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If the German krimi genre (krimi = a German variation on the
murder mystery) ever had a female face, it must have been Karin Dor's. Her naive,
innocent looks, her subdued eroticism and her ability to deliver a trademark wide-eyed
deer-in-the-headlight facial expression at the drop of a hat were all perfect for the somewhat weird, somewhat trashy but
immensely successful and often very funny German krimis of the 1960's and
brought her success throughout Europe and quite a few engagements in
international productions ... But Karin Dor's career
didn't start in krimis at all, it started in Heimatfilms, then the
main product of the German film industry (Heimatfilm = cheesy rural dramas
and/or comedies often set in pittoresque mountainous settings, which
usually give an idealized version of the simple life they
propagate). Born Kätherose Derr 1938 (according to some sources 1936) in
Wiesbaden, Germany, Dor's first ventures into the film industry were two
films on which she worked as an extra, Der Letzte Walzer/The
Last Waltz (1953,
directed by Arthur Maria Rabenalt) and Rosen aus dem Süden (1954,
Franz Antel) ... and somehow, Arthur Maria Rabenalt was so impressed by
the young girl that he proposed her for a supporting role to Harald Reinl
for his film Rosen Resli/Rose Girl Resli (1954) ... and Harald Reinl should soon
become (for a time) the most important man in her private life and in her career
[Harald Reinl bio - click here]
... Harald Reinl would not only put her into the films Rosen
Resli and Der schweigende Engel (also 1954), both essentially
vehicles for child star Christine Kaufmann in which Dor would appear in
small roles under the name Rose Dor, but also in 1954, Reinl, 30 years her
elder, would marry her, a marriage that lasted until 1968 and saw the two
collaborating on many occasions. It was not long before Karin
Dor's roles improved from supporting to lead or at least second lead
status with films like the school comedy Ihre grosse Prüfung/The
Big Test (1954, Rudolf Jugert), the drama Solange Du lebst/As
Long as You Live (1955, Harald Reinl) or the musical comedy Santa
Lucia (1956, Werner Jacobs), which was basically a vehicle for popular
Schlager star Vico Torriani (Schlager = a specifically German
version of pop music invariably sung in German, invariably from the cheesy
end of pop and primarily appealing to older audiences). In Kleiner
Mann - ganz gross/Little Man on Top (1957, Hans Grimm), Dor was
paired with Joachim Fuchsberger for the first time, her most frequent
filmpartner, with whom she would soon become the perfect couple (onscreen
that is) as they would co-star in no less than 10 films over the years,
most of them krimis, but even in a Western - but
let's not get ahead of ourselves. In 1957 already, the two were
re-paired in the Heimatfilm Zwillinge vom Zillertal (Harald Reinl). In
all, while Karin Dor's career was definitely going up, the Heimatfilms and
mindless comedies she was in gave her little variety in roles though, and
only films like the (slightly) erotic comedy Mit Eva fing die Sünde an/Sin
Began with Eve (1958, Fritz Umgelter) - which was released in the USA
as a sexfilm called The Bellboy and the Playgirls in 1962 with
additional (sex-)scenes shot by Francis Ford Copolla - and the moral
medical drama Worüber man nicht spricht/False Shame (1958,
Wolfgang Glück) allowed her to break out of her usual clichéd roles ....
All
that would change though with the arrival of the 1960's: It was actually
back in 1959, when Dor's husband directed Der Frosch mit der
Maske/Frøen/Fellowship of
the Frog, a crime thriller (or krimi) based on a book by the
popular British crime novelist Edgar Wallace filmed in Germany for the Danish production
company Rialto
- which would soon move to Germany by the way - and against all odds and
all predictions, the film became a smashing success and prompted Rialto
to start their successful Edgar
Wallace series.
