Author: Jim McLennan

The Secret Agents (1965)

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Dir: Christian-Jaque, Carlo Lizzani, Terence Young, Werner Klingler (uncredited)
Star: Vittorio Gassman, Bourvil, Robert Ryan, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. The Dirty Game

This multi-national anthology seems to be intended as a “grounded” counterpoint to the more excessive spy thrillers common in the sixties. The James Bond films are the most well-known of these, though are certainly far from the only ones. There was an entire “Eurospy” genre, driven by the success of 007, and we’ve already covered some of them already, including Coplan Saves His Skin and Only the Cool. These took various approaches, from the serious to comedic spoofs, and from the down-to-earth to entries that made even the more ludicrous entries in the Bond franchise seem sober by comparison. Given their inspiration, the presence of Young as a director of a segment here is interesting, since he helmed three official 007 entries: the first “proper” adaptation Dr. No, plus From Russia With Love and Thunderball.

Here, there are three separate stories, unfolding over the space of slightly more than two hours in the fullest version (there’s a 133-minute director’s cut according to the IMDb). However, the American release was severely edited, running under ninety minutes, and with the order of the anthology’s parts changed. By most accounts, it’s an almost incomprehensible hack job. A “proper” version has never been released officially in a version compatible with English-language viewers. A fan-assembled edition exists, based on a 123-minute cut of the movie released in Italy on DVD. This fan edit combined audio from the shortened English dub when appropriate – e.g. when American characters are speaking, with subtitles for the foreign language dialogue, spoken in German, French or Italian. Props to the creator, for sure. Just a shame it’s not a better film, in my opinion – especially from the Kinski front.

It begins with Young’s segment, in which deep-cover agent Dimitri Koulov (Henry Fonda) breaks through the Berlin Wall into the Western-controlled sector. He demands to see his handler, General Bruce (Ryan), but he’s unavailable, being out of town until the next day. Koulov is put up in a hotel overnight, but the Communists have followed his movements into West Berlin, and are keen to make sure he doesn’t live to meet the General. The second installment is set mostly in and around Djibouti in East Africa, where a plot unfolds posing a threat to a pair of nuclear submarines which are scheduled to rendezvous just off the coast. The French send agent Lalande (Bourvil) to track down and neutralize the scheme. Finally, the Italian segment centers on a scientist who has developed a new fuel source, but refuses to co-operate with either side. Perego (Gassman) is tasked with kidnapping the man, to help him see sense.

To start by getting the Kinski element out of the way, he plays an unnamed Russian agent, part of the team sent into West Berlin to stop Koulov from giving up his information. Their initial plan is to ambush the defector as he’s being transferred to the hotel, but this is foiled, more by luck than direct action. The team is therefore forced to try and assassinate Koulov in his room, first through a sniper, then by sending a killer onto his window-sill and finally into the building. Weirdly, their target doesn’t bother… oh, I dunno, telling anyone about this, just wrapping a towel around his wounded arm, and accepting it as a fait accompli when the room phone and bell service doesn’t work. Leaving the room, to make the assassin’s job at least slightly harder, apparently never crosses Koulov’s mind.

Kinski (top) is almost unrecognizable, sporting a severe five o’clock shadow and coke-bottle glasses. He doesn’t get to do much either, barking out a couple of commands but generally overseeing the murderous efforts of his underlings. It’s a bit of a surprise, because he was certainly a known actor by this point in the mid-sixties, having appeared in a slew of the Edgar Wallace krimis. You’d think they might have found a bit more for him to do. Mind you, the entire Berlin sequence is done and dusted in less than half an hour, Koulov having left a cryptic message on the mirror that then moves the plot on to the French leg of the movie. It never returns to Germany, and Kinski collects his payment on the way out.

The rest of the film is, I would say, steadily downhill. The French portion is at least somewhat interesting, mostly for Lalande being strongly against type as a spy, looking more like a chartered accountant. However, he seems to uncover the details of the plot against the submarines with almost ludicrous ease, and there’s also too much scuba-diving footage. I get that this was novel stuff at the time, but it seems slow and uninteresting now. [Though he wasn’t responsible for it here, Young’s other 1965 film, Thunderball, also falls into the same trap] It does still have considerably more to offer than the Italian installment, which borders on the incomprehensible. Though to be fair, it could well be that I was struggling to keep my attention engaged. There are a lot of moving parts, and it often seems unclear who is doing what to whom, and why.

I’m generally not in favor of hacking great chunks out of foreign films to make them palatable to a domestic audience, But I must admit, I kinda see why American International Pictures decided to take that route here. In its original format, all of the stories struggle to achieve much: I would say they’d have been better off doing them as three separate feature films, and giving each the room to breathe they desperately need. The performances generally aren’t bad, despite the near-criminal under-use of Kinski, and I understand what they makers were trying to accomplish. As the poster tag-line puts it, “The real true story behind the world’s most dangerous business: spying.” However, on the evidence of this, they’d have been better off printing the legend.

Again the Ringer (1965)

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Dir: Alfred Vohrer
Star: Heinz Drache, Barbara Rütting, René Deltgen, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Neues vom Hexer

I believe this is the only case of an Edgar Wallace krimi made by Constantin Films which was a direct sequel. For this was a follow-up to 1964’s The Mysterious Magician (Der Hexer), which I haven’t seen and is not reviewed here, because it did not include Kinski. This might have affected my enjoyment here somewhat, since I had no idea who the titular master-criminal was. A brief discussion thereof, seems pertinent. The IMDb synopsis runs as follows: “The sister of a famous, as-yet-uncaught criminal named The Hexer is murdered. Inspector Higgins of Scotland Yard believes that The Hexer will surface to take his revenge on his sister’s killers, and plans to set a trap to finally capture him. However, bodies soon start piling up, and it looks as if The Hexer might get away yet again.”

