REVIEW: "Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen"/The Devil's Daffodil 1961 Christopher Lee goes Krimi and introduces us to the Faceless Killer Icon

 A 1961 Rialto Edgar Wallace Production, shot on location in London in two languages (with different actors) simultaneously, featuring "hot" star Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, and a real-life killer... and introducing the nylon-masked faceless killer to world ....What can go wrong?

Belgian Poster

Looking at the attendance for "Das Geheimnis der Gelben Narzissen" (The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils), this movie was big. It is the second highest-grossing Rialto production, coming in hot on the trails of the legendary "Toten Augen von London". So again: What can go wrong?

Well, first of all, the genesis of this movie is much more convoluted and troublesome than most of its predecessors. Rialto just could not finish the script for this movie, being troubled by the story in the original novel that would have killed the main suspect right at the start of the movie. 

Meanwhile, Rialto was looking for wider distribution of the successful series and had to co-produce the movie with a British studio to have a chance for a market share there. The British movie market had been closed to German movies since WW2 (and before), and the only way to get the pictures shown there (and in the "Empire") was a co-production. 

British Poster

So they teamed up with Omnia Production, founded by Hungarian-born Stephen Pallos, who had previously done the British remake of "Hands of Orlak" and was part of the Hungarian exile community in London. As was Hungarian-born Akos Rathonyi, who had been directing in Germany and Britain throughout the post-war era and established the contact. Rathonyi himself had been assistant director (together with Alfred Hitchcock) in the 1929 British-German movie "Atlantik" (="Titanic," but British censorship did not allow the mentioning of that disaster back then), the last pre-war German-British co-production. "Daffodil" now was the first post-war British-German co-production....

German Posters

The film was shot in London with a double cast of Germans and English, with only Christopher Lee speaking in both versions in both languages without being dubbed. The British actors, replacing the German ones, were William Lucas (for Joachim Fuchsberger), Penelope Horner (for Sabrina Sesselmann), and Colin Jeavons (for Klaus Kinski).

The Killer drops daffodils. 
on his victims

So what is the story? Fake daffodils are imported from Hong Kong to London that contain heroin to be distributed in the "established" "Cosmos Club." Of course the head of the trading company and of the club work together, and both employ good old Klaus, who is there to clean up the washed-out bodies of the "girls" working at the club, made passive by the drug. Insurance investigator Fuchsberger is tracing them down, helped by his Hong Kong friend Lee Kli-stoper (yellowfaced) and a rather stiff British inspector. 

output:Kinski being... Kinski

Unhappy club girls and secretaries want to break the story to the police about the drug trafficking but get stabbed by a faceless (black nylon mask) killer (sadly not wearing a hat and a coat—what a disappointment). 

All ends in a nice shootout in an obviously real British graveyard where the killer can be revealed.

Hmm. 

This film is a mixed bag. The problems they had with the script are obvious, as there is so much circular dialogue going on that it becomes tiresome. Director Rathony has the unhealthy habit not to care too much about sequence errors and the audience. This is a certain lazyness that is sadly obvious in all his 1960s movies.

All the standout scenes, like van Bergen's striptease song and the Giallo killings though are well done, and the British music sounds sometimes a lot like "Blood and Black Lace." And as this movie was one of the highest-grossing ones of the whole cycle, it would have been stupid of the producers not to take the best (and forget about the rest).

Can you guess the killer? No, you can't.
It's a nameless stunt double, making it even
harder - but the first time a faceless killer strikes
anyway...

The movie sticks quite closely to the book, which is not very favorable at all, as the convoluted plots by Wallace are better handled when straightened out. 

The complete lack of the funny sidekick makes this a more "realistic" movie, as do the on-location shots in London. But this misses the charm of "fake Britannia" in the Rialto Cycle.

This is the first time for Kinski to appear in the Rialto Krimis and in the first scene that Fuchsberger and Kinski had together, Fuchsberger couldn't help but laugh at Kinski which led to a real Kinski-meltdown-moment, capured in the movie.

Director Akos Rathonyi went on to produce more Krimis and is one of the unsung heroes of the genre as he tried to go as sleazy as possible and expand the genre towards horror with "Der Fluch der Grünen Augen" and bridge it to the (then non-existing) Giallo with "Jungfrau aus zweiter Hand" (Second Hand Virgin) in 1966. He died at the age of 60 during the pre-production of the movie "Y-XX Formel des Todes," which is completely lost but seems to be strangely connected to Argento's "Cat o' nine Tails." In my opinion, the whole Eastern European exile staff on the Krimis gave them a certain madness and a certain central-continental old-fashioned feel.

Lee Klistoper is auditioning to become 
Fu Manchu

Bar singer Ingrid van Bergen also was part of "Jungfrau aus zweiter Hand" and had a considerable career in the movies and on TV. In 1977 she killed her (much younger) lover by shooting multiple times at him and went to jail for manslaughter because she had her "period" (true!) when killing him. She is still alive on a farm somewhere in Bavaria appearing on several TV-shows for stars that should better be left in the jungle anyway...

As mentioned, this movie did really good business, which is surprising, as it was released in the low summer season and is not "that" good. But the combined star power of Lee and Fuchsberger and Kinski (first time on Rialto) and van Bergen must have been too good to ignore...

As a Krimi, it checks most of the boxes, leading to a 7.5 score on the Krimimeter, as a Giallo, it does have 2 standout Giallo pieces: the masked killer and the women. Other than that, the movie simply is too down-to-earth to excite... The audience in Germany was exceptional (3.400.000 tickets sold). In France very much less so (270.000 tickets).

Rialto could and would do much better Krimis on their own....

Italian Poster and Lobby Card

French one

Here is an on-set report by Kine Weekly, 30-3-1961: 

"AS I WAS SAYING to a delicious blonde German actress called Sabi Sesselman, “Auf meinem Weg zum Studio passierte etwas Lustiges. . . .”

This was, of course, because there's a severe case of schizophrenia at one of the stages at Shepperton—on the set of a picture called The Devil's Daffodil. Anyone visiting the set is liable to find some of it rubs off. A scene is shot, and then director Akos Rathony goes through it all again—sometimes with the same actors—with the dialogue in German.

The idea is to make two films at the same time without having the problems of dubbing into a foreign language. It overcomes the problem that audiences always regard dubbed pictures as foreign. 

And it also means that producers Steven Patios and Donald Taylor end up with two films, the average cost of which is about 30 percent. less for each than the normal budget for one

Commercial possibilities

And as there are seven Continental countries where German is widely spoken, apart from Germany with its 4,000 cinemas, the commercial possibilities are immediately apparent.

“In terms of shooting schedules,” says director Rathony, “it only means from 10 percent to 25 percent extra.”

In *The Devil's Daffodil* many of the leading members of the cast—like Albert Lieven Christopher Lee and Marius Goring—are appearing in both versions.

And it takes them only a few adjustments to the idea of language.

The film is a thriller with a narcotics background in which a new corpse turns up every few hundred feet, and daffodils are strewn on the bodies. Hence the title.

Basil Dawson and Donald Taylor wrote the screenplay. Rialto Film of Copenhagen and Omnia Pictures are the co-producing production companies."