The German-accented phantoms of old London town

I’ve found the Blu-ray box set Shadows in the Fog to be a great introduction to the West German Krimi genre despite, on paper, being a collection of also-rans.

‘Krimi’ is a description applied to a run of films made in Germany between the 1950s and the 1970s, based on or inspired by the works of British crime writer Edgar Wallace.

The six films in this set were made by CCC Filmkunst as an attempt to cash in on the better-known Rialto Film series.

Rialto’s films were adapted directly from the novels of Edgar Wallace but CCC cannily enlisted Wallace’s son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, as the mascot for their knockoff series.

CCC’s films were all supposed to be based at least on ideas by Wallace the younger, although really the important thing was to get his name on the posters and in the opening credits.

Much has been made of the influence of Krimi on the Italian giallo genre. Often, the suggestion is that the giallo realises fully what the Krimi only half grasped. It’s true that gialli are generally bolder, more erotic, and more colourful.

Being British, it’s easy to scoff at the version of England presented in these films, recreated on Berlin studio backlots, on suburban streets, or in the grounds of historic buildings. 

If you’re even remotely sensitive to architecture and design, you’ll notice the absence of London brick and the jarring presence of baroque stonework. And wven with the careful placement of extras in British police helmets and strategically parked Jaguars, you can’t turn smart Berlin apartment blocks on a neat grid into Soho or Whitechapel.

It’s only fair, though, isn’t it? At the same time the UK’s Hammer Films expected us to buy a country park as the wild mountain forests of Mitteleuropa, and its own backlot dollhouses as ‘Carlsbrück’ or ‘Karlsbad’.

It doesn’t really matter that the London of the Krimi film is unconvincing because in this context it is merely a mythic playground for archetypes. (See also the landscape of the western, as various critics have observed.)

It has more in common with the foggy Universal backlot London of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s than with the real thing.

In fact, Sherlock Holmes is clearly an unspoken reference point for the Krimi.

For example, the plot of The Phantom of Soho (Franz Josef Gottlieb, 1964) concerns a group of wealthy conspirators being hunted down one by one as revenge for a crime committed overseas – a plot structure Conan Doyle used multiple times.

As in the Holmes stories, we often get lords and wards and family secrets, with stately homes as key locations.

The films perhaps have more in common with the money-grubbing post-war Holmes pastiches of Adrian Conan Doyle, or with August Derleth’s Solar Pons stories, both of which tend to the macabre and the melodramatic.

One of the films in this set, The Curse of the Yellow Snake (Franz Josef Gottlieb, 1963) suggests a contemporary of Holmes, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, with all the racism that entails. It also feels like a precursor to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and, going full circle, Young Sherlock Holmes.

Unlike Sherlock Holmes stories, Krimi credits the dogged men of Scotland Yard with a certain amount of genius.

The chief protagonist is usually a police inspector, like Jeff Mitchell (Harry Riebauer) in The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle (Harald Reinl, 1963) or John Hillier (Hansjörg Felmy) in The Mad Executioners (Edwin Zbonek, 1963).

They’re often the sharpest men on screen, both in terms of brainpower and fashion sense.

There’s never anything supernatural afoot but the films often hint that there might be. The killer in The Phantom of Soho wears a skeleton mask while in The Mad Executioners a gang of vigilantes rides about the Home Counties in a horsedrawn Gothic hearse straight out of Dracula.

The more Krimi I watch, the more I want to watch.

They’re reassuringly formulaic but also constantly surprising. The music is groovy, jazzy, and often surprisingly electronic. The faces are fascinating – household names in Germany but mostly unknown elsewhere, unless they cropped up in war films playing Nazi officers.

And this fantasyland of nightclubs, secret tunnels, laboratories, ruins, wild moors, and foggy Spreeside-Thameside streets is such a wonderful place to escape the here and now.

Shadows in the Fog is available from Eureka as part of its Master of Cinema series.