Review: Der Rächer/ The Avenger 1960 Kinski's Wallace debut

The German Edgar Wallace Krimis are unseperatably connected to the Danish-German Rialto Production house, but they were not the only ones to produce Edgar Wallace Krimis. Some rights had already been sold to producers who were informed and quick enough to seal a deal with the Wallace-Clan before Rialto got a hold on all his novels.

One of them was Kurt Ulrich, a veteran producer who went in quick and hard with a tight script and a set of memorable actors, who made such an impact that they were then hired by Rialto to become staple faces in their productions. So here we get the first time Wallace appearances for Heinz Drache, Klaus Kinski, Siegfried Schürenberg and Ingrid van Bergen. Directed by veteran Klaus Anton (his last movie), this is tight, tough and surprisingly kinky and is much more down-to-earth than the lurid escapades of the Rialto-crew. But then this is a very, very good entry in the German Krimi cycle. 

 

 The Story: An "Avenger" decapitates criminals and terminally ill people and drops their heads (in boxes) all over the country. When a secret agent (who - as it turned out was a double agent) loses his head, the Foreign Office steps in with their best man, Heinz Drache. The niece of the killed double-agent is working with a film- crew and investigating this company all kinds of jealousy and back-stabbing happens. 

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Filming takes place at two locations: two neighbouring castles, one owned by an elderly man of French descent and one by a brutish ex-colonial officer who keeps a) a deaf and mute brute b) an exotic beautiy c) 4 martial arts servants (all from Dutch Borneo) as slaves (yes, this is not only hinted at) for his varous desires.

This scumbag who drugs and obviously rapes the exotic girl each night, now has set his eyes on the female star of the movie: double-agent’s niece.

So he sends out his very, very black(ened) brute to capture her, which makes Heinz Drache very curious about what is going on in this castle. Also, we have a very suspiciously behaving scriptwriter called Kinski who has a script that was written on the same typewriter as the letters that accompany each head.

This is fun. Humor is lacking a bit although Drache and Kinski play off each other beautifully. But the depictions of perverse lifestyles are breathtakingly blunt. Direction is crisp and the movie begs to get a high-def scan from the negative.

The movie did very well until Rialto was able to push "Die Bande des Schreckens” into the theaters a mere 3 weeks later. And in a move to basically prevent their competition from continuing with these movies, they simply hired most of the cast in long-term contracts. 

This movie delivers in all departments and  has you guessing at who the Avenger is until the end. This is a tough, sensationalist, exotic, and kinky crime movie.

Ulrich tried again with “Der letzte Zeuge," which also is a very competent Krimi the same year, but obviously both movies were not as successful as expected, and so Ulrich went back to musical comedies for a few years before quitting in 1964 when the Europa-Filmverleih, who had put up a lot of money for those movies, finally went bankrupt.

Der Racher is a fascinating movie, and you can see so many things that it injected into the Rialto- style but it stays in its distinct bracket of a more traditional tough whodunnit.

Here, for the first time, the genre description of “Gruselkrimi” is used in the advertisments to reflect the more horrific elements. Later that term became synonymous with the Rialto Edgar Wallace Productions. But they did not coin it.

l enjoyed it a lot. The only available physical media source is the Filmjuwelen DVD which is sadly not more than a magnetic analog TV-master transfer.