Film review – Der Rächer (The Avenger) (1960)

My notes on Der Rächer (The Avenger) (1960)

Der Rächer (The Avenger)

In 1959, Rialto Films had a hit with Der Frosch mit der Maske (Face of the Frog), the first of their decade-long series of Edgar Wallace krimis.  While they were negotiating to secure German film rights to the rest of Wallace’s extensive backlist, rivals nipped in to pick off a couple of titles.  Kurt Ulrich Filmproduktion quickly produced Der Rächer (1960), from Wallace’s The Avenger (aka The Hairy Arm, 1925), while Artur Brauner’s CCC outfit waited for the Rialto series to gain traction before delivering the imitative Der Fluch der gelben Schlange (The Curse of the Yellow Snake) in 1963.  Ulrich beat Frosch’s immediate follow-ups (Der Rote Kreis/The Red Circle, Die Bande der Schreckens/The Terrible People) to the screen in 1960.  Several players who made their Edgar Wallace debuts in Der Rächer (Heinz Drache, Klaus Kinski, Siegfried Schürenberg) would become mainstays of the Rialto series.

A murderer who calls himself ‘die Wohltäter’ (‘the Benefactor’) – but is also known variously as ‘der Rächer’ (the Avenger) and ‘der totjäger’ (‘the headhunter’) leaves freshly-severed heads neatly packed in cardboard boxes around the Green Belt (Esher and Leatherhead).  Because the latest victim was better-connected than previous ne’er-do-well decapitees, the secret service (represented by Schürenberg, in the first of many many pompous official roles) call in smug playboy agent Michael Brixan (Drache), who hares off on a tangental lead which of course turns out to wind up with him cracking the case.  Brixan traces the victim’s innocent neice film extra Ruth Sanders (Ina Duscha) to Gryff Tower, a country house being used as a location, and notices that a page from an old film script he comes across was written on the same typewriter as the notes left with the heads.  Posing as an entertainment reporter, Brixan meets showbiz types who serve as suspects and victims: repressed, typewriter-owning script editor Lorenz Voss (Kinski); thuggishly lecherous, if well-travelled Sir Gregory Penn (Benno Sterzenbach); high-handed director Jack Jackson (Friedrich Schönfelder); eccentric comedy dodderer Henry Longvale (Ludvig Linkmann); tight-slacks-sporting blonde diva movie star Stella Mendoza (Ingrid van Bergen); and, most entertainingly, red-herring-smelling, hulking servant Bhag (Al Hoosman).  The owner of the novel’s hairy arm (though his hairy unshod feet get more screen time), Bhag is a human-gorilla wild man type, with wolfman facial hair and pop-eyes.  He dotes on womenfolk but is given to lunging after them at odd times, beefing up the horror side of the film.

The old dark houses used by the film folk are full of clutter from all corners of the Empire (masks, swords, etc) and even run to a bare-midriff Malaysian dancer (Maria Litto) kept as a sex slave in a secret room.  Brixan’s detecting style involves creeping around after lights-out, peering through gothic windows and running into the chain-rattling Bhag.  At one point, it seems the apeman will brain the hero but an Asian martial arts guy in a trenchcoat jumps in and sees off the monster.  In a moment prefiguring gialli to come (and Blowup), a clue is caught in the background of the film being shot and frames are pored over – though this doesn’t break the case.  Beginning his long run of suspicious-but-innocent creep roles, Kinski purrs nastily until his head turns up packed in straw– with blaring music and a shock close-up.  A busy final reel pulls it all together: Sir Gregory tries (again) to abduct Ruth, Bhag chases the heroine (she falls into a hidden chamber littered with headless corpses), Brixan homes in on the least likely suspect as the guilty person (as in Hound of the Baskervilles, a family portrait gives the game away); and the mad avenging killer drags the heroine to the private guillotine he has stashed in the traditionally extensive catacombs under the estate only for Bhag to save her and shove him into his own decapitation device.  Note that the monster turns out to be more use than the hero.

The screenplay is by Gustav Kampendonk and Rudolf Katscher; Katscher had co-scripted an earlier German Wallace film, Der Zinker (1931) before relocating to the UK and having a distinguished career in television under the name Rudolph Cartier, producing (and directing) the Quatermass serials and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954).   It’s too early in the cycle to display much of the wry black humour which crept in at Rialto but it unashamedly uses old-fashioned melodrama tropes like the eyes staring through a mask on the wall.  Like many krimis, it has a wonderful feel – direcor Karl Aton and cinematographer Willi Sohn lay on the noirish shadows and composer Peter Sandloff gives the guillotine a catchy theme.  After a few stock shots of London locations – in German krimis, you get the impression that the chimes of Big Ben emanate from Tower Bridge – we’re very much in a London created in Berlin, an imaginary Britain which has a few modish aspects but is otherwise rooted in a fantasised idea of what the country was like circa 1928.