This was adapted from the Wallace novel published in 1925, and originally titled The Gaunt Stranger. The book had already been made into a film five times from then through 1952, and many of the cast from the 1963 version returned, including Deltgen as the mastermind, Arthur Milton. As this begins, he has left the British Isles for the less legally-troubling climate of Australia. However, he returns to England because of the murder of Lord Curtain, a crime at whose scene one of his calling cards was found. Unwilling to accept this attempt to blame him for a crime he didn’t commit, Milton decides he needs to clear his name by finding the real culprit. This puts him somewhat alongside Inspector James W. Wesby (Drache) of Scotland Yard, though for obvious reasons, Milton has to operate unofficially.

What’s interesting, is that this does not start off as a “whodunnit”. We know exactly who murdered Lord Curtain from the get-go, and how they did it. It was Archie, the nephew of the aristocrat, with the help of family butler Edwards (Kinski). He killed his uncle after stepping away from a game of cards. But with the aid of a tape-recording, containing a gunshot followed by a scream, he makes it seem as if the murder took place after his return, when he was sitting back at the table. That’s kinda clever. Except the judge presiding over the case notes that the bullet would have been immediately fatal, allowing no time for a scream. He then produces the tape-recorder – the judge is actually Milton, who is a master of disguise.

To this point, I was thoroughly impressed by the plotting on view, which was both imaginative and crisp. Unfortunately, the film as a whole is not able to sustain this level of creative writing. It soon turns out that Archie was not acting on his own. After he turns up dead – not the last corpse here, by any means – then we are back in the usual territory of multiple suspects, murky motives and more or less contrived twists on the way to the finale. Initially, it seems money is the motive, with the heirs to the Lord’s fortune also being knocked off. However, it eventually turns out to be more personal. The only member of the family who seems immune to the threat is Margie (Rütting), who has been cut off by Lord Curtain, after refusing to stop pursuing her dream of becoming an artist.

Outside of Kinski, one scene is certainly memorable – and, from a modern perspective, absolutely jaw-dropping. One of the Curtain family is a young boy, Charles, the family heir who lost an arm in a car accident. There is a failed attempt on his life, and at the end, he’s abducted. The kidnapper seeks to kill Charles by locking him in a room, and unleashing multiple tigers. The kid is genuinely in the same room with the big cats. No CGI obviously, but no stunt doubles or split screen either. At one point, he basically rides the tiger around! Quite what this means in terms of the story is hard to say: aristocratic children can soothe the savage beast? The boy is played by Teddy Naumann, whose family were animal trainers. Oh, and his missing arm is real: he lost it at age three (!), playing with a bear. [Fun fact, director Vohrer also lost an arm, fighting as a soldier in Russia during World War II]

As for Klaus, he certainly makes a sharp opening impression as butler Edwards, sitting up out of a coffin, and pronouncing it a good fit (above). He then is next seen playing the harp (!) for the amusement of his employers. But thereafter, he doesn’t get given too much to do, eventually turning up as one of those corpses mentioned earlier, being found in a dumb-waiter, used by those of nefarious intentions to move around the Curtain stately home. It is interesting that the film is almost a Battle of Butlers, for Milton has one of his own, Archibald Finch, played by comic relief stalwart Eddi Arent. Both manservants sport facial hair of some kind: Finch has a full beard, while Edwards has more of a five o’clock shadow going on, perhaps in deference to the character’s morally dubious nature and actions.

The film ends with an odd breaking of the fourth wall, Inspector Wesby, having stopped Milton from leaving for Australia, is asked what he wants with the man. He turns to the camera and says, “You will be told soon… in this theater.” This is an obvious set-up for a third movie in the franchise, and is all the more questionable, because it never happened. It appears the sequel was not quite able to repeat the success of its predecessor, and no further entries were made, apparently due to scheduling reasons. By this point, I’d lost most interest, and Wesby’s statement seemed more like a threat than a promise. Perhaps I’d have felt differently had I seen the original movie, rather than being introduced to a Ringer who was already very much in progress.

Location Africa (1987)

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Dir: Steff Gruber
Star: Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Steff Gruber, Peter Berling

We have quite a particular situation here. In this century we’ve had perhaps two or three people of Kinski’s calibre. There’s no-one else like him. He’s a wonder of the world. And this wonder can still be seen… There’s a duty, a great duty over me, since no-one else can do it. I have to be able to take it on. I want to be a good soldier of cinema.

Werner Herzog, to Steff Gruber

Documentaries involving Kinski are typically enthralling, simply because of the mercurial nature of the man. At any point, the volcano which is Klaus can potentially go off, delivering the kind of content which is gold to film-makers. But comparing this, about the making of Cobra Verde, to its most obvious sibling, Burden of Dreams, this certainly feels blander. While you still get the sense of how working with Kinski could be a challenge, the way it’s depicted here puts it in a different light. Rather than the sense of walking through a minefield, it is more of a grind – a test of Herzog’s stamina, rather than of his will. Klaus comes over almost as an energy vampire, someone with whom every interaction turns into a draining encounter, with minute details being questioned and every directorial decision being challenged.

From the start, it’s clear that Gruber is firmly on Herzog’s, saying of the director, “I admire his courage, which he constantly demonstrates in his films, how uncompromising he is, and his visionary power.” I guess it’s a good thing that the film admits its biases up front, though in general, I’m more a fan of documentaries that go wherever the story takes one, rather than where the makers come in with a predetermined agenda. Gruber sniffs daintily at the prospect of covering the juicier elements. While acknowledging that the arguments between director and star “dominate the shooting,” Gruber asks himself whether they should become the subject of the movie. He answers himself in the negative: “I resist the temptation. We’re not here to carry out gossip journalism.”

While he’s reluctant to do anything which might paint his hero in even a negative light, there are still scenes of the discussions – shot from a very long way away! “Why do I have to stand there?” demands Klaus, or “Why do I have a rifle?” Werner patiently explains his thinking, in the face of disparaging comments which would try the patience of most people. “I can’t shoot like this! I refuse to work with idiots!” goes Klaus, and continues to mutter darkly, even after the director has gone to take up his position. “What a load of rubbish! We shouldn’t shoot an important scene like this with two cameras!” It’s difficult to think of any other actor and director pairing which seemed to operate in such a state of perpetual tension.

