REVIEW: DER CHEF WÜNSCHT KEINE ZEUGEN / NO SURVIVORS PLEASE (1964). Let's go all the way.

 

A very odd movie. And if you like Krimis AND odd movies, well, this one here's for you:

The boss of a secret organization orders the killings of several prominent figures of politics and science in the midst of Cold War paranoia. Those about to be killed are from all political groups and all over the world.

The plan is to put in doppelgangers that will then lead the world into a nuclear war. To accomplish that, there have to be no witnesses of the "accidental" deaths of the targets, as they would be the only ones miraculously surviving those fatal incidents—hence the titles (the translation of the German title is "The Boss wants no witnesses").

The Boss in this case looks and acts suspiciously like Dr. Mabuse, and if this were part of the official Dr. Mabuse series, no one would complain, but then.... this movie is odd.

See: The Boss is an alien from the planet Orion and the doppelgangers too are all aliens, replicating the bodies of the dead victims. 

In comes an investigative journalist who becomes suspicious as all those survivors of plane crashes, ship accidents, etc. are quite prominent, while all the other, dead ones, are not. He sees a pattern there that becomes nearly a certainty when he can prove that the handwriting of those survivors had completely changed after the accident. He hits on the secretary Maria Perschy (as always stunning) of an American ambassador he suspects of being swapped. And both of them start the fight against the aliens.

Again, this plays like a Dr. Mabuse movie, and the question to why this all happens is never answered (sure, the aliens want a nuclear war, but why they do this is never mentioned - at least Dr. Mabuse wanted world domination through chaos). 

Shot on a shoestring budget on location in the USA, this movie cleverly uses lots of stock footage, minimal sets, and a row of second-level German talent for all of this. The lack of funding is cleverly veiled but shines through here more often than not. Acting is ok, and the movie does entertain. 

Direction by Peter Berneis (a scriptwriter who had remigrated to Germany after the war) and filmmaker Hans Albin is inventive and modern; there are no special effects to talk about and no action scenes as there simply was no budget for this in here.

The movie was not a success, cheaply made and distributed, and the title would suggest more of a crime-comedy, which might have been the nucleus of the film (like a Mabuse-spoof), but there is not much left of that in the final movie. 

In the end cleverly done, the movie is not a classic but not a miss either. 

Just a remarkable oddity.