Review: "Der Mörder"/ Enough Rope 1963 Exciting Film Noir out now on US-BD

Starring Krimi heavyweight Gert Fröbe (Goldfinger) and Robert Hossein this is a tight little Eurocrime (FRA-GER-ITA) Film Noir based on the novel "The Blunderer" by Patricia Highsmith.

Set in France the movie starts with a long, long sequence without any dialogue in which we witness the bookshop-owner Kimmel (Fröbe) lure a woman out of  a bus in the night and killing her in all graphic detail.  That was his wife, it turns out. Although having an alibi and being cleared of all suspicion, he gets visited by the architect Saccard in his bookshop who is looking for "inspiration". Sacca has his own problems with his rich but neurotic wife and after a quarrel she takes a bus to visit her mother in the Alps. Saccard follows her and at the bus station looks for her but cannot find her. A day later her body is found, having fallen into a gulch at the bottom of that bus station. 

Saccard had been seen and is being interrogated by the inspector (Hossein) who is very clever and very funny. Soon, Kimmel gets drawn into this game between Saccard and the inspector and now the fun starts.

This is a fine example of both the huge advantages and the huge disatvantages of Eurocrime. Acting is superb and Fröbe is creepy as hell. Camerawork is excellent with all the strange black/white shots we love about Film Noir. The score is good and the story gets trickier and trickier for each one involved.

But somehow the motivation of the characters remain vague. Why did Saccard visit Kimmel in his bookshop? Why did he lie about all the obvious details of the bus trip of his wife and why is he just plain stupid all the time????

Saccard is neither a match for the Inspector nor for Kimmel as the movie goes on and that flaw in the character makes the movie fall short of being a classic. Furthermore, the "solution" of the movie is not its strongest part.

It is, however a very worthwhile 100 minutes of beautiful noirish entertainment with Gert Fröbe's performance being the icing on the cake. 

Having been unavailable for decades, this movie was released by PIDAX in Germany in 2020 and will be released in the US on 29th OCT 2024 on BD! as "Enough Rope". 4K Restoration by TF1,  NEW Audio Commentary by Film Historians David Del Valle and Dana M. Reemes Theatrical Trailer In French with Optional English Subtitles. RT: 117 Minutes on KinoLorber.

Putting out a Film Noir in 1963 did not prove to be as successful as the producers might have wished and the movie fell very short of expectations in Germany (418.000 Tickets and Pos 138 end of year charts) and France (968.000 / 78).

The german print on the Pidax DVD which runs 115 min (=119 min on BD) does not aknowledge the french movie production at all. I have not checked if the french version differs much from the geman, but with the movies that I checked by PIP that was regularly the case. In these cases, it was always the german print that was used for the italian version ...

On the Krimimeter it gets 4.2 as it is more of a Film Noir than a Krimi (althogh Hossein as funny Inspector pre-shadows the performance of Louis de Funes in the later Fantomas movies).

Nice.