Even Herzog has his breaking point. He tells Gruber, “There’s a final limit for me… When I reach it, then without hesitation, and within seconds, I’ll do things that nobody thinks are possible, and that will affect my life forever.” Though he never provides specifics, I immediately thought about the stories of him pulling a gun on Kinski. Compared to that, Cobra Verde seems to have been a cake-walk, Herzog adding, “I don’t think we’ll reach the limit here.” You do get a sense of why Herzog was prepared to tolerate it. He praises Kinski’s instincts: “He sees absolutely perfectly how physically people get frightened and run away. All at once something is there that has real life. When there’s no life in cinema you shouldn’t make it at all.”

What does come over is Herzog’s weariness of the entire process, but how he feels almost an obligation to make movies, despite the obvious pain the experience causes. “Making films isn’t a good job… You really shouldn’t do it too often.” There are moments where his frustration at the process comes through, such as when the local extras suddenly require double the previously-agreed daily rate, causing Werner to explode: “What you are demanding from me is nothing else but blackmail, and you should know that!” But he has little option except to give in to their demands. Gruber described the director as almost disassociating himself from proceedings: “Herzog acts as if he’s not involved, like a sleepwalker.”

It is more about the film-making operation from the director’s perspective. Kinski, when he appears at all, is often a long way off. About the only extended scene where he’s is the focus sees him goofing off (top) with some of the extras who play his character’s Amazonian army. Though the line between goofing off and sexual harassment of these topless women is probably a complex equation involving time, place and intent. Gruber spends more time talking to the extras than Kinski (the latter being “none at all”), though this is sometimes quite interesting in its own terms. One said her boyfriend thought she was a prostitute, for showing her breasts to white men, and demanded she choose him or the film. She picked the film.

The week before watching this, I listened to the audio commentary for Apocalypse Now, which might be another example of what Gruber here calls “A sort of short-term colonialism.” There are definite parallels: an auteur director, shooting in a foreign country with a talented but problematic star, and often finding the process to be more of a chore than a pleasure. But they both also illustrate the magic of cinema, where what appears to be chaotic disorder can still result in the creator’s vision being realized, when all the elements come together. Watching this, you’ll wonder how Cobra Verde was ever finished, never mind that it provided an appropriate full-stop to the long, memorable sentence which were Herzog’s collaborations with Kinski. But this documentary feels very much like a snapshot of the movie’s creation, rather than the full picture, and so is frustrating in its incompleteness.

That Man In Istanbul (1965)

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Dir: Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi
Star: Horst Buchholz, Sylva Koscina, Perrette Pradier, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Estanbul 65

This is one of those Eurospy films which it felt like were being churned out on an almost weekly basis during the sixties. It was likely in response to the success of the Bond movies, and in this case From Russia With Love, released two yeas previously, seems a particular template, at least in its location. Here, things take place largely in – as the title suggests – Istanbul, which had also featured heavily in Russia. It’s probably the best thing the film has going for it, taking full advantage of just about everything the city has to offer: you can almost tick off the landmarks as they appear. I imagine at the time, there was considered to be something exotic about it, straddling the Bosphorus between Europe and Asia. It’s certainly easy to imagine Istanbul being a hot-bed of spies and intrigue.

The movie begins with the exchange of a nuclear scientist, Prof. Pendergast, who has been abducted with a ransom of one million dollars negotiated with the kidnappers. Except, they aren’t playing fair. Overseen from his limo (top) by the mysterious Schenck (Kinski), they return a double, implanted with a bomb which blows up on the plane returning him to safety. The US government is unimpressed, but due to diplomatic concerns, are unable to take action against the most likely perpetrators, the Chinese. I’m not sure why they, rather than the Russians, are deemed culpable. Anyway, Department of State agent Kelly (Koscina) asks for and is sorta-not-really given permission to travel to Istanbul and investigate, in the hopes of getting back both the Professor and the ransom.

Once there, almost all of the actual investigating is delegated to Tony Mecenas (Buchholz). He’s a disgraced American immigrant who was deported for alleged, but denied, mob ties and has set up shop running an illicit casino. He was seen near the site of the plane crash, but says he was just passing by. Tony still holds a grudge against Uncle Sam for kicking him out of the country, but thanks in no small part to Kelly’s feminine wiles, agrees to help out. Initially, this involves recovering a tie-clip camera which had been used to photograph the original swap, and can thus identify the perpetrators. Once that’s in hand, he can then work his way up the chain of command, to find where Pendergast is being held, and rescue the scientist.

Well, that’s the plan, and things don’t go quite as planned, with a slew of escapades, These include Kelly getting kidnapped by the villains, or the unexpected arrival of an Argentinian heiress, Elisabeth Furst (Pradier), who had also apparently been kidnapped by the same gang. She proves susceptible to Tony’s charms as well, though he has his hands full with avoiding numerous attempts on his own life, as he gets closer to the center of the plot. These include both Schenck’s gang and the Chinese, though the relationship between those two is a little vague. The same could be said of most of the plotting here, with confusion over quite what’s going on, by whom and why, being the order of the day.

That said, as long as you’re prepared to go with the flow, and presume things more or less make sense, this is a breezy and generally entertaining piece of fluff. Buchholz was well into his thirties at this point, but looks far too young to be a successful nightclub entrepreneur, least of all one getting involved in international espionage shenanigans. [Matters are not helped by a disturbing resemblance, in some shots, to a young Rick Astley] After being one of the stars of The Magnificent Seven, he was not able to parlay that into a significant Hollywood career. This was in part because he had to turn down the lead in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, due to filming the now all but forgotten Billy Wilder comedy One, Two, Three.

There are some moments where it is clear this is not intended as a particularly serious spy movie. Tony shows up to meet someone who has promised to divulge the whereabouts of the captive, only for the informant to be shot, and the gang of kidnappers try to mow him down with their cars. In the middle, he pauses, before breaking the fourth wall with a “What, me worry?” directed to the audience. He then finds a bulldozer, with the keys apparently left in it, and goes on a fairly impressive rampage of vehicular carnage.

