Review "Der Zeuge hinter der Wand"/What the Peeper saw (1972). Andrea Bianchi goes Krimi ...

November 02, 2024

Review "Der Zeuge hinter der Wand"/What the Peeper saw (1972). Andrea Bianchi goes Krimi ...

This is one of the crime-movies that came out in the early 1970ies that is impossible to define other than "EuroCrime". Both in production and story it is neither Giallo nor Krimi and in the end both of them. Of course nowadays it got the sticker "Giallo" patched on by the media as this term is much more marketable than "Krimi" or "EuroCrime". Whatever.

This co-european (British-Italian-German-Spanish) production conceived by non other than our good old friend Hary Allan Towers (uncredited) stars honorable Krimi/international actors like Lilly Palmer (Wicked City) and Hardy Krüger (Flight of the Phoenix, Hatari!), and the europudding is being completed by Mark Lester (Fahrenheit 451, Oliver!) and Britt Ekland before she moved to Wicker Man and the Bond-movie "The Man with the Golden Gun". Sounds good. So far.

Well. To be positive, this movie reminded me very much of "The Innocents" (one of my all-time favourite movies), with the plot circulating around the depressed sexual desires of a grown up woman towards an adolescent boy. To be negative, it looks, feels and smells like Andrea Bianchi (as "Andrew White") remade it with just the icky parts being left in. Come on. We know him. "Malabimba", "Strip nude for your Killer"and -of course- "Burial Ground" are reason enough to stay way clear of the thought of consuming a movie directed by him on exactly this topic. Of course it is our duty here at KRIMI! to watch these movies. We're professionals!!

Eh. Yes. -- direction is obviously split between him and Andrea Bianchi and I have a slight suspicion which scenes Bianchi directed. Sometimes it is fun to see the erotic desires of a director being put on screen but not so, certainly not so with Bianchi. I don't know which traumata he went through before trying to cope with them as a movie director. But actually I don't wanna know.

The only one having fun here is director Bianchi

Thank God it's 1972 and the scenes in question are kept strictly at the edge of tolerable, with harsh cuts indicating that they both were not on the set the same time when Ekland phantasises about being with him. Puh. Otherwise there is talk about a vhs-print that has this all in one take. Well, I do not need to investigate this further....

Needless to say, the movie ran into lots of trouble anyway.

So what is the plot? Wife of millionaire gets killed in the bathtub and he gets a newer fresher one (Brit Ekland). Spending the summer in a spanish villa his 12-year old son drops in from boarding school for the vacation but things go eerie as he is obviously much more a "Damian" than a "child". Sooner or later, she is in danger as he manipulates her more and more. And who killed the first wife? The husband, the boy or Ekland????

This comes right out of a Hank Janson story and the plot boils and boils, but sadly never cooks. We got some pretty camera-shots of the landscape and the house and everybody obviously was enjoying themselves on vacation but this is much back and forth without keeping the tension up. As a crime-movie this is disappointing. And I defintively want to know if the nice house in Spain is - or isn't - Stephen D. Francis' home...

I have the slight suspicion that the producers put in the feisty murder-scene (first wife in bathtub) and the "dream-sequence" about 2nd wife seducing boy into this movie out of cynical profiteering. But then, maybe not, and it was an effort to actually show the delicate and fragile emotional bondings between grown-up women and young boys. Eh. No. Andrea Bianchi directs. It's the first suggestion. Plain and open.

Lilly Palmer, who used to be a film-noir hottie in
the US shortly after the war here has to earn
her living....

There is a new BD out there that promised four Minutes more than the PIDAX-DVD I have been watching, but if you calculate that with the faster running mode of PAL-DVDs, it is the same running time. I will not bother to find out if it is the same cut. No. But I would be very surprised if someone would take on the work to scan this movie twice.

Going through the IMDB-reviews it is obvious that it splits the audience in the middle. This movie certainly tingles your senses if you've seen it all in exploitation but then it is too afraid of itself, trying to cover it all up with some psychological mumbo-jumbo. The plot goes nowhere and the twist-ending is ridculous (and honestly forgettable - I had to rewatch it as I could not remember it half a year after watching the movie for the first time).

On the Krimimeter it scores a sad 2.2 points out of ten but as giallo it just would not work either (here's the score 4.2 mainly because of the 70ies fashion and good camera-work), this is more in the vein of the british "Taste of Fear" or "The Innocents" if you know what I mean.

Skippable except for two scenes for the Eurosleaze fanatics.

TRAILER

ADDENDUM: We have been contacted with the information that Bianchi "DID NOT" co-direct the movie as "Andrew White" but was simply put on the Italian prints for tax reasons. Well, as always, we would be delighted to have source-information on that one, as the assumtion is common that Bianchi was part of this enterprise.. So feel free to leave a comment....