Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor

Edgar Wallace was a master storyteller who is best remembered today for creating compelling stories in the murder mystery genre. While that is where he found some of his greatest successes, his writings encompassed far more than that. He began writing as a war correspondent during the Boer War. Eventually, he returned to England where he began writing thrillers (popular fiction) to raise his income. It seems Wallace's Achilles heel was his inability to handle money. For every nickel earned, he spent a dime. Many people mismanage their finances, but Wallace did so on a very large scale.

It's staggering to think how much money he squandered, even when, through sheer hard work and determination, he eventually became an internationally recognized author. He wrote journalism, screenplays, poetry, historical nonfiction, 18 plays, 957 short stories, and over 170 novels. More than 160 films have been made of his work.

He sold over 50 million copies of his combined works in various editions. Understandably, he was described as one of the most prolific thriller writers of the 20th-century, so prolific that in 1928, his publishers claimed a quarter of all books in the United Kingdom were written by him!

What has all this preamble to do with a film review? Well, somewhere along the path of international success, Wallace's work struck a particular chord in Germany, especially West Germany after the Second World War. Today, the majority of Wallace's works are out of print in the United Kingdom, but they are still readily available and eagerly read in Germany.

Therein lies the link. In the 1960s, a cycle of crime films, called krimis, became enormously popular with West German audiences. Entirely adapted from Edgar Wallace's works (and a few by his son, Bryan Edgar Wallace) they combined the traditional murder mystery with horror as they depicted enigmatic killers stalking their victims through foggy English landscapes, from the streets of London to isolated rural Agatha Christie-like mansions.

The second film in the series of six recently released as a box set on Blu-ray under the name TERROR IN THE FOG: THE WALLACE KRIMI AT CCC is arguably the best. THE STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE is beautifully shot, rich with ambience and atmosphere; stacked with gorgeous women (including Karin Dor, who enjoyed some success in Hollywood) and stocked with eccentric characters and performances. This is one wild ride right to the end, with some genuinely startling moments of suspense. The horror element is best depicted by the masked murderer carving the letter M on the foreheads of each of his victims.

One exceptional feature about THE STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE is the work of avant-garde composer Oskar Sawa, who saved the producers of the films he scored in this series a ton of money by requiring only one musician to play the score and not having to hire an entire orchestra. This was a big deal as the krimi films were low-budget affairs, costing about $3,000 each to make. Beginning in 1929, Sawa had developed and mastered an instrument he called the trautonium, considered the world's first electronic instrument. No less a visionary than Alfred Hitchcock employed this innovative composer and his computerized creation in lieu of a traditional musical score for his soundscape in THE BIRDS. Those of us who have seen THE BIRDS remember how disturbing and spine-tingling was the end result!

All in all, these elements cobbled together made for the perfect West German cinematic experience. A wealth of character actors, clever plot twists, a little romance (not Wallace's forte), and lots of mostly bloodless violence which, curiously, appealed to the preferred operatic, melodramatic tastes of their audience, culminate in a number of films from another time and place that still hold up reasonably well today, especially in the newly-restored versions now available.

THE STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE. Don't be a strangler. I mean, stranger...

There's a heavily disguised man who appears mysteriously, threatens Rudolf Fernau, and disappears. His daughter, reporter Karin Dor, enters, distraught she has almost run over Hans Nielson, who owns Blackmoor Castle; he's renting to Fernau to avoid having to sell the place, and lives in a corner turret. As the movie goes on and Fernau becomes seriously ill and paranoid, Inspector Harry Riebauer investigates the mysterious goings on, while reporters cluster around the story -- and pretty Miss Dor, too.

It's one of the Edgar Wallace mysteries produced in Germany that were so numerous in the 1960s. They certainly had a large corpus to work with; Wallace had written over 170 novels, almost a thousand short stories, and 18 stage plays before heading off to Hollywood, coming up with early drafts of KING KONG and dying in 1932 at the age of 56. He died deep in debt -- to the bookies, mostly -- but the enormous popularity of his books cleared the estate within two years.