The film has a couple of other nice bits of action. There’s an underwater knife fight in a hotel swimming pool, and the other sequence which stood out is the extended brawl between Tony and Schenck. The former tries to pass himself off as a member of Schenk’s gang, a deception which is rapidly uncovered. He’s about to get an injection of lead for his pains (above), but fortunately discovers that a glass-topped coffee table in Schenk’s apartment is made of particularly thick material, and so bullet-proof. The subsequent fist-fight after the villain runs out of ammo, destroys much of the fixtures and fittings, before Tony is able to prevail by drowning Schenck in the bathroom sink.

There is no definite mention of this film in either version of Kinski’s autobiography. He does say at one point. “A film in Turkey: We shoot in a men’s brothel,” before going on to describe some of his sexual exploits [It’s only present in All I Need is Love] The time-frame might roughly fit, as it comes shortly after Doctor Zhivago, another film from 1965, but it’s hard to tell. There are no scenes involving his character which particularly feel like they were filmed in a brothel, and I doubt he was on set for more than a few days, However, there’s still enough going on, that Kinski’s brief appearances feel like a bonus, rather than the only reason to watch it. With plenty of eye-candy in both feminine and architectural forms, this is more of a pleasure than a chore.

The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud (1984)

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Dir: Danford B. Greene
Star: Bud Cort, Carol Kane, Klaus Kinski, Marisa Berenson

Dear lord. Is there anything worse than a comedy which fails, utterly and completely, to be funny? I previously tagged Revenge of the Stolen Stars as being Klaus’s worst movie, when considered overall. But this one definitely deserves to be in the conversation, and given the higher resources here, is likely more terrible, on a per-dollar basis. It’s conclusive evidence that, in the world of movie-making, artistic talent is not necessarily transferable. For director Greene was nominated for an Oscar, not once, but twice. The problem is, this recognition was not for his directing. They were for his work as editor on M*A*S*H in 1971 and Blazing Saddles four year later. Yeah, we are talking about a pair of thoroughly well-respected “comedies” (even if M*A*S*H really is not that funny), but none of his abilities transfer into Danford’s one and only time in the director’s chair.

It would be wrong to blame Greene solely for this disaster, however. The screenplay, by Linda Howard and Roberto Mitrotti, is asinine stuff. If you imagine someone reading the Wikipedia article on Sigmund Freud, and deciding to turn that into a farce, you’ll have some idea of how badly this misfires, on every level. I knew this was going to be a chore, when one of the early scenes has the young Freud being surprised by a horse’s dick. That’s the level at which much of this works: the father of psychoanalysis’s obsession with sex is something Howard and Mitrotti appear to share. Then there’s the casting. Cort may vaguely resemble Freud, in that he has a beard and glasses. But there’s a reason he’s best known for playing creepy in Harold and Maude, rather than comedy. No joke here proves sufficient armor against his ability to suck the life from it.

The story is more or less a retread of Freud’s life from his early childhood, through to his eventual marriage to Martha Bernays (Kane) and discovery of the psychiatric field. This was not so much born out of actual interest, as his discovery at medical school that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. His phobia ruled out most conventional fields, and drove him to work in treating disorders of the mind, using hypnotism rather than a scalpel [Per Wikipedia, this is entirely made-up] If you’re looking for sufferers of mental illness being treated as the butt of jokes, you are in the right place, because that’s what we get here, headlined in particular by Dick Shawn’s depiction of what the credits call “The Ultimate Patient”. This means him dressing up as anything from Beethoven through the loony archetype of Napoloen, to be treated by Freud. Guess it was cheaper than paying half a dozen actors? I’ll pause here for you to fix your surely splitting sides.

Mel Brooks might have been able to do something with this kind of thing. His collaborator, not so much. In general, I will say that outside of Cort, who seems to be playing the role as an unwanted straight man, the rest of the cast are probably the least ineffective element here. Kane is at least trying, unlike Cort apparently having been informed that this was intended to be a comedy. She vamps things up more than acceptably, and if only there had been more for the script to give her. Carroll Baker shows up and is half-decent as Freud’s mother, while Ferdy Mayne can also be seen. However, there is just nothing for them to do. Even the writers seem to realize this, suddenly injecting a pair of (mercifully brief) musical interludes later on, for want of anything better to do. It makes as much sense as anything else.

Kinski plays Dr. Max Bauer, who appears to have been entirely made-up for the purpose of this film. He’s a friend of the family, and rather obviously (top), is the long-term lover of Mrs. Freud. Though in general he’s very “hands-on,” even making a pass at Martha (below). The concept of Klaus playing a sex-maniac is one which might have had promise. Again, the failure of the script and director to do anything with the idea, helps condemns this to irrelevance, and his character seems to serve no purpose in the narrative. Not that there is much of a narrative to serve. The film ends with Freud inexplicably deciding that there is, in fact, more to life than sex, sex, sex, and apologizing to Martha for having thought so. It’s the kind of unexplained and puritanical twist you’d expect from a film made in the Hays Code era, not one from the mid-eighties.

Shot in Belgrade, I can’t fault the production values, which do a good job of recreating the look and feel of Vienna in the late 19th century. Local cinematographer Djordje Nikolic does his job, which is more than can be said for composer Vojislav Borisavljevic. His soundtrack appears to be operating under the mistaken belief it’s accompanying a Benny Hill episode, though might have been at least somewhat appropriate if there had been any comedy for it to backdrop. Despite a reasonable amount having been spent on this – period pieces aren’t cheap, even in Yugoslavia – it’s entirely understandable why this never appears to have received a theatrical release in any territory I have been able to locate. The movie eventually seeped out directly on home video in February 1987, almost three years after its Cannes Film Market premiere.

Sadly, being one of his later productions, it came too late for Klaus to cover it in his autobiography, I am sure he would have had some pithy comments to offer on the movie, and the pleasures of getting to touch up Carroll Baker, for reasons apparently deemed necessary to the plot. That is considerably more pleasure than the typical viewer will take. I was left without any detectable insight in or knowledge about the subject of this poor excuse for cinema, and had not even been amused by the process. There are films I’ve watched purely for Kinski, which I am pleased to have seen. This is not one of them. The idea of a biographical comedy about Sigmund Freud seemed a poor concept from the start, and the execution very much confirms my skepticism.

