Les SS frappent la nuit

There's nothing as intense and disturbing as German-produced serial killer films, especially when they are inspired by raw, macabre factual cases, like "M" (Peter Kürten), "The Tenderness of Wolves" (Fritz Haarmann) and "Angst" (Werner Kniesek). Okay, admittedly, that last one is 100% Austrian, but also and truly one of the most harrowingly realistic thrillers ever made. "The Devil Strikes at Night" is another masterpiece that fits into this category, as it's based on serial murderer Bruno Lüdke and very accurately depicts the period and the circumstances of his arrest in Berlin during the summer of 1944. Mario Adorf, still in one of the earliest roles of his rich career, impressively portrays the strong and potent but mentally disabled Lüdke. He breaks through the cork of a wine bottle with the tip of one finger, but he also occasionally feels the incontrollable urge to strangle young women, like the Hamburg waitress Lucy Hansen. Her lover, Willi Keun, is wrongfully arrested for the murder and sentenced to death, but you don't really care since he's a Nazi commander and a sleazy pervert. Commissioner Axel Kersten, however, does believe in justice and connects the murder to several ones that took place before the war. He unmasks Lüdke, but this isn't good news for SS-Gruppenfuhrer Rossdorf because he doesn't like the idea of a handicapped Aryan being able to remain below the radar in their superior Third Reich. Master director Robert Siodmak ("The Spiral Staircase") returns to Germany to portray his native country how it really was during World War II: corrupt, ugly, hypocrite and completely devoid of honest and honorable men! It's not a very exciting or action-packed thriller, but it's hugely atmospheric, depressing and wonderfully shot by Georg Krause. My inner horror fanatic is somewhat disappointed that a killer suspected of 51 murders is only seen strangling one victim, but Siodmak opted to put all his energy into the drawing of Lüdke as an atypical serial murderer and the slow but certain extirpation of Nazism.

I watched The Devil Strikes at Night after browsing Son of Dracula director Robert Siodmak's IMDB credits and reading the film's extremely interesting synopsis.

Disillusioned German detective Axel Kersten investigates the identity of a serial killer who possesses the incredible strength of shattering the tiny u-shaped throat bone in his roughly 80 female victims.

Axel initially finds the full support of the Nazis, until the findings of his investigation threaten public perception of Hitler's SS. What could have been a more straightforward movie about a serial killer during Nazi Germany turns into a story about how quickly the lines of culpability can become blurred in such a bleak place as Germany towards the end of World War II. It's a great movie with excellent performances that really holds your attention for its two-hour runtime of reading subtitles.

It blew my mind to learn after watching The Devil Strikes at Night that it's story was loosely based on real-life serial killer Bruno Lüdke who shares his name with the character in the film.

Yo, Super Mario. Though while later Eurocrime "cult" actor Mario Adorf does quite a convincing job as the retarded serial killer in Robert Siodmak's Nazi noir The Devil Strikes at Night, ex-boxing-champion Claus Holm – imagine a German Van Heflin – as the crippled police Kommissar and Hannes Messemer as his SS-Obergruppenfuehrer opponent easily steal the show from him: Their confrontations, chock-full of icy dialogue, constitute the epicentre of this sardonic high tensioner that doesn't lose its momentum for a single second, due to Siodmak's remarkably concentrated direction, aided by the unobtrusive, but perfectly effective camera work by unjustly forgotten cinematographer Georg Krause (who did Kubrick's Paths of Glory – !! – a year before), competent editing by Walter Boos (who went on to do some Schulmaedchen-Reports in the 70s), and excellent supporting performances by Werner Peters and the strikingly beautiful Annemarie Dueringer. "Belief? Where did you dig up that word?", Messemer's slick SS herrenmensch asks the crushed Kommissar. Once, they even had great screenwriters in Germany, among them Werner Joerg Lueddecke, who sets the fast-paced, bitter, cynical and sometimes darkly humorous tone of the movie. When the Kommissar is sent to war in the end – the year is 1944 –, he reassures his trembling girlfriend: "It won't take much longer. Soon, you can reach the front line by city train."

