A Cold Blooded Affair/Tip Not Included/Die Rechnung – eiskalt serviert (1966)

‘My company is in the phone book under the FBI.’

A top FBI agent saves a stranger from being beaten up by two thugs after leaving a bar. What he doesn’t know is that all of them are part of a conspiracy to hijack an armoured van and rob the U.S. Treasury. The agent begins to investigate when the young man turns up dead, but the poison gas he created is already in the hands of the gang…

The fourth entry in the Jerry Cotton series finds the ever-present American actor George Nader once more in the title role. Although his adventures are often recorded as falling under the Eurospy umbrella, the connection is a little tenuous. Nader might be a cool agent ready with his fists, but there’s little of the girls and gadgets on hand that an audience might reasonably expect and even less of the typical glamour.

A quiet night down the pub is never on the cards when you’re a secret agent. When his spider-sense starts a-tingling, Jerry Cotton (Nader) follows young gun Tommy Wheeler (Christian Doemer) out of his local when the chemist picks up a couple of non-too friendly plus-ones. Nader deals with them, of course, but Doemer doesn’t hang around to say thanks. Nader shrugs it off, of course. It’s just another day at the office for the likes of him. He’s happy to go back to his pint and chat up the bar’s singer Violet (Yvonne Monlaur), who tells him that Doemer is an out of work chemist who seems to be in some sort of trouble. Nader agrees to look into it, although it may only be an excuse to give her his telephone number.

Doemer has fallen in with a criminal gang who hang out backstage at a wrestling arena and are led by the ruthless Charles Anderson (Horst Tappert). The current project on the books is robbing the U.S. Mint, apparently located in Wall Street and not Washington D.C. as you might have thought. Anyway, this government financial ‘clearing house’ (whatever it may be) is in the habit of recycling old bills for new, sending out the discards in an armoured van, presumably for destruction. The plan is to hijack the vehicle using a smoke bomb provided by Doemer, grab the cash and head for the hills. The heist comes off, but Doemer is surplus to requirements afterwards. When the boffins at the FBI examine the body, they find traces of the gas used in the robbery, and Nader puts two and two together.

The bureau was already on high alert when it came to the targeted shipment anyway, and Nader had advised bank official John M Clark (Walter Rilla) to make the run with an empty van. Stupidly, he ignored our hero’s advice. Faced with the distraught Rilla, Nader accepts responsibility for the decision to the press, which earns him an immediate suspension from agency head Mr High (Richard Munch). Of course, Nader hangs around instead of going on leave and keeps in touch with the investigation, courtesy of his sidekick, Phil Decker (Heinz Weiss). Developments are only too predictable from there; the villains double-cross each other, the inside man reveals his identity, and in an enjoyably silly climax, Nader launches himself off a building and grabs on to a helicopter.

All told, this is a pretty dreary entry in the series, with only the inventive heist sequence sparking any significant interest. This action is well-executed by director Helmuth Ashley, even if it is a tad implausible. Elsewhere, there’s the usual desperate effort to make the film look American with New York stock footage and some truly terrible back projection work. The armoured van also has a ‘Mells Fabo’ decal, which is obviously a riff on ‘Wells Fargo’, but it’s unclear if this is supposed to be a joke or another hamfisted attempt at hoodwinking the audience as to the origins of the film. As usual, Peter Thomas provides a swinging, brassy soundtrack that practically screams the 1960s, but it’s scant reward for sitting through another 90 minutes of Nader’s underwhelming crime games.

Nader was born in Pasadena and performed some uncredited bits and minor supporting roles in films in the 1950s before landing the lead in Phil Tucker’s famously dreadful ‘Robot Monster’ (1953). Signed to a contract by Universal Studios, most likely as insurance against Rock Hudson being outed. Nader’s career went nowhere, perhaps because he was also gay and, unlike Hudson, made little effort to hide it. He did land the title role on the syndicated television show ‘Shannon’ in 1961, but all that followed were a few scattered film roles. These included a return to low-budget science-fiction with the Woolner Brothers’ shabby production of ‘The Human Duplicators’ (1964). He left for Europe shortly afterwards, where he made eight films as Jerry Cotton. There were another couple of encounters along the back roads of cult cinema before he retired in 1974 to become an author.

Monlaur was born in France and trained for the ballet before working as a model in her late teens. She began appearing in domestic and Italian films in her twenties and relocated to England at the end of the decade. Some assignments in the horror field followed, starting with the wildly entertaining ‘Circus of Horrors’ (1960), where she played opposite mad surgeon Anton Diffring. Her performance was enough to get her noticed by Hammer Studios, who cast her as naive heroine Marianne Danielle in ‘The Brides of Dracula’ (1960) and alongside Christopher Lee in ‘The Terror of the Tongs’ (1960). But her career never took off and, after a handful of films back in her native land, she retired at the end of the 1960s.