Mark of the Tortoise (1964)

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Dir: Alfred Vohrer
Star: Hildegard Knef, Götz George, Richard Münch, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Wartezimmer zum Jenseits

“Hier spricht… James Hadley Chase”? Shurely shome mishtake? But that’s the feeling you get here, because this could have been one of the Edgar Wallace krimi movies made by Rialto in the sixties. Not the least element being Vohrer, in particular considering his track record to this point. I think he is probably the man who directed Klaus most often, surpassing even Kinski’s legendary collaborations with Werner Herzog. Vohrer made nine films in which Klaus appeared during the sixties, most of them being Wallace adaptations. Their partnership began with The Dead Eyes of London (1961) and continued until Creature with the Blue Hand (1967). That said, this is likely one of their lighter efforts, with Klaus collecting his check at the thirty-minute mark. We’ll see though, he still leaves a mark.

As suggested above, this was based on a book by Chase, specifically Mission to Siena, which was originally published in 1955, though under another nom-de-plume of Raymond Marshall. [While best known as Chase, that was a pseudonym too, with his real name being René Lodge Brabazon Raymond] It was one of two adaptations of a Marshall novel to come out that year, with Mission to Venice also being released. That may explain the changes in title. The English language one is a little weird: while a tortoise with a skull painted on its back does make an appearance, it’s of trivial significance in the film. The book makes it considerably more clear that it’s the nickname of the chief villain. The German title translates as “Waiting Room to the Beyond”, and is probably a better one.

It begins with Don Micklem (George) getting worrying news from his aunt, telling Don that his rich uncle is the victim of extortion, having received a demand for cash. A refusal to pay will be met with his death. Uncle doesn’t take it seriously, but he should. For it’s part of a scheme by the wheelchair-bound Marchese Mario Orlandi di Alsconi (Münch). He knows the target won’t pay up, and intends to kill him so that future victims will be more inclined to acquiesce to his demands. Sent to London to organize things is his moll, Laura Lorelli (Knef), who arrives to find a disgraced knife-thrower (!) Shapiro (Kinski) has been hired to carry out the hit. Despite Don’s efforts, that’s exactly what happens, but Shapiro is trailed by Don and the authorities to a seedy hotel out of which Laura is operating. He finds evidence linking her to the hit, while Shapiro is silenced to ensure he doesn’t talk to the authorities.

Laura high-tails it out of the country and back to Trieste where the Marchese has his headquarters, a sprawling complex of Bond villain-like complexity. Don follows her to Italy, in search of the truth about his uncle’s death, along with sidekick Harry (Hans Clarin, in a light comic relief role obviously written for Eddi Arent), He appears to have help in the shapely form of Laura, who is seeking a way out of her relationship with the crippled aristocrat, and saves Don from being the victim of a bomb attempt on his life. However, does she genuinely care, or is it merely part of a larger plot? For she tells di Alsconi that Don is the heir to the uncle’s fortune, and his wealth now makes him a target for the Marchese’s scheme. He’s captured and a ransom demanded: can Don talk, work, fight or even love his way out before he becomes superfluous to requirements?

Even allowing for my Kinski bias, I felt this worked considerably better in the first half, with a broader scope of locations and plot development. There is some super location period footage of central London to start (below), and the script does a good job of pitting Laura’s plot against Don’s defensive maneuvers, then his attempts to uncover the murderers. The story-line is relatively straight-forward compared to some of the Wallace films: we know from the start who is responsible, and there are no red herrings to speak of. But once it gets to the Adriatic, and Don is captured, it kinda grinds to a halt. While there apparently was a reasonable budget, the film remains mostly confined inside di Alsconi’s mansion, and the film feels as much a captive as its hero.

The only time the film generates real tension is after the Marquesi discovers Laura’s intentions, and confines her, Don and a couple of minor henchmen in a room with a hydraulic press for a ceiling. Like his lair, it’s high-grade Bond villainy: why bother shooting them when you can create an extended sequence of torment, as they discuss whether to shoot each other before they are crushed to death? There’s uncertainty as to the eventual fate of di Alsconi, and I suspect if this had been a bigger box-office success, he might have been brought back to anchor a franchise [Some other reviews compare this to the Mabuse franchise about an evil criminal mastermind, but I haven’t seen enough of those to comment here]

On the positive side, the performances are generally good. George is a suitably square-jawed hero, and Knef has an ethereal, poignant feel to her performance: Laura feels like a character who wants to be good, but pragmatism has forced her into doing bad things, purely to survive. It’s just a shame Klaus’s twitchy circus performer is not allowed to go deeper into the movie. Even with a relatively small amount of screen-time, it’s a memorable character from his very first scene. There, he demonstrates his credentials to a dubious Laura, by turning the lights out and then immediately hurling a knife, which embeds itself in the wall of her trailer, inches from her head. Point made, both literally and metaphorically. Shapiro is key, in that it is his nervous fleeing to her hotel, which gives Don his first clue as to Laura’s involvement, and thus kicks off the rest of the plot. It’s therefore a good example of Kinski having a small role, yet making a significant impression.

Lifespan (1975)

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Dir: Sandy Whitelaw
Star: Hiram Keller, Tina Aumont, Klaus Kinski, Fons Rademakers

This is just an odd entity. On the surface, it’s not a very good movie about scientific morality, or in particular, the lack thereof. However, there’s an argument to be made that it perhaps has hidden depths, with layers of meaning lurking beneath the surface, if you care to unpack it. On the other hand… Nah, I’m good. In all honesty, I can’t be bothered to put the necessary effort in, which would be required for a detailed analysis. I’m perfectly fine with leaving it at being a not very good about immorality and immortality.

The central character is Dr. Ben Land (Keller), the son of a plastic surgeon. He has also gone into medicine, just on a different field: that of extending the longevity of the human race, by stopping or even rewinding the internal clock within our cells. He is in Amsterdam to meet fellow researcher Dr. Paul Linden. Initially, it seems Linden is “off,” but Ben doesn’t appreciate how much until he comes across the dangling corpse of his colleague, Linden having hung himself. Paul decides to stay on, and gets permission to continue Linden’s research, which appears to have succeeded in doubling the lifespan of laboratory mice. However, there are significant and suspicious gaps in the research papers.

