I’ve been a fan of the German krimi films—lurid crime mellers generally based on the novels of Edgar Wallace or his son Bryan Edgar Wallace, and set in extraordinarily unconvincing English locales—since I was a kid. They are fairly hard to find on DVD, especially if you’re looking for better stuff than Alpha puts out. Unless, of course, you’re a big damn cheater like Sandy Petersen and import box sets of the things from Germany to play on your fancy all-region player.
Secret of the Black Widow has joined the ranks of the English dub versions of these films to become available here. It’s not the best of the batch by a large stretch, but it has its charms for the aficionado. Per usual, it involves an insanely complicated plot about member of a tontine (although it is never called that) being murdered, per usual, in an incredibly baroque fashion. Here it’s envenomed rubber black widow-shaped darts fired from an air pistol.
Investigating the murders is the usual roguish smartass ladies’ man, although here he’s not a Scotland Yard detective but instead a reporter for the tabloid paper The London Sensation. (!)
Sadly, this one isn’t quite as goofy as most of these, and worse, is ten or twenty minutes overlong, which results in some water-treading in the middle of things. Luckily things pick up nicely for the last twenty minutes or so. Meanwhile, the zoomframing here is brutal. I’d have much preferred to see the film in its original aspect ratio. However, most of the action at least stays in the frame; filmmakers in the ‘60s purposely staged things that way, knowing their movies would end up on TV.
Defects aside, the picture has its amusements. Whoever distributed this was lazier than usual, and didn’t shoot inserts to replace notes in German or even a song sung in German in an “English nightclub.” Looking at a threatening missive from the killer written in German, they attempt to cover this by having someone theorize that it’s to “throw us off the track.” (???) We also learn that a black widow spider is native to Central America, a fact explicated more than once.
The hero, meanwhile, takes the heroine—a suspect because the member of the tontine killed her father with a black widow on an expedition back in the day—to the aforementioned nightclub to hear the song. “I want you to hear a German song,” he explains. “You’ll know it.” That’s because it’s The Song of the Black Widow, about—I guess, I don’t understand German—a killer with a black widow theme. Ah, it’s all coming together. Sort of.
Most pleasing is that parade of familiar faces that always appeared in these things. Klaus Kinski is here, although oddly he plays a more refined, John Steed sort of character, and doesn’t provide his own dubbing. The gorgeous Karin Dor, who appeared in a zillion of these and was a Bond girl in You Only Live Twice, is the heroine. Balding supporting actor Werner Peters of course is on hand, as is, sadly, perennial Odious Comic Relief Actor Eddi Arent.
I certainly wouldn’t start with this as your first krimi if you’re new to the genre. If so, find Phantom of Soho (found on Vol. 2 of The Edgar Wallace Collection) or Dark Sky’s fabulous disc for The College Girl Murders. The latter is even in vibrant color rather than the usual black and white. However, if you’re a fan of this stuff, you’ll definitely want to give it a look.
