Review: Circus of Fear/Das Rätsel des Silbernen Dreieck(s) 1966: The Edgar Wallace Oddity

This is a tricky one. For all the connections there are, one would surely spend years to untangle how this all happened. Let's look at the business side of things first.

German Poster

We got the CONSTANTIN distribution that basically owns RIALTO, the producer of the German Edgar Wallace Movies who usually advances around 50% of  the production cost of each movie. From the get-go it was obvious that Rialto was not able to produce more than 4 EW movies per year, which already forced CONSTANTIN to co-produce and distribute EW-style Krimis elsewhere. Looking at the filmography of Rialto, it seems that the more lavish and complicated productions of their Karl May Westerns seemed more profitable and that the upcoming sex wave looked more promising than EW. So Constantin was informed that Rialto would only produce two (color) EW-Krimis instead of four (black-and-white) ones per year.

British Poster

Demand for those Krimis was still strong, as the "Hexer" movie had proven. But it seems like audiences were demanding Krimis shot in color too. So Rialto had to abandon the preparation for shooting "Der Bucklige von Soho" in b/w and started from scratch with the color version. 

Italian Poster

In comes Harry Allan Towers (with his buddy Christopher Lee), who had already produced Wallace movies in color, but they were drawn from the adventures of Com. Sanders in Africa and not per se Krimis. Somehow (and we do not know how) he was able to get the license to a short story called "Again the Three (Just Men)," a kind of follow-up to Wallace's debut novel "Four Just Men." The three men use a silver triangle as a "brand" and go on a revenge spree. The German title for this novelette is "Das Silberne Dreick" (The Silver Triangle)—here you go. 

The Silver Triangle here
replaces the Red Circle that 
was the trademark of 
Edgar Wallace Novels

Towers is ready to write a script and shoot this thing in color at Bray Studios near London (home of Hammer Films) with Heinz Drache (who had already starred in the two Sanders-Wallace movies that Towers had produced before). CONSTANTIN is willing to put 1/3 of production costs and two contract players, Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent, into the mix.

The director would be John Moxey, who already was an experienced horror director (the marvelous City of the Dead) and Wallace director for the English series.

Klaus, as always, is only in it for the money.

The outcome is a solid, colorful thriller that is ... eh... solid.

The Plot: The Boss plans and surveils via telephone a spectacular robbery of a money transport in London (very nicely done). One of the gangsters is sent to the boss's place with his part of the money, only to be killed right after the arrival (with a throwing knife that has a silver triangle engraved on the handle).

Arent, showing his mean side...

The police investigates, and the marked money comes up in shops near the winter home of a circus. With the police inspector arriving there, more murders and murder attempts happen as the killer obviously tries to get his hands on the money. The question is: Where is the money, who is the boss, and who is the killer?

I was absolutely fine with watching it and liked it. But then, I watched the British version in color with 10 minutes added.

The German version, in B/W and running 82 minutes, is less comprehensible. And there is the question of why Constantin put it out that way and not the color version.

1. The first thing that is obvious is a complete lack of care. The German title "Das Rätsel des silbernen Dreieck" (huge grammatical error—it's like saying "The boy parents" instead of "The boy's parents"—but" then at least it could make some sense in English; in German it simply does not make any sense) already points out that Constantin was not willing to put up the additional money for error correction. 

2. The second thing that is obvious is that the cut is different, not very much so, but some scenes are longer, and some are shorter, but overall the English version feels more fluid. Rumour has it that Constantin dubbed the movie based on a working print copy and was not willing to pay additional money for the extra dubs needed for the final version, so they went with the working print (that usually was in b/w).

3. The third thing that is very odd is the original cert 18 censorship approval that CONSTANTIN wanted to avoid and cut down the movie twice to bring it down to cert 12. I have not seen the censorship admission cards, but I sincerely doubt that. "Room 13" had a cert. 18, but that had nudity and razor-blade-giallo-killings with splatting blood. Nothing in the English final version comes even close; there is no nudity, and the knife-throwing killings are completely bloodless (the knife sticks in one victim's back, and the white (!!!) clothing is completely unstained). 

4. The German version uses the music of the CCC BEW movie "7th Victim," the last BEW movie that CCC would do before re-emerging with Dario Argento's "Bird." Why??? Again, this points to a workprint that usually has no film-score or soundtrack at all. 

The German version is not bad, but it feels like a careless and rushed release. Having an alternative (happy) end further makes this whole enterprise questionable. The question is why?

Did RIALTO complain as they had "Der Bucklige" in the pipeline and wanted to be the first to bring out an EW-Krimi in color? Did CONSTANTIN lose interest in the finished product (which is not at all bad)? Well, I don't know. The fact is that filming of "Der Bucklige" started 3 months after "Triangle" had already had its short run in the German cinemas. Box office was disappointing (but then unsurprising, given the bad treatment of the German version), so maybe that finally flipped the switch to color-shooting all next Edgar Wallace movies.

Furthermore, maybe the movie did play a part in RIALTO' decision to open their own offices in London (RIALTO LONDON) which they did in 1966, to produce "Das Geheimnis der Weißen Nonne"/The Trygon Factor but nothing else. They unceremoniously closed it down in 1968 for reasons unknown.

As I said. I don't know.

The German Blu-ray by Filmjuwehlen is very, very good: the English languageversion is from the camera negative, the German language version is from the duplicate negative, the booklet is very nicely written (and state-of-research), there is a good German commentary track, and there is a 30-minute general interview with Harry Allan Towers and the original German trailer (with the title written correctly). No complaints here at all. Region 2, German and English audio with the German b/w dub imposed over the English color version with German subs for the additional scenes. This is how it should be done, though it is sadly lacking the audio commentary by director Moxey that is on the Blue Underground BD. But then, Moxley's commentary is just about filming. He was a director-for-hire who obviously had no say in the production of this movie.

US-Poster