Review "Das Rätsel der Grünen Spinne" / Mystery of the Green Spider 1961 - what a delightful Krimimusical

 What a joy. Coming in early in the Krimicycle but nevertheless highly entertaining, tense, funny and well-made this is a one-of-a-kind experience.

The Story: In the Cabaret/Night Club "The Green Spider" one of the stars is found dead. Is this suicide or homicide? The police and a journalist investigate to find out that there is a pattern. The pattern of a "whistling assassin" who kills women, but why? And when will he strike next??

The Execution: Well, this is a one-off Krimi that mixes the genres of the "Jukebox Musicals" and "Film Noir". Given the huge popularity of both genres at that time this makes sense. Absolutely. Just imagine "Rock around the Clock" with a serial killer plot.  Here's the trailer:

Both things work as the direction is crisp, the actors (Krimi veterans Renate Ewers and Adrian Hoven) do their thing and the songs are good. The staging of the crime scenes and the musical numbers is both professional and entertaining. And the instrumental played by the band during the killings reminded me very much of the exciting use of music in "Blood and Black Lace". 

If you can accept the shallowness of "Schlagermusik", the 15(!!!) musical numbers in this movie bring a big smile on your face as bona fide "stars" like Hazy Osterwald, Bill Ramsey and Billy Mo appear alongside Italian and French artists that were unknown to me. I had to smile as obviously the real secret of the Green Spider is how this etablissement makes money when they show these lavish productions in front of 20 guests... (well maybe they smuggle drugs... who knows??)

This is all big fun and mind you: the Krimi-elements are not bad and even quite creepy (although shying away from showing the actual killings). I certainly had a good time (helped by some alcoholic beverages) with this movie and it conjured up the illusion of a better, more carefree time back then (which - as we all know- it was not)...

Box-Office results were ok but not overwhelming with "Green Spider" just ending up on position 59 of the 1960-year-end-chart with 1.900.000 tickets sold. Given the short expiry date of such movies this is ok. As the movie was distributed in all relevant european markets I would like to find out whether special appearances were shot (or maybe even some songs, sung in German were dubbed ...).

1960/61 obviously Krimi and music were a thing: "Ohne Krimi geht die Mimi nie in's Bett" (Without a Krimi the Mimi never goes to bed) and "Kriminaltango" also touched this theme but in a far more harmless manner. Even the officiall EW and BEW series incorporated musical numbers. 

The last one of those was "Hotel der Toten Gäste" a few years later but about that, you can read in KRIMI!#0 out soon via AMAZON. 

And on our own "KRIMIMETER" checkist "Green Spider" scores a whopping 7.5 out of 10 Krimipoints for basically showing all the ingredients needed for a typical Krimi. And it is entertaining as well!

The PIDAX DVD runs a very crisp scan from a good print with some good restoration being done. The sound is very good too. There are no extras or other tracks on this dvd (relating to the movie).

One of the many 7" singles that were featured
in the movie