the idea of censorship of horror in its story of theatre censorship censoring the Jack the Ripper play. Using the same sets as Phantom of Soho, it is a moody, entertaining piece. However, realising its similarities to The Brighton Strangler, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1965) makes one realise how the krimi’s real roots are in the echt-British thrillers made by German ex-pat directors. Both Strangler and The Lodger and Hangover Square were made by German refugees – Max Nosseck and John Brahm, and are set in a very similar version of London to these films.

Less of this atmosphere is found in the next film of the collection. The Racetrack Murders (1964) is a rather more dull sub-Dick Francis story about horse racing. Less horror and more realistic, it lacks the fantastic details and its rural setting removes some of the sleazy London echt-clubland we’ve grown to love with these films.

However, taken as a collection, these films and the various others not in the collection are something special. They exhibit a lovely German view of England, that originates in Pandora’s Box and the Threepenny Opera, and continued even in American films set in England by German directors. Not just the aforementioned work of Nosseck and Brahm but Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and Ministry Of Fear (1944) and Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947) and Thunder On The Hill (1951) all feel like spiritual templates for the krimi, not just in their plots and their atmosphere but their slightly off version of Britain.

Terror In The Fog : The Wallace Krimi at CCC is out on 26th May on Blu-ray, released by Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label.

The extras are excellent. Introductions by Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas set up context, commentaries with experts Joanthan Rigby and Kevin Lyons plus Kim Newman with Barry Forshaw and Stephen Jones (I prefer Newman with Jones) and interviews and trailers complete a much recommended package.