A rather bloodless and unmemorable crime drama that strays a little into Eurospy territory but fails to make much of an impression in either genre.

Scotland Yard Vs Dr. Mabuse/Scotland Yard Jagt Dr. Mabuse (1963)

‘You’re a plucky old bird alright, you’re stronger than any apparatus.’

The chief of a hospital takes on the spirit of Dr Mabuse after the famous criminal mastermind dies in his care. Relocating to England, he plans to take over the country by kidnapping a royal princess and using a machine that can hypnotise innocent people into committing criminal acts…

Famous film director Fritz Lang returned to his native Germany after roughly a quarter of a century in Hollywood to revive his most famous character. The resulting film, ‘The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse’ (1960) was apparently not a critical success, but kick started a new series of five homegrown pictures, beginning with ‘The Return of Dr. Mabuse’ (1961). The film in question here was the fourth of the series and featured several of the cast who had appeared in previous instalments, although, somewhat confusingly, they play essentially the same characters just with different names. Continuity was obviously not a major consideration for the producers.

Having said that, Walter Rilla returns as Professor Pohland from ‘The Testament of Dr. Mabuse’ (1962) and also appeared in final entry ‘The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse’ (1964) in the same role, so that’s straightforward enough. However, Peter van Eyck was in ‘The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse’ (1960), this film and ‘The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse’ (1964) and, although he’s the blonde hero in all three, he’s Henry B Travers in the first one, Bob Anders in the second and Bill Tern in the third. Werner Peters appears in four different entries but plays a different role each time. I could go on. All clear so far?

This time out, the dead Mabuse transfers his will into Professor Pohland, who immediately (and without any apparent difficulty) takes over the criminal organisation of the late mastermind. He quickly identifies a ‘device that must not fall into the wrong hands’ which, on this occasion, is a hypnotising machine invented by Professor Masterson. Predictably enough, Masterson’s lab possesses zero security and he has the obligatory pretty daughter (Sabine Bethmann). Brilliantly, Rilla orders Masterson liquidated before the machine is perfected which causes problems, but at least the prototype comes in a nice size so it can be disguised as a hand held movie camera (and save a little on the production budget).

Has Kinski been hypnotised yet? You decide…

So far, not so bad, but it’s pretty clear from the beginning that the film has problems. For a start, van Eyck’s entire success as a detective, previously and in this case, rests entirely on his elderly mother (Agnes Windeck)! Yes, her uncanny leaps of intuition are always 100% accurate and acknowledged but never explained. In practical terms, they’re a crutch for the screenwriter every time he needs to move things on, and events develop in ways that rely increasingly on coincidence and illogic.

At one point, rather than simply overpower one of Rilla’s hypnotised goons (they have a gun), van Eyck and Peters apparently jump from a road bridge into a river. That kind of act is potentially fatal, of course, but we never actually see the stunt and the only consequence is sitting around a heater for five minutes afterwards. Why do they do it? To convince Rilla they are dead (for some reason). By the time we reach the climax, suspension of disbelief is almost impossible and there’s a suspicion that the film might even be playing it for laughs.

After all, Rilla’s grand scheme to take over England is to hold a princess to ransom (named Diana curiously enough), and hole up in a farmhouse with a handful of goons. Sure, they now have about a dozen hypnotising machines, but I’m not entirely convinced his plan has a great chance of success. Even if one of his minions is former policeman Klaus Kinski, who manages to look pretty suspicious even before he’s hypnotised! Luckily for the forces of truth and democracy, van Eyck has discovered that the infernal machine’s hypnotic influence can be countered by wearing a hearing aid (seriously?), although he hasn’t bothered to procure any for his colleagues. Luckily, his mother turns up at the climax with a smile and a boxful of spares!

It’s a messy film all told. It has good moments, in particular a heist from a mail train (even if the robbery is somewhat unrelated to everything else), but these are far outweighed by the disjointed nature of the narrative and its’ serious lack of credibility. There’s also no sense of the Doctor’s vast criminal network or his pervasive, subtle influence on evolving events. Pretty much staples if the film wants to bare comparison to Lang’s original classics. It is better than series closer, ‘The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse’ (1964), but that’s really not saying much.

An adequate first act that quickly disintegrates into a slapdash and unsatisfying production.