THis is a gothic-looking production, with its gloomy castle setting, and the visuals are good.. I can't judge the performances, given I looked at an English-language version. Unlike most of the mystery writers of the era, the people who solved the mysteries were not brilliant amateurs, but the police. Shocking, isn't it?

1963's "The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle" (a literal translation of "Der Wurger von Schloss Blackmoor") was among the more popular krimi to emerge from West Germany, crime thrillers based on the works of Edgar Wallace or, in this case, his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. More straightforward than some of the more convoluted entries, the prolific Harald Reinl directing his young wife Karin Dor to play Claridge Dorsett, reporter/niece of diamond smuggling uncle Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau), both renting the huge castle of Blackmoor from its eccentric, tax burdened owner (Hans Nielsen). There is indeed a strangler on the loose, wearing a mask to completely cover his face (very similar to the culprit in Lew Landers' 1962 "Terrified"), later revealed by Scotland Yard's Inspector Jeff Mitchell (Harry Riebauer) to have only 9 fingers. When he can't get his hands on them he sets traps like a line across the road to behead one cycling victim, the letter 'M' a calling card branding their foreheads. The moor is dotted with hidden passages that occasionally turn up (or drop in), while Clark's ex-con diamond cutter (Dieter Eppler) seems especially determined to prevent Claridge from earning her share of the estate on her 21st birthday. A spot of blackmail finds several shady types frequenting a certain London tavern, but most of the mayhem takes place on the foggy marshes or inside the castle, a suitably eerie setting for added horror atmosphere. What sets this apart from the others is to be a virtual blueprint for the more violent Giallo, as there's little blood shown but times would change by decade's end.

Despite the noticeable absence of series regulars Eddie Arent and Klaus Kinski, this is another solid entry in the long-running Edgar Wallace (or in this case, son Bryan) krimi series, and probably the most action-packed. Unlike the playfully gimmicky Alfred Vohrer, director Harald Reinl (an acknowledged Fritz Lang disciple) preferred to play his material straight, emphasising action and violence. The proceedings are highlighted by surprisingly gruesome assaults and murders (decapitation being a specialty here), but to his credit, Reinl filled in the edges with imaginative touches, eccentric behaviour by oddball characters, and quirky humour (the knock-out by moosehead would have pleased Vohrer immensely). The cheekiest Langian homage is the M inscribed on the victims' foreheads, but there are plenty of other visual and thematic tropes that smack of the master's influence (it was Reinl who took over Lang's Mabuse franchise at about the same time as this picture). For instance, one minor character, a henpecked clerk, insists that he could definitely tell that the suspect who phoned him was a blonde by her voice (wink-wink), prompting a withering look from his wife. The moody b&w cinematography is often striking, and the creepy modernist score is effective and memorable. The director's statuesque wife and regular leading lady, Karin Dor, is disappointingly mousy in her role, but Ingmar Zeisberg steals the show as a sultry, unnatural-blonde barmaid at a sleazy Soho cabaret who leads a double life. Only the final revelation of the murderer is a bit of letdown, but that was par for the course.

A strangler is loose on a British estate, and he not only strangles his victims but brands an "M" onto their foreheads before he decapitates them.

The letter M features heavily in the story, scrawled on the foreheads of the victims, one head is mailed to someone, which quite gruesome. Complicated and dullness hinders the film, making it not so gripping. Castle, strangler, diamonds and light and shadow atmosphere- quirky and mysterious characters all with their own sinister motivations is here, and sounds enticing, however the direction is pedestrian and the excitement is lacking. It's just passable, but of its ilk it's not top tier. Karin Dor is great as always. The killer here is like those fiends from a 1980's slasher film -sometimes strangling his victims, but also machine-gunning them or chopping their heads off. For its time, there's a fairly gruesome scene where a guy gets his head lopped off while on a motorbike.