aka The Dark Eyes of London
(Die Toten Augen von London)
West Germany. 1961.
Crew
Director – Alfred Vohrer, Screenplay – Trygve Larsen, Additional Dialogue – Wolfgang Lukschy, Based on the Novel The Dark Eyes of London by Edgar Wallace, Photography (b&w) – Karl Löb, Music – Heinz Funk, Production Design – Mathias Matthies & Ellen Schmidt. Production Company – Primsa/Rialto Film.
Cast
Joachim Fuchsberger (Inspector Larry Holt), Karin Baal (Nora Ward), Dieter Borsche (Reverend Paul Dearborn), Wolfgang Lukschy (Stephen Judd), Eddi Arent (Sergeant ‘Sunny’ Harvey), Klaus Kinski (Edgar Strauss), Franz Schafheitlin (Sir John), Adi Berber (Jacob ‘Blind Jack’ Farrell), Harry Wüstenhagen (Fleabite Fred), Ann Savoy (Fanny Weldon), Bobby Todd (Lew Norris), Hans Paetsch (Gordon Stuart)
Plot
Scotland Yard inspector Larry Holt investigates a series of murders in which industrialists have been killed. A message in Braille is found on the latest victim’s body. Nora Ward is brought in to translate the message and gives assistance to Holt. They go to investigate a local mission for the blind, from where Holt believes that the people behind the scheme have recruited a blind killer. It is then found that all of the dead industrialists have taken out an insurance policy, which leads Inspector Holt to the nefarious dealings of the Greenwich Insurance company.
British thriller writer Edgar Wallace (1874-1932) was once considered the most prolific writer in the world. It was at one point estimated that a quarter of all fiction read in the English language was one of Edgar Wallace’s works. He was known to complete books in the space of 72 hours. Before his death, Wallace had turned out some 175 novels, 24 plays and 957 short stories. The greater portion of Wallace’s books were detective thrillers.
Wallace has been very popular on film – the IMDB lists some 189 Edgar Wallace film adaptations. Some 80 odd of these were produced between the silent era through to the 1940s. Wallace himself even directed two adaptations – Red Aces (1929) and The Squeaker (1930). Wallace also received credit as co-writer on the original King Kong (1933), although died before the film went into production.
For some reason, Edgar Wallace has an extraordinary popularity in Germany. During the 1960s, there was a host of Wallace film adaptations made in West Germany, beginning with The Face of the Frog (1959) and 32 other films. These gained such popularity they were then followed by seven adaptations of novels by Wallace’s son Bryan Edgar Wallace. Most of these German films have little to do with the Wallace texts they are based on and instead spin the basics out into a series of luridly Grand Guignol murder mysteries. These became a genre unto themselves known as krimi films.
Adi Berber as the killer Blind Jack
Dead Eyes of London is adapted from Edgar Wallace’s novel The Dark Eyes of London (1924), one of his most popular as a cinematic subject. It had been filmed before this as The Dark Eyes of London/The Human Monster (1939) starring Bela Lugosi. This film’s director Alfred Vohrer went on to make another version of the story a mere seven years later with The Gorilla of Soho/The Gorilla Gang (1968).
When it comes to Dead Eyes of London, Alfred Vohrer creates some wonderful atmosphere all in black-and-white. The film is perfectly set by the opening scene where a businessman walks through the foggy streets while a hulking blind man (Adi Berber) waits in a basement stairwell and then emerges to attack. The blind man has considerable eerie and menacing threat – a huge brute, bald, shaggily shaven and with blank white eyes, something that gives him an undeniable resemblance to Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). Elsewhere, we visit seedy gambling clubs and bars, or the blind institute with the men at the table all lined up under a low angular roof. The streets everywhere are filled with fog.
Dead Eyes of London is essentially a Police Procedural but, as with the other krimi films, there is the habit of piling on so much weirdness that everything enters into genre territory. The film functions fairly well in terms of its mystery. It follows the plot of Wallace’s book generally when it comes to the insurance scam and the involvement of the blind institute, while adding the killer Blind Jack to the mix. One of the distinctive aspects is Klaus Kinski up to shady goings-on where Kinski, some year before he became an internationally famous if not notorious name, cuts a strange presence.
A very weird Klaus Kinski
There is slightly more added over the book with some confusing talk about the daughter having a twin. The film arrives at a memorable climax with the abducted Karin Baal imprisoned in the institute basement and being threatened by a blowtorch-wielding Wolfgang Lukschy who is determined to marry her and then she being drowned in a covered vat (a scene repeated in The Gorilla of Soho) before being rescued. In the final scene, Joachim Fuchsberger’s Inspector Holt decides he is going to marry her.
Alfred Vohrer (1914-86) was a regular director of krimi films and made fourteen Edgar Wallace adaptations with The Door with Seven Locks (1962), The Inn on the River (1962), The Indian Scarf (1963), The Squeaker (1963), The Mysterious Magician (1964), Again the Ringer (1965), Circus of Fear (1966), The Hunchback of Soho (1966), Creature with the Blue Hand (1967), The College Girl Murders (1967), The Gorilla of Soho/The Gorilla Gang (1968), The Hound of Blackwood Castle (1968), The Zombie Walks (1968), The Man with the Glass Eye (1969) and Seven Blood Stained Orchids (1972).
Other Edgar Wallace adaptations that fall into genre material include The Terror (1928), Before Dawn (1933), Mystery Liner (1934), The Terror (1938), Chamber of Horrors (1940), The Dark Eyes of London/The Human Monster (1939), The Avenger (1960), The Gang of Terror/Hand of the Gallows (1960), The Door with the Seven Locks (1962), The Inn on the River Thames (1962), The Black Abbott (1963), The Curse of the Yellow Snake (1963), The Indian Scarf (1963), The Squeaker (1963), Room 13 (1964), The Sinister Monk (1965), The Phantom of Soho (1966), The College Girl Murders (1967), Creature with the Blue Hand (1967), The Gorilla of Soho/The Gorilla Gang (1968), The Hand of Power (1968), The Horror of Blackwood Castle (1968), The Devil Came from Akasava (1971), Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972) and What Have They Done to Solange? (1972). Wallace also worked as a screenwriter, turning out an adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1932), with his most famous being the original story for King Kong (1933).