The further Paul digs, the more he discovers that all was not well in Linden’s life. He was having a sadomasochistic affair with a younger woman, Anna (Aumont), the upkeep of which was putting him under financial stress. As a second source of income, he had agreed to work as a consultant for a Swiss pharmaceutical company owned by Nicholas Ulrich (Kinski). This had given him access to papers smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and led to Linden moving from experimenting on mice, to the residents of an old folks’ home nearby. The results could charitably be described as “mixed”. One resident basically regains the flower of youth; quite a few more don’t survive the treatment.

The longer Paul stays in Amsterdam, the more it seems he is inevitably going down the same path as Linden. He begins a similarly bondage-heavy relationship with Anna (which probably explains why the BBFC-approved version passed in 1987 and 1995, runs a terse 77 minutes!). Through her, he is also introduced to Ulrich, who makes the same offer of employment he made to Linden. Paul’s efforts to investigate the survivor at the old folks’ home also go wrong, forcing him deeper into cahoots with the increasingly suspicious industrial magnate. It all ends in an annoyingly open manner, with Paul going to Ulrich’s facility in the Swiss Alps, but not exactly committing to give his boss the gift of eternal life.

As mentioned, there were points where it did seem to be trying to say something about identity as well as the tension between scientific progress and larger concerns. If we could suddenly live forever, what impact would that have on society? Would it be worth the cost? There are some interesting topics for discussion there, though the film never does much more than skate across their surface. There were also times where it felt like a predecessor to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. The combination of cutting-edge technology, sexual deviance and the gradual loss of identity are all topics with which Cronenberg is familiar, though he handled them with much greater confidence and coherence than the director here. Whitelaw, who was best known as a subtitler, only directed one other feature, 1997’s Vicious Circles.

As for Kinski, this is not one of his more memorable performances, and to be honest, my attention was hard-pushed to remain engaged until he does more than lurk menacingly in the background. That comes in the second half, in particular after he engages with Paul, and attempts to get his hooks into the young researcher. It’s clear Ulrich is thoroughly unconcerned with anything getting in the way of his desire to live forever. Probably nothing makes this clearer than his purchase of a mask used to perform Faust for the Nazis (that’s particularly unsubtle!). He then dons it while going down on Anna, getting whiny after Paul phones him up during their sex play: “Now I’ve lost my concentration!”

On working with Klaus (for the second time, after Pride and Vengeance), Aumont said, “He was quite calm. I read his biography and I do not like what he says of me, the “pétite Aumont, la pétite Marquand”, when he says that he preferred to go elsewhere rather than the “orgies of the pétite Marquand” or something like that. What do I know, he will have written it because of my reputation for using opium Our relationships were good, we ate together a thousand times. Pretty hypocritical.” It is true that Aumont had a long history of drug abuse, spending nine months in jail for importing opium after being arrested in 1978. However, the above seems odd, since – at least in the English translations – neither All I Need is Love nor Kinski Uncut include any such reference.

In the DVD commentary, director Whitelaw has some kind things to say about Kinski, though he did apparently complain about the smell of the mice! “He was extremely nice on the film. He said we had such good food because we had cheeses and cold cuts for lunch. I mean, he wasn’t there for that long but he was not at all bad. He was very nice to work with. I had always loved Klaus Kinski.. I got in touch with Kinski and he was available and he was not very expensive; he keeps on saying, “I was a whore, I would have done any movie, anything, for the money and they paid me”, but in fact, he got very little money. He was extremely nice on the set.” In typical Klaus style, he did make unilateral changes to his character’s dialogue – “I just managed to get what I needed,” says Whitelaw – and the director had to get of a strong Mexican accent Klaus affected on arrival. But compared to many film-makers, Whitelaw seems to have got off lightly.

L’important c’est d’aimer (1975)

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Dir: Andrzej Zulawski
Star: Fabio Testi, Romy Schneider, Jacques Dutronc, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. That Most Important Thing: Love

This is the kind of film they just don’t make any more. Well, at least not in the sense of “mainstream” cinema. The year it came out, this was among the thirty most successful movies at the French box-office, with basically the same number of tickets sold there as Rollerball. Even allowing for the difference in cultures between the two countries, anyone remember the last relationship-based drama to make the annual top thirty at the box-office in the US or UK? I don’t say this out of any sense of elitism or snobbery – not least because this is typically the sort of movie I would usually run a million miles from. I prefer my cinema to be loud, flashy and ostentatious, rather than angst-ridden and, to be honest, not much more than tarted-up soap-opera. But Project Kinski plays no favorites, so here I am, watching two broken French people colliding like icebergs.

The central character is Servais Mont (Testi), a photographer who is forced to make a living in various dubious ways, such as shooting blackmail photos at an orgy, for the mob. He sneaks on to a film set and sees actress Nadine Chevalier (Schneider) being abused by her director in order to get the performance she wants, the actress breaking down in tears on set. Chevalier was once a top-tier starlet, but now at the ripe old age of 30 (!), is reduced to playing in B-movies. Her last film was the wonderfully-titled Nymphocula – hey, I’d go see it! We later learn from an enthusiastic endorsement by Klaus’s character, that this was, “Two dykes in a castle with a dwarf”. Hey, I’d still go see it. Servais becomes infatuated with Nadine, and begins a relationship with her, to the near-apathy of her gay husband, Jacques (Dutronc).

Hoping to revive her career, Servais borrows twenty thousand dollars from his pals in the mob, despite having only just got out from under his previous obligation to them. This was incurred in order to pay back debts incurred by Servais’s father – he has a noble yet self-destructive willingness to put himself in harm’s way, in order to help others. He uses the money here to fund a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, in which Nadine will play Lady Anne. In the title role is German actor Karl-Heinz Zimmer (Kinski). It’s a rather radical reworking of the classic, for example, with the medieval English soldiers sporting samurai armor, and the press is not kind to it, to say the least. Nadine’s despair only deepens, and she is increasingly torn between Servais and Jacques, due to her sense of obligation towards her husband. He takes care of that by overdosing on pills and committing suicide, leaving Nadine and Servais staring into an uncertain future.

