Review "7 Tage Frist"/School of Fear 1969 - Alfred Vohrer's excellent post-Edgar Wallace Krimi

 With the Edgar-Wallace Cycle being in hiatus in 1969, Alfred Vohrer, the director that basically had defined the "Krimi," was looking for a fresher approach to this genre. While Dario Argento was pushing the genre towards Giallo, Vohrer also went up-to-date but kept things more "German". He took most of his Rialto team and teamed up with Luiggi Waldleitner, a Munich-based producer, for 4 films, each of them being highly interesting but going in different directions. 

This is "7 Tage Frist" or "School of Fear," the first "modern" Krimi. And it is excellent.

At a boy's boarding school a student goes missing. And his father too. A young teacher investigates as does the police. Things point towards a teacher who had a sexual relationship with the student, but when he is found dead, everybody seems to have a motive too.

Wow. This is exactly the type of movie that had to evolve out of the Edgar Wallace Cycle.  This is much more raw, political and nasty than one would expect.

It almost feels like Vohrer was aware that down in Italy, Artur Brauner was cooking something new within the Bryan Edgar Wallace franchise and that this was his counter. Basically, all the Edgar Wallace staff is on board, with Joachim Fuchsberger, Horst Tappert and Petra Schürmann and many more in front of and behind the camera. 

The setting is now Germany, and it is much more political and cynical than the Edgar Wallace movies. Direction is crisp and the coastal winter landscape is something very fresh and new (if you love snow-spaghetti-westerns, you will love this snow-krimi...). 

Fuchsberger, Tappert and Vohrer (from left)

Vohrer is aware of the change in the moviegoer's taste but here he demands too much. Although some female nudity is shown (when the boys visit a strip club), this is strictly between the boys.

Heterosexual tensions are shown only inside the marriage of the facility manager and that is horrifying enough but very unexciting. 

The rest is about sex & violence amongst men. This, however, was not the sensationalism that the average customer back then was interested in.

As a Krimi, this is a standout achievement. As a crowd-pleaser and money maker, it is not. Box office results were not bad but disappointing. While Argento's "Bird" was a huge success in the southern European countries, this strictly northern affair did not raise any eyebrows. If the victims would have been women killed in spectacular fashion, this movie would have been very influential. Vohrer then tried out adjusting to the "Dirty Harry" formula with Horst Tappert as "Perrak" (Hard Women) before hitting gold with a new franchise: The Simmel Krimis... but more on that later.

Vohrer might have liked it, but the audience 
was not ready....

So as for now, this is a fine document on where the "germanic" side of the Krimi could have developed. (It somehow did, but then in the "Tatort" and "Derrick" TV-series that would take over that tradition).

The DVD by "Filmjuwelen" offers a crisp scan, german and english dub as well as some insteresting newsreel-stuff in the extral.

This scores 5.1 out of 10 Krimi points, because, well it is just too modern. Gone are the moments of comic relief, gone the foreign fantasy setting, gonae is the assassin extraordinaire. This is as close to a giallo as you can get with actually being a krimi (on the Giallo-score it has 4.9 points). Well done.

If you are interested in an in-depth analyis of the movie, check out the blog-entry by Leonard Jacobs' excellent (but sadly discontinued) "KRIMI IN THE POCKET"...

The German Krimi-Novel,
the movie is based on

The rarest of its kind: A snow-krimi