DEAD EYES OF LONDON (1961)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I've seen Alfred Vohrer credited with directing fourteen of the German crime films known as "krimi," and it looks to me like DEAD EYES OF LONDON might be his first. It's a remake of the 1939 British programmer THE HUMAN MONSTER, which was itself an adaptation of a 1924 Edgar Wallace novel that I've not read.

Even so, there have been textual changes. The novel had two villains, which MONSTER cut down to two roles played by one fiend, but EYES returns to two villains, though one doesn't find this out until the rousing conclusion. The main hero is about the same, doughty Inspector Holt, this time essayed by Joachim Fuchsberger. However, in MONSTER, comedy relief is supplied by a wisecracking American cop, while here it stems from a slighty fey British cop who is mocked for his habit of knitting. 

The female lead in MONSTER is a young woman whom Holt sets up to investigate the slayer of her father. But here a lady named Nora (Karin Baal) works with Scotland Yard as a "braille expert," helping the police decipher a clue found on one of the bodies floating in the Thames River. She still infiltrates the Home for the Blind, where supposedly blind Reverend Dearborn (Dieter Borsche) runs things, but Holt doesn't know from the start that Nora is also the daughter of one of the victims. Finally, MONSTER included a hulking blind fellow named Jake who served the villain but ended up turning on him. EYES plays up a bald, blind hulk named Blind Jack (Ady Berber) who's seen strangling a few victims, but he's executed halfway through the movie by one of the two main criminals. 

Vohrer and his scenarists comprise a much more kinetic adventure than anything seen in the 1939 MONSTER, making liberal use of intense close-up shots. Indeed, many of the murder-sequences look forward to the giallos and the slashers for sheer brutality, though there's nothing fit to compete with Argento. (Klaus Kinski has a small role as one of the evildoers' pawns.) The one weakness in the lively script is that there's some peculiar mention of a "league of blind killers" early on, even though no one has any reason to think that any of the deaths are even associated with blind men. In contrast to MONSTER's fairly dull conclusion, Vohrer delivers a serial-style "woman in peril" sequence and a last-ditch battle between Holt and his adversaries. The narrative emphasis thus shifts from the story's "monster" to its crusading hero, though the detective elements still align the movie's mythos with the drama.