Following an 11-year Hollywood stint, during which he mainly excelled in film noirs, German director Siodmak returned to his native country – where his promising initial career had previously been cut short by the rise of Nazism. Arguably the best-known of his latter-day efforts, the film under review deals in part with this particular 20th Century scourge and was distinguished by its receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film; prior to this, Siodmak had only been personally short-listed in a Best Direction nod for the seminal noir THE KILLERS (1946).

Anyway, while this revolved around a definitely intriguing premise – in the midst of WWII, a chase is on by the Police and Secret Service for a serial killer of women – I could not help feel somewhat let down by the end result. Siodmak's apprenticeship at the tail-end of the German Expressionist movement serves him in good stead with respect to the film's shadowy visuals; that said, a social commentary was clearly intended a' la Fritz Lang's M (1931; this greatest of all serial killer films, also emanating from Germany, is the obvious model here) – but, apart from its occasional jabs at the Third Reich, the impact is curiously muted. As with Lang's masterpiece, the murderer's identity is immediately revealed to us (he is well played by future "Euro-Cult" regular Mario Adorf) – his activities being also similarly counterpointed by the authorities' attempts to capture him.

The film, in fact, falters where Lang's found its greatest inspiration: there is no diatribe here by the culprit as to his helplessness in committing these heinous acts against others who did wrong out of choice. Rather, Adorf plays up his character's mental deficiency in his defense, and – disappointingly – no relation is really made between an individual (i.e. minor) crime spree and the genocide being perpetrated in the name of racial superiority by the German people! Indeed, the Nazis initially take this opportunity to target even imperfect Aryan specimen – but after the crippled policeman on the case 'raises a stink' (his thoroughness is demonstrated by the tearing up of newly-installed wallpaper at an apartment in order to verify an old journal's reportage of the murders) when a philandering German official accused of slaying one of Adorf's victims is sentenced to death, the Third Reich retracts the whole incident (though the killer is still executed) and the cop transferred to the war front!

While THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT is relentlessly grim and talky, it has its fair share of interesting sequences and performances: the early (and bafflingly) solitary murder sequence during an air raid; Adorf offering an incriminating handbag to his current crush and being reluctantly convinced to hand it over to the local authorities; the defiant Adorf proudly and bemusedly leading a posse of investigators to the spot in the country where he buried one of the 55 (or 80, depending on which source to believe) bodies he disposed of; the crippled investigator calling on the SS officer (Hannes Messemer) who commissioned him during a debauched party at his mansion and the confrontation which ensues; the train station finale in which the now-enlisted investigator denies the very existence of the Mario Adorf character to the above-mentioned girl the latter fancied, etc. Ultimately, the film would make a fine companion piece to Anatole Litvak's star-studded, big-budget Hollywood epic THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS (1967) which equally deals with an outbreak of serial killings during WWII.

There is a strange continuity in German movies: about every 20 years someone makes a film about a serial-killer. Apart from "Es geschah am hellichten Tag" (recently remade by Sean Penn) I'm thinking of the following works:

* M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931)

* Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957)

* Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973)

* Der Totmacher (1995)

While three of these films are more or less loosely based on the case of Fritz Haarmann who killed more than 24 young men in the 20s, "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" is about Bruno Luebke who murdered several people in Hamburg during WWII (also a true case). In contrast to the picture that many American movies (e.g. "Hannibal") paint of a serial-killer as an evil being who kills for pleasure, these German movies show men who are helpless victims of their urge to kill, to which they succumb not when they want to, but when they 'have' to. Mario Adorf plays Bruno as such a man and his performance is of the same rank as Peter Lorre's in "M" or Götz George's in "Totmacher" IMO.

Even better is Hannes Messemer as an SS-Officer, who, for 'political' reasons, wants another man executed against better judgement. The main forte of the film however, is the depiction of everyday-life in the last years of the third Reich. In the scene where the ugly harvest helpers get their reward from a sweating hanger-on Robert Siodmak perfectly captured the moral corruption (thinly veiled by empty propaganda phrases) within Nazi-Germany. In view of mass-murder of an entirely different caliber (i.e. genocide), the question if the right man is sentenced for a killing series becomes secondary in the end.