The production company for which Zulawski is filming can’t sign a contract with me because the German distributor, who’s co-financing the project, doesn’t want me. The reason is that the miserable maggot who’s negotiating with the French company wants to get back at me. Years and years ago, he had the hots for Erika when I was fucking her. But Erika wanted to screw only with me. That’s why this maggot hated me. Zulawski says he won’t make the movie without me. I don’t give a shit about the film. I need bread.

Kinski Uncut, pp.236-237

Interestingly, the above section is not present in All You Need is Love, one of the cases where Kinski Uncut actually does live up to its title. Kinski was able to work around the problem because, according to his version, he was having an affair with “Sabine”, who is simultaneously having an affair with “Herr Von S.” who runs the distributor’s Munich branch and is the boss of the producer working with Zulawski. Through that connection, Kinski gets the job. As ever, take his version with a pinch of salt, but on the commentary track for the DVD, the director did apparently say that Kinski punched one of the producers and called him a Naz. This would appear to confirm that the relationship was at least somewhat fraught! Not that Kinski particularly cared for the end product, calling it a page or two later, “Zulawski’s intellectual jerking off.”

I mean, he’s not wrong. This is Arthouse Cinema with a capital A, R and T. I do admit, there are points where it is extraordinarily well-acted, and it’s easy to see why Schneider became the first ever recipient of the Cesar (France’s equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Actress. One scene near the end, her character and Servais are talking in a restaurant, which escalates into a hysterical outburst that’s almost painful to watch. Though I am impressed with the apparent stoicism of French consumers: the only person to pay any attention is the waiter, and he’s mostly concerned about the resulting mess. Kinski is perhaps the sole actor here who can stand up to the incandescence of Schneider when she lets loose. On the re-release in 2017, the New York Times review said the part was “played by Klaus Kinski at full Kinski volume.” They’re not wrong either.

Witness the scene just after the scathing review has been read to him. Zimmer fabricates a reason to take offense with a passer-by, beats him up and walks off with both of his victim’s two lady friends. To be honest though, I can’t blame him. I would watch the hell out of Klaus Kinski playing Richard III and any critic who could not see the appeal of that, is not one whose opinions I can take seriously. I did attempt to clip out a subtitled version, but two different, and usually very reliable, video conversion programs both coughed up a hairball when I tried. So you will have to make do with this untranslated clip above, which has Kinski giving the famous, “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech from the play. Still, even in French, it’s a hypnotic rendition, and I just wish there was a version of the whole play available.

Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloß (1964)

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Dir: Franz Josef Gottlieb
Star: Judith Dornys, Rudolf Forster, Ernst Fritz Fürbringer, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. The Curse of the Hidden Vault

I just hope Klaus was not being paid by the word for his performance in this krimi, because if so, his check would have been very small, if not non-existent. I don’t recall him saying a word in the entire performance, with his role being largely relegated to lurking menacingly in the background – typically behind a gate or foliage, and lit from beneath as shown below. It’s not clear until the end where his allegiances lie, when his actions finally speak considerably louder than his words. This is a bit disappointing, since the opening credits proclaim “with Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent”, but the two get very different amounts of screen time and significance to the overall story. Arent comes out thoroughly on top, which is fair enough. He’s playing his usual comedic relief, yet stays on the side of irritating, which can’t be said for all of his roles. His bumbling does occasionally prove necessary to the plot.

Speaking of which, it’s the story of Australian heiress Kathleen Kent (Dornys), who has returned from a land down under to England, with her legal advisor Ferry Westlake (Arent), to claim her inheritance. There isn’t actually much of that, as her father was taken to the cleaners by those to whom he owed money. This was mostly gambling debts, in particular owed to crooked casino owner, Mr. Real (Forster). However, as Real approaches his death bed, he suffers a pang of conscience at having left Kathleen destitute, and so wants to make things right by returning his ill-gotten gains to her. His criminal partners, led by Connor (Fürbringer) are unimpressed by this sudden burst of charity, and want to get their hands on what they see as their rightful profits.

The problem is, Real has got his assets locked up extremely tight, in a vault whose access is guarded by a series of traps, such as a tripwire which triggers a sword-swinging suit of armor. To beat the expected inheritor to the money, they have a number of plans, which begin with meeting Miss Kent at the station where she arrives, and locking her up in a hotel, to make sure she is not able to visit Mr. Real. They then send a stand-in in her place, only for the deception to be revealed by one of Real’s associates, who knows what Kathleen looks like. Further attempts then occur, up to and including masquerading as policemen, in order to get access to the vault, where they will then blow the hell out of it with dynamite.

Fortunately, Miss Kent has some allies on her side, including Inspector Angel of Scotland Yard (Harry Meyen), and Jimmy Flynn (Harald Leipnitz), who occupies a grey area between cops and robbers. There’s also no particular honor among the thieves, with mistrust the order of the day. The film begins by showcasing this, in an interesting way. It looks like we’re watching the police raiding a house where a hostage is being held. Except, after she is rescued, the words “THE END” then flash up, and we pull back to discover that we have been watching a film in a cinema. One of the customers appears to be sleeping, but when the usherette tries to wake him, it turns out he is dead, having been shot under cover of the noise of the on-screen gun-battle. It’s a striking opening. The bad news is, there’s not much else which follows that can come close.

That isn’t entirely true, with one grisly death the other highlight. Mr. Real, fed up of attempts by Connor and his gang, decamps to a room in a remote windmill. When tracked down there, and one of Connor’s gang pays a visit, Real’s mute minion George (Kinski), unleashes a false floor (below), sending the visitor plummeting into the heart of the mill machinery. Despite desperate struggles, the victim is unable to escape and is eventually caught up and crushed by the grindstones. While it may not be explicit, with very little in the way of gore, the sheer, extended duration of the demise and the about to be deceased’s screams of terror make a difficult watch. Without wishing to spoiler George’s end, let’s just say that he who sets the wheels in motion, gets the wheels in motion… A sternly-worded letter from the Health and Safety executive seems sure to follow. [The original title here was The Mill of Horrors, until that was deemed to brutal by the producers.]