Karin Dor by the way did not appear
in this film mainly because the film's distributor Constantin
Film insisted upon Eva Anthes as the female lead (while Reinl no
doubt wanted Dor). However, for
the third film in the series (and the second Reinl directed), Die
Bande des Schreckens/The
Terrible People (1960), Reinl got his will due to the previous
movie's success and could cast Karin Dor opposite - guess who - Joachim
Fuchsberger (who was also in Fellowship of
the Frog). Reinl would also cast her in the three other Edgar
Wallace films he made, Der Fälscher von London/The
Forger of London (1961), Zimmer 13/Room 13
(1964) and Der Unheimliche Mönch/The
Sinister Monk (1965), and his choice of leading lady was obviously
appreciated by Rialto
because Dor was also cast in Jürgen Roland's Edgar Wallace adaptation Der
Grüne Bogenschütze/The
Green Archer (1961).
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Basically, all the films of the series
were overconvoluted murder mysteries full of pulp-mainstays like masked
killers, secret passageways, secret and evil societies, white slave rings,
a fair share of torture and sadism - toned
down for mass-appeal -, lots of creepy fog, a few horror/gothic elements
and a cast full of eccentric characters. Add to this a bunch of German
actors desperately trying to come across like spleeny Englishmen and
German landscapes desperately made to look like England and what you get
is a distinctively unrealistic version of crime drama that nowadays often
looks unintentionally hilarious (in a good way) - but back in the days was immensely
successful ...
Dor's roles in these films were most often the innocent
victims who through no fault of her own gets sucked into the center of the
on-screen goings-on and in the end she is saved by the hero - a bit like
the fairy tale princess and the knight in shining armor in updated settings ...
though today one would probably call Dor a scream queen.
Only rarely did she break out of this cliché, a notable exeption is Zimmer 13/Room 13,
where she in the end is revealed as a psychotic killer ...
Asides
from the Edgar
Wallace films, Dor still played in a few Heimatfilms/mindless
comedies like the operetta Im Weissen Rössl/White Horse Inn
(1960, Werner Jacobs) - basically a vehicle for popular Schlager star
Peter Alexander - and the musical comedy Im Schwarzen Rössl (1961,
Franz Antel) - which had her co-starring with Peter Kraus, a Schlager
singer who was once billed the German Elvis. By and
large though, the Heimatfilm was in decline, but thanks to the success of
the Edgar
Wallace series - and her success in the series - Karin Dor was
more and more hired to star in krimis and thrillers, to an extent that
eventually earned her the nickname Miss Krimi:
- Die Unsichtbaren Krallen des Dr. Mabuse/The
Invisible Dr. Mabuse/The
Invisible Claws of Dr. Mabuse (1962, Harald Reinl) was the third in
the Dr.
Mabuse series produced by Artur Brauner's CCC-Filmkunst
to both cash in on the Edgar
Wallace series and the popularity of Fritz Lang's character
that first appeared in the 1920's and 30's. The film, while well-directed
is pretty much on the hokey side storywise since it carelessly mixes
common crime-thriller elements with science fiction elements like
invisibility to rather hilarious results. But the film was at the same
time Dor's first collaboration with American actor Lex Barker [Lex
Barker bio - click here], with whom she would over the years
co-star in four more movies (plus one in which they appear in different
segments though and thus have no scenes together).
-
Both Der Teppich des
Grauens/The Carpet of Horror (1962 Harald Reinl) and Die Weisse Spinne/The
White Spider (1963, Harald Reinl) were krimis based on books by Louis
Weinert-Wilton which stayed very much in tone with the Edgar
Wallace series - and in both, Karin Dor's co-star was Joachim
Fuchsberger.
- Ohne Krimi geht die Mimi nie ins Bett (1962, Franz
Antel) is a rather silly romantic comedy with some Schlagers added on that might try to make fun of Karin
Dor's image as Miss Krimi - but doesn't succeed.
- Der Würger von Schloss Blackmoor/The
Strangler of Blackmoor Castle (1963, Harald Reinl) was the first in
another series that Artur Brauner's CCC-Filmkunst
created to compete with Rialto's
Edgar
Wallace-series, the Bryan Edgar Wallace-series - a series of movies based on the works of Edgar
Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace.