The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse/The Secret of Dr Mabuse/Die Todesstrahlen des Dr Mabuse (1964)

‘You are out and about with girls while I have to stay at this brothel and live like a nun.’

A British agent is sent to Malta where a top scientist is experimenting with a death ray on an offshore island. An unseen criminal mastermind and his troop of frogmen plan to get their hands on the device so that he can rule the world. Could this unseen villain really be the infamous Dr Mabuse?

World renowned film director Fritz Lang returned to his native Germany a decade and a half after the end of the World War Two to film the underrated ‘The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse’ (1960). Although the film did not receive the critical plaudits that had greeted his previous excursions with the character in the 1920s and 1930s, the film was popular enough to spawn a series of five homegrown ‘Mabuse’ pictures released over the next five years, of which this was the final one.

Dr Mabuse is always a difficult proposition for a filmmaker. Unusually for a title character, he is always offscreen for the vast majority of the story. He’s a puppet master, the shadowy presence behind the scenes who pulls the strings of a large criminal organisation and manipulates the forces of law and order. Without that focus, audience attention switches to the activities of the good guys and the problem here is that the investigations of British agent Peter van Eyck are pretty underwhelming stuff.

We open with van Eyck investigating Professor Pohland (Walter Rilla) whose recent criminal activities were apparently provoked by the spirit of Mabuse. Pohland escapes but, despite this failure, van Eyck is assigned to Malta to investigate another scientist, Professor Larsen (O.E. Hasse) who is fooling about with a death ray. Not surprisingly, various nations are interested in this contraption which works using a synthetic ruby and a mirror. What is a surprise is that van Eyck uses his sometime girlfriend Judy (Rika Dialyna) as cover for the mission, the two allegedly being on honeymoon. Obviously, there were no qualified female agents available for the role. The local British secret service are located behind a pharmacy (and in a brothel) with operations directed by Admiral Quency (Leo Genn, complete with eyepatch, scarred face and stainless steel hand!) and his deputy Commander Adams (Robert Beatty).

What follows are some lacklustre espionage shenanigans as frogmen are washed up on the beach and van Eyck has a series of clandestine meetings with various femme fatales. These include the Professor’ s daughter (Yvonne Furneaux) and the secretary of the local museum director, played by Japanese actress Yôko Tani. The main thrust of the plot revolves around the secret identity of Mabuse rather than the death ray itself, which we never see in use. Could it be Hasse or his chess-playing partner Claudio Gora? Local playboy Gustavo Rojo, or his brother Massimo Pietobon? Or is Rilla still hanging around somewhere? Or, perish the thought, perhaps it’s Beatty or Genn?

She was never going to order extra large pilau rice with her curry again.

With so many suspects, and no real clues provided, the mystery is rather less than gripping and the audience is left with a parade of pretty dull action scenes, punctuated by van Eyck wrestling with various female members of the cast. Yes, it’s more like a half-hearted James Bond adventure than a Mabuse movie. There’s absolutely no sense of a vast criminal network or any trace of the sophisticated surveillance methods that made the character seem almost omnipotent in his earlier incarnations under Lang.

It’s a pity that the series lost its way so badly as the first couple of entries were really quite decent. Those featured ’Goldfinger’ himself, Gerte Frobe, as world-weary Kommissar Lohmann, and were placed in the hands of better directors than Hugo Fregonese who got the gig here. None of this is van Eyck’s fault, a capable leading man who had started his career as an assistant stage director with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. Recognition in front of the camera followed with a featured role in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s international hit ‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953) and he’d actually appeared in Lang’s 1960 Mabuse film. Furneaux starred opposite Christopher Lee in Hammer Studio’s ‘The Mummy’ (1959) and later appeared in smaller roles in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ (1965) and Buñuel’s ‘Belle de Jour’ (1967).

The ending of the film hints at a possible continuation of the series, but it’s no real surprise that it didn’t happen. Very disappointing.

Frozen Alive (1964)

‘It only remains for me to thank all our contributors for this very interesting symposium on hypothermia.’

Two scientists conducting research into cryogenics achieve notable success with freezing and reviving monkeys. They want to move onto human testing, but their request is blocked by the front office, who fear the repercussions of possible failure. Meanwhile one of the scientists is having problems with his wife, who is bored, jealous, and has a drink problem. She’s also hanging around with an old boyfriend, who is still in love with her.