Otherwise, though, it’s not particularly memorable. Kathleen is a particularly passive heroine, outside of one sequence where she throws pepper in the face of her captor, in order to stage a breakout attempt. I read a review which criticized the film for lacking a clear protagonist, and that is fair comment. It feels like Jimmy Flynn should occupy that role, except he doesn’t get enough screen time to justify it. Ferry Westlake has considerably more scenes, despite being an obvious supporting character. He’s even the one who is left by the vault with the ticking bomb, unaware of his peril due to a preceding bang on the head.

It appears to have been a fairly troubled production. Filming was delayed in order to allow other Edgar Wallace adaptations to take precedence, including Das Verrätertor. These schedule changes ended up resulting in some parts being recast, with the first choices no longer being available, e.g. Dornys’s role was supposed to have been played by Heidelinde Weiss, Leipnitz was originally intended to be Inspector Angel. Perhaps due to these issues, or perhaps just because the end result isn’t very interesting, the audience stayed away, with the 1.3 million tickets sold making it the worst-performing film of the Rialto Wallace adaptations to that point. While I’m sure Klaus enjoyed the challenge of his mute performance – or perhaps appreciated not having the tedious task of learning lines! – it does feel a less than full use of his talents.

The Counterfeit Traitor (1962)

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Dir: George Seaton
Star: William Holden, Lilli Palmer, Hugh Griffith, Klaus Kinski

Get a cup of coffee, Kinski fans, and perhaps a sandwich as well, because you’re going to be waiting quite a while for Klaus to show up in this one. As in, he appears only ten minutes before the end – and that’s in a film which runs for two hours and twenty minutes. Frankly, I had given up hope, and was beginning to think I had missed him entirely. I restored to Googling some other reviews which did re-assure me that he was just going to enter proceedings very, very late to the party. They were right enough: you just need patience. Whether there’s enough going on to sustain your interest until that point? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, I’d say.

The film is based on a book written by Alexander Klein; detailing the exploits of wartime secret agent Eric Erickson, who went into Nazi Germany in order to pass back key information to the Allied forces. What makes this different from other war-time escapades, e.g. A Time to Love and a Time to Die, is that this is non-fiction. Though in its review of the book, The New York Times said, “The trouble with fictionalized true-life stories is that the reader never really knows which part is fiction and which part is true life. This is particularly disturbing in adventure tales whose flavor lies primarily in their assurance to the reader that what may seem unbelievable has really happened.”

As far as Erickson’s story, and Klein’s re-telling of it goes, there appear to be some doubts as to its authenticity. Indeed, going by that article, the movie may be more accurate than the book in some ways. It does depict Erickson (Holden), correctly, as someone working in neutral Sweden, who was content to sell to both sides, even years after Hitler’s armies blitzkrieged their way across Europe. He only agrees to spy for the Allies after his name is publicly placed on a blacklist of Nazi collaborators, in the movie being handled by Collins (Griffith), an intelligence officer with no qualms about sources. “My job is information, and in order to get it, I will deal with thieves, liars, procurers, traitors, sluts, the lot. I really don’t care if you’re Goebbels’ half brother or if you sell heroin for a living.”

A project to build a refinery in Sweden for Nazi use is concocted, allowing Ericson to travel back and forth to Germany, and obtain data on their current oil production systems. One of his contacts there is upper-class Frau Marianne Möllendorf (Palmer), whose unhappy marriage plays into the two spies falling in love (while a fictional character, there was an equivalent in reality, Anne-Maria Freudenreich. As a Swedish citizen, Erickson had a certain degree of protection, when the true purpose of his visits comes perilously close to being revealed. The same doesn’t go for Möllendorf, who is also increasingly troubled by her religious faith, after information she passed on results in the destruction of a school and its pupils. Conversely, Erickson’s own motivation becomes less pragmatic, after he witnesses a Nazi atrocity first-hand.

Eventually, the network of agents is cracked by the Gestapo, with Möllendorf being captured and executed (this did happen to Freudenreich, though likely not in front of Erickson’s eyes, as the film depicts). With his cover blown, Eric has to make his way through Germany, across the Danish border and from there across the three-mile wide strait separating that country from Sweden. While this appears to be an entirely fictional element, it’s in this final sequence where we meet Kindler (Kinski), a Jewish refugee also fleeing the Nazis. They share a trawler on the final leg of the journey, but Kindler is severely ill, and has to be carried bodily by Eric onto the boat. His loud wheezing (above) could result in their discovery by the Germans, who are patrolling the water between the two nations.

There’s very little to Klaus’s part, he barely says anything beyond a groan, and it’s not particularly coherent. As the image below suggests, it doesn’t end well for Kindler: according to Erickson, “He choked to death rather than cough.” I must confess, my first instinct was to call for a forensic examination of the body. There’s a significant difference between “He choked to death” and “He was choked to death”. The somewhat surprised expression on the corpse’s face make me lean toward the latter. I’m just sayin’… It’s interesting how the film groups its supporting cast by country, with Kinski ninth of the ten players listed from Germany. This was largely shot on location, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin and Hamburg, and that certainly lends value to the production.

The movie does a good job of depicting the relentless mistrust, inherent to the world of espionage. Erickson finds it hard to tell who’s who: friends can turn out to be enemies, while those apparently operating against you can actually be acting in your best interests. Leverage is everything: the only people he can truly trust are those who’d be dragged down with him, if Erickson were to be caught. However, the film is a good thirty minutes too long, and Erickson’s frequent voice-over, particularly common in the early going, adds little of note. For me, the biggest problem was the trite depiction of the romance between him and Frau Möllendorf. While both Holden and Palmer deliver decent performances, the script forces them together, more out of apparent duty than mutual attraction.

There are still some good sequences which you’ll remember. The ones which particularly stick in my mind include the mass civil disobedience on bicycles in Copenhagen, to help Erickson escape, and Möllendorf’s confession of her sins, which proves a fatal mistake. I can’t say it felt like I had wasted my time entirely, and this is a reasonable, and I suspect accurate enough in tone (if not necessarily specifically factual), depiction of what life as a spy of this kind was like. Just be aware that there will be an awful lot of wartime water flowing under the bridge, before Klaus takes the stage.