- Das Geheimnis der Schwarzen Witwe/The Secret of
the Black Widow (1963, Franz Josef Gottlieb [Franz
Josef Gottlieb bio - click here]) is a German-Spanish
co-production with O.W.Fischer in the lead, but since Karin Dor is in the
supporting cast along with Klaus Kinski and Eddie Arent, both Edgar
Wallace regulars, there is no doubt this is another attempt to cash in on
the Edgar
Wallace series, plus even director Gottlieb did a few Edgar
Wallace films in the mid-1960's.
- The German-French-Spanish
co-production Das Hotel der toten Gäste (1963, Eberhard
Itzenplitz) is yet another krimi in which Karin Dor is paired with Joachim
Fuchsberger. The cast also features Elke Sommer in a small role.
- Then there was The Face
of Fu Manchu (1965, Don Sharp), British producer Harry Alan Towers' first venture
into the Fu
Manchu series of films and Dor's first international
film. Actually the film belonged to Christopher Lee as the oriental
villain and Nigel Green as his perpetual nemesis Nayland Smith, but Karin
Dor and Joachim Fuchsberger - who else - were there to play the more
traditional roles of hero and damsel-in-distress (with Fuchsberger being
the hero and Dor being the damsel, naturally). The film might have been
nothing great, but it was an ok espionage yarn and probably the best of the
series ...
- And there was Der Mann mit den 1000 Masken/L'Uomo
da Uccidere/The Man of a Thousand Masks/The Spy with 10
Faces (1966, Alberto De Martino), an Italian/German espionage flick
obviously inspired by the James Bond
series of films (even
the hero - Paul Hubschmid - is called Upperseven), that like so many
Italian/German espionage flicks fails to convince.
By the mid-1960's, the krimi-genre was slowly dieing
down, and with it, Karin Dor's popularity as Miss Krimi vaned - but
by now she had already found a second career ... of all genres in
Westerns.
Back in 1962, production
company Rialto,
fresh from their success with the Edgar
Wallace series, decided to once again try something new:
Westerns made in Germany, based on the books of popular German writer Karl
May (1842 - 1912) revolving around the noble Apache chieftain Winnetou.
The concept sounds nothing short of ridiculous I confess, and the fact
that the whole thing was filmed in Yugoslavian landscapes that - while
being quite impressive - look nothing like the American prairie, and lead
Pierre Brice [Pierre
Brice bio - click here] - an attractive Frenchman - looks nothing like a Native
Americanmake the whole series sound like dead on arrival (and that the
only German character in this German film set in the USA was played by the
only American actor in the cast, Lex Barker, just seems to be the icing on
the cake) ... but Harald Reinl, director of the best films of the series,
managed to give the series a fairytale-like tone that sets it apart from
e.g. the American B-Westerns that more or less follow the same lines. And
against all odds, Der Schatz im
Silbersee/Treasure
of Silver Lake (1962, Harald Reinl) became the most successful
German film up until that point and outgrossed even the immensely
successful Edgar
Wallace films with ease.
In Treasure
of Silver Lake, Karin Dor's role was comparatively unimportant,
she played the romantic interest to secondary hero Götz George, but in
her next appearance in the series Winnetou II/Last of the
Renegades she had a much bigger role, that of Native American
girl Ribanna whom Winnetou madly falls in love with - but ultimately she
is given away to white army major Merrill (a pre-stardom Terence Hill
appearing under his birth name Mario Girotti) to keep the peace between
the white and the red man ... breaking the heart of Ribanna and Winnetou
both. (By the way, that Karin Dor didn't look in the least bit
like a Native American does not matter in this film at all, somehow one
has come to not expect authenticity from the Winnetou-films.
In turn, they were much more sympathetic towards the plight of the Native
Americans as a whole than many comparable American films.)