Marianne Koch and Mark Stevens are experimenting with a new kind of deep freeze at the ‘World Health Organisation Low Temperature Unit – Berlin Division.’ Their success brings them an international prize, with big bucks attached, but trouble is just around the corner in the form of red tape and Stevens’ drunken wife. Really for a top research scientist, he’s a bit of an idiot, failing to see that Koch is nuts about him, he really feels the same way about her, and that his wife is understandably getting rather pissed off about the whole thing.

Flat and unsatisfying mixture of science fiction and a murder mystery that really isn’t one thing or the other. The science fiction aspects are underplayed, and the murder mystery seems to have been tacked on almost as an afterthought. It’s mildly pleasing that Koch is nominally in charge of the cryogenic project and that Stevens has just come in to help out, but it’s him who handles the difficult questions at the scientific conference at the start of the film. But it doesn’t matter that much, after all the whole shindig was presumably only held for the benefit of the film’s audience anyway.

‘Roll up, roll up!’

There is a pleasing lack of scientific gobbledygook for a change, but it’s never a good sign when plot threads are tied up by a convenient phone call at a film’s climax. The story has some potential, but never really comes to life and wastes a decent, professional cast, who make what they can out of roles that are severely underwritten, and drama that is half baked at best.

Stevens and Koch are a lively, sympathetic couple and John Longden shines as their immediate boss, delivering his dialogue in a refreshingly dry manner. However, Delphi Lawrence is handed a shallow, shrewish role as Stevens’ wife, and this helps rob the tale of any depth, grit or moral ambiguity. Everything is very black and white. Similarly, Walter Rilla (‘The Terror of Dr Mabuse (1962)) is good value as the politically astute head of the institute, but his role is a total cliché.

The only surprise here is that matters manage to remain vaguely interesting throughout the rather lifeless, under developed 80 minutes.

The Gamma People (1956)

“You asked me about the ray, Mr. Vilson…”

Two journalists find themselves stranded in the tiny Eastern European republic of Godavia where a Professor is carrying out strange experiments on the local children.

U.K. Science Fiction was not exactly booming in the 1950s but the success of TV serial ‘The Quatermass Experiment’ – and the subsequent movie – did inspire a handful of projects, probably none more curious than this one; a strange mixture of comedy, politics and horror.

The first point of interest is the presence of star Paul Douglas, a nationally famous American sportscaster until he switched to acting in middle age. Importing a ‘name’ to ensure sales abroad was standard practice for British films of the time but Douglas had been 3rd billed behind Grace Kelly and Stewart Granger in ‘Green Fire’ (1954) less than 2 years earlier so why did he agree to appear in this? The other journalist is played in his usual fashion by Leslie Phillips (yes, the ‘Carry On’ and ‘Doctor in Love’ guy) and the idea that he’s best friends with the dour Douglas is simply impossible to swallow. Phillips is prominent in the movie early on (for the comedy) but gets a bit lost later on (when things get serious).

The only convincing notes in the movie are supplied by the locations (Hertfordshire standing in surprisingly well for Eastern Europe!) and the performance of Walter Rilla as the villain; cool, suave and ruthless. He is experimenting to create a super race – intelligent, emotionless and obedient. Apparently, he aims to achieve this by a cunning use of modelling classes and hair driers. It’s working too – local moppet Hedda is well on her way to being a concert pianist and headboy Hugo is a right superior little shit. Sadly, the process is not always successful and Rilla’s rejects are a goon squad that display a worrying tendency toward violence and out of control eyebrows.

“Something for the weekend, sir…?”

What really scuppers proceedings here is the uncertainty of tone. At first it seems like a bit of a lark – Phillips smirks and tries to chat up ‘birds’, the local police chief blusters in a silly hat and the telegraph officer channels Monty Python. But then it all gets a bit heavy with robotic kids and the oppression of the local populace. Eventually, the natives get restless when their carnival is cancelled, go into open revolt and our heroes take on the good professor in his Science Fiction lab. It’s a mix that just doesn’t gel.

But there are some interesting ideas here. In the opening sequence, the journalists end up in Gorovia when their carriage becomes uncoupled from a train. We see the coupling bend and then cut to two of the children sitting by the side of the track. After the train separates, they rush to throw a switch and divert our heroes on to another track. It all looks planned. Similarly, subsequent event infer that they are something more than ‘ordinary’ children but this line of the plot never really goes anywhere. A year after the film’s release, John Wyndham published his novel of super intelligent, alien children called ‘The Midwich Cuckoos.’ Three years after that it was turned into the creepy classic ‘Village of the Damned’ (1960) with George Sanders. And who directed that movie? Walter Rilla’s son, Wolf! It’s probably just a co-incidence but it’s curious just the same…