In 1968, Dor
returned to the series for a film produced not by Rialto
- who gave up the series two years earlier - but by Artur Brauner's CCC-Filmkunst
- always a company; to jump any bandwagon and milk every cashcow to
death. For the film in question, Winnetou und Shatterhand im Tal der
Toten/In the Valley of the Death
(1968, Harald Reinl), CCC-Filmkunst
did not
only borrow the lead actors Pierre Brice, Lex Barker and Ralf Wolter (whom
they previously borrowed for Old Shatterhand [1964, Hugo
Fregonese]) but also parts of the crew like director Reinl,
cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke and soundtrack composer Martin Böttcher,
who were in large parts responsible for the look, sound and feel of Rialto's series - but both financially and on a quality
level, the film failed to live up to the best films of the series ...
Besides
her appearances in the Winnetou-films,
Karin Dor also got a role in an adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's The
Last of the Mohicans, a book that was actually one of the main
influences for Karl May, and that was made into a movie in 1965 to cash in
on the success of the Winnetou-series:
Der letzte
Mohikaner/Last of the Mohicans (1965, Harald Reinl), starring Anthony Steffen as
Hawkeye and Dan Martin as Uncas, with (once more) Joachim Fuchsberger as
secondary hero and Karin Dor as his love interest. But unlike the Winnetou-films,
Last of the Mohicans
was a moderate success at best.
In
1966, Karin Dor made two films with Stewart Granger that were very
probably made to once more cash in on the Winnetou-series,
even if they were modern-day thrillers: Gern
hab' ich die Frauen gekillt/Le
Carnaval des Barouzes/Killer's
Carnival (1966, Sheldon Reynolds, Alberto Cardone, Robert Lynn)
and Das
Geheimnis der gelben Mönche/Il Segreto dei Frati Gialli/How to Kill a Lady/Wie tötet man eine Dame (1966, Manfred
R.Köhler). You see, by 1966, Stewart Granger had just starred in three Winnetou-films
replacing Lex Barker as Winnetou's white friend (though playing a different
character than Barker) and thus found new success in Europe - so the producers must
have thought it a good idea to have him co-star with Karin Dor, another
familiar face from the Winnetou-series,
to appeal to the fans of the series. Killer's
Carnival even had both Pierre Brice and Lex Barker - the
protagonists of the series - in the cast as well. For some reason though,
they do not only not interact with either Dor and Granger nor with each other,
they even play in totally isolated segments of this anthology film. And
while How to Kill a Lady is at
actually rather entertaining from a
nostalgia point of view, Killer's
Carnival is pretty bad, as if noone had really cared to
make a good movie as long as enough actors from the Winnetou-series
are in it.
With the krimi more or less a thing of the past in
the late 1960's, Dor was allowed to take more interesting roles, like that
of the scheming, demonic Brunhild in Harald Reinl's two-parter from
1966/67 Die Nibelungen (Die Nibelungen 1.Teil -
Siegfried von Xanten [1966] and Die Nibelungen 2.Teil - Kriemhild's Rache
[1967]),
based on the famous German legend from the Dark Ages, which was previously
(in 1924) filmed by Fritz Lang. Reinl's films are no masterpieces compared
to Lang's films, naturally, but somewhat naive but enjoyable romps about
the Middle Ages also starring Herbert Lom, Mario Girotti/Terence Hill and
sports star Uwe Beyer as Siegfried.
In 1967, Dor also starred
in one of the few German all-out horror films, the Edgar Allan
Poe-inspired Die
Schlangengrube und das Pendel/Castle of the Walking Dead,
which was probably director Harald Reinl's best, most atmospheric, but
also most underappreciated and least successful film. In it, Dor plays the
female lead opposite Lex Barker as the hero and Christopher Lee as the
supernatural villain who wants to kill them both.
1967 also saw
Karin Dor in her first truly international film, the James Bond
film You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert), that pits her as
seductive, double-crossing female spy Miss Brandt against Sean Connery's
James Bond, whom she tries to kill - without success, naturally,
ultimately she herself gets eaten up by piranhas. Blofeld, the main
villain in the movie, is played by Donald Pleasence, by the way [Donald
Pleasence bio - click here].
Two years
after You Only Live Twice, it looked as if Karin Dor managed to top
even being a Bond-girl when she landed a role in an Alfred Hitchcock
movie, Topaz (1969) - even if Hitchcock's espionage films of the
late 1960's showed the master definitely past his prime, and his idea to
cast Dor as a hot-blooded Cuban revolutionary (going by the name Juanita
de Cordoba) seems a bit far-fetched.
Still, one would think
that an attractive woman in her early thirties with a
James Bond-
and an Alfred Hitchcock-film under her belt and plenty of experience in
film would be bound to have an international career ...
but quite the opposite was the case. In the USA, Dor only got engagements
in a few TV-crime series like Ironside and It Takes a
Thief, while back in Europe, her last films for a few years would
be Los Monstruos del Terror/Dracula jagt Frankenstein/Assignment:
Terror/Dracula vs Frankenstein (1970, Tulio
Demicheli) - a piece of Euro-horror trash that has her starring opposite
Michael Rennie and Paul Naschy [Paul
Naschy-bio - click here] and that has Naschy's Hombre
Lobo, Frankenstein,
Dracula
and the mummy all fighting each other - and Haie an Bord (1971, Arthur Maria
Rabenalt) - an adventure film that was basically a vehicle for Schlager
star Freddy Quinn, who is also allowed to perform a few songs. And
while at least Assignment:
Terror might nowadays be considered a cult classic by trashfans like
myself, for Dor it was definitely a few steps down on the career ladder. Problem
was, the German (and European, and international) film-industry saw some major changes during
the first part of the 1970's. Due to relaxation of censorship all across
Europe, suddenly the main focus of Euro-cinema was on sex and violence,
and many cheaply produced films like the German Schulmädchen
Report series suddenly became regular blockbusters, while many of the established actors, directors and
production houses suddenly saw themselves unable to keep up with the times.
Karin Dor was just one of many examples ...
Dor
did not return to the big screen until 1974, when she took a role in Die
Antwort kennt nur der Wind/Only the Wind Knows the Answer, one
of Alfred Vohrer's Johannes Marius Simmel-adaptations [Alfred
Vohrer-bio - click here], after that it took 3 more years
until Dor returned to film work for another 3 films, Dark Echo/Dark
Echoes (1977) - a forgotten horrorfilm that is interesting only
inasmuch as it was the only directorial effort by Dor's future husband
George Robotham, otherwise an acknowledged stunt coordinator -, the war
film Warhead (1977, John O'Connor) that had her starring opposite
David Janssen of The Fugitive-fame, and the hospital drama Frauenstation/Women
in Hospital (1977, Rolf Thiele), in which her co-stars included Horst
Buchholz and Stephen Boyd.
By the late 1970's, Karin Dor by and
large turned her back on filmmaking, but not on acting as such, and soon
enough she has become a big name in (dinner-)theatre, something she
continues to this very day. Occasionally, she has even makes appearances in
TV-series and TV-movies, mostly cheesy stuff like a few German adaptations
of stories by British kitsch-author Rosamunde Pilcher. In 2006, Karin
Dor even made her big-screen comeback in Ich bin die Andere/I am
the Other Woman (Margarethe von Trotta), playing the rather demanding
role or the alcoholic mother of leading lady Katja Riemann. If this film
will revive Karin Dor's film career - or if she even wants it to - remains
to be seen, but in the eyes of fans she will always be Miss Krimi, the
female face of the German Edgar
Wallace series (even though she did not play in all that many
films of the series), the woman with the deer-in-the-headlight face, and one
of the most successful and memorable actresses of popular German cinema of
the 1960's.
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