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Alfred Vohrer might not rank among Germany's most important directors,
he was certainly not an auteur like Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak, nor
a mad (if sometimes overrated) genius like Werner Herzog or
internationally acknowledged artfilm maker
like Wim Wenders, and even in his best times, during the 1960's, he never
proved to be as inventive a craftsman as fellow director Harald Reinl [Harald
Reinl bio - click here], plus he more or less lacked any kind of personal
style ... but that said, Vohrer's influence on the German Krimi-genre
(= the specific German version of the murder mystery that had its heyday
in the 1960's) cannot be overrated thanks to his long-lasting association with the Edgar
Wallace series. Plus, within all the genres he
worked in Vohrer proved to be a competent (if not always inventive) director, and fact is
that he worked on some of the most successful films/filmseries of the
1960's. And thanks to his competence he could later effortlessly make the
transition to television where he worked on some of the biggest German
hitseries - and almost literally to his death, too ... he died in his bed
only hours before he was supposeed to direct yet another TV-show ... Initially,
Alfred Vohrer, who was born in 1914 in Stuttgart, Germany, did not want to
become a director though but tried to establish himself as an actor, and
to this end, he took acting and singing lessons. In the 1930's, he managed
to get an acting assignment at the Württembergisches Staatstheater
in Stuttgart ... but then he got drafted into the army and was sent to
Russia to go through with one of Hitler's many madcap plans of conquest -
which cost Alfred Vohrer his right arm in 1941. All aspirations to one
day become a successful actor died with the loss of Vohrer's arm, so after
he had returned to Germany and was nursed back to health, he entered the
film industry and became assistant director to Harald Braun and Alfred
Braun at the UFA. With
the end of the war, the German film industry as such temporarily came to a
standstill, so Vohrer moved to the radio - Radio Stuttgart - just
to keep working ... It wasn't until 1949 that Vohrer returned
to the film industry, but in rather an unexpected job: as dubbing
director, first for MPEA, later for the Ultra-Film GmbH.
During his time as dubbing director he would eventually be responsible for
dubbing almost 1,000 films into German language.
In 1956, Ultra-Film
wanted to produce their first film, Zum Leben Verdammt, for which
Alfred Vohrer had written a script, but unfortunately the movie eventually
did not get made. But Ultra-Film did not bive up on film producing
altogether, and only two years later, they produced their first picture
for real, Schmutziger Engel/Dirty Angel/Imperfect Agel (1958),
which would also be the debut of Alfred Vohrer as a director. The film
itself was a teenager/juvenile delinquency movie modelled closely after
similar American films like Blackboard Jungle (1955, Richard
Brooks) as well as their German counterparts like Die Halbstarken/Teenage
Wolfpack (1956, Georg Tessler) and wasn't essentially a work
of art or an extraordinary fillm ... but it was successful enough for Ultra-Film
to let Vohrer direct 2 more films of the same ilk, Verbrechen nach
Schulschluss/The Young Go Wild (1959) and Mit 17 weint man
nicht/17 Year Olds don't Cry (1960), plus another teenflick, Meine
99 Bräute (1958) for Inter West Film, ironically the
production house of Ultra-Film's rival dubbing entrepreneur Wenzel
Lüdecke.
1960 marked the first collaboration between Alfred
Vohrer and prolific German producer (and notorious bandwagon-jumper) Artur
Brauner, for the Film Bis dass das Geld Euch scheidet .../Until Money
Departs You (1960), a mediocre relationship drama that stars Gert
Fröbe, one of the heavies of German cinema, as a cheating husband.
Vohrer's
ultimate breakthrough though came a year later, when he was hired by
Rialto Film to take over their series of Krimis based on the books
of Edgar Wallace as director ... The Edgar
Wallace series was established in 1959 with the film Der Frosch mit der
Maske/Frøen/Fellowship of
the Frog (directed by Harald Reinl), which despite its many
incongruencies - it's supposed to be set in England
but was (obviously) filmed in Germany, German actors desperately try to
appear British, the weird assumption that all Englishmen are eccentrics,
... - the film became a tremendous success and was the starting point for
a series that lasted into the 1970's (and was revived in the 1990's) and
consisted of 32 entries (only counting the films produced until 1972) ...
plus a few Edgar Wallace adaptations done by other production houses.
Furthermore it is often quoted as one of the main influences of the
Italian giallo (and as a matter of fact, the last few films of the
series were German-Italian co-productions). To
this day, the series is considered one of the most successful German
movie-series.
By 1961, the series was well-established on one hand, but
the market wasn't yet oversaturated on the other, so if one kept all the
ingredients that were established with Harald Reinl's Fellowship of
the Frog right - (over-)convoluted whodunnit plots, eccentric
Englishmen, foggy landscapes, outrageous caper-plots, secret passageways,
sliding panels, masked murderers, and the occasional
horror element -, there was little that could go wrong. And Vohrer was perfect in emulating this
style - or in fact any given style.
Alfred
Vohrer's first Edgar Wallace adaptation was Die Toten Augen von London/The
Dead Eyes of London (1961), an adaptation of the novel The Dark Eyes of
London (which, incidently, Vohrer made into another film in 1968, Der
Gorilla von Soho/Gorilla
Gang), starring series regulars Joachim
Fuchsberger, Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent. The film is a typically
convoluted story about a gang of blind criminals and a home of the blind
where the police believe the head of the gang to hide out. It might be
silly as hell, but Vohrer manages to give the film an eerie atmosphere
that makes up for its far-fetched plotline. Nowadays the film is considered
by many as one of the best of the series, and since it was quite
successful back in the days - actually it was the most successsful of the series
so far -,
Rialto Film made the wise decision to keep Alfred Vohrer on the series ...
and
before the decade was over, he made another 13 (!) Edgar
Wallace-films, which made him the most proficient director of the series
by a long shot.
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Vohrer's further films for the series were Die Tür mit
den sieben Schlössern/The Door with
Seven Locks and Das Gasthaus an der Themse/The Inn on the
River (both 1962), Der Zinker/The Squeaker and Das Indische Tuch/The
Indian Scarf (both 1963), Der Hexer/The Ringer/The
Mysterious Magician/The Wizard (1964), Neues
vom Hexer/Again
the Ringer (1965), Der Bucklige von Soho/The Hunchback of
Soho (1966), Die Blaue Hand/Creature with the Blue Hand/The
Bloody Death and Der Mönch mit der Peitsche/The College Girl Murders/The Monk with
the Whip (both 1967), Der Hund von
Blackwood Castle/The Horror of Blackwood Castle, Im Banne
des Unheimlichen/The
Hand of Power/The Zombie Walks and
aforementioned Der
Gorilla von Soho/Gorilla
Gang (all 1968), and Der Mann mit
dem Glasauge/The Man with the Glass Eye/Terror on Half Moon
Street (1969).
While the first films of the series that Vohrer
directed had this wonderfully old-fashioned, almost Gothic look and were
shot in glorious black and white, later films were done in colour and
featured a more contemporary look (even if keeping up with times at times
seemed forced), and were higher and higher on gimmickry, to the point of
self parody. But despite all these
changes, by 1969 when Vohrer left the series, the market was
oversaturated, and it hardly came as a surprise when the series was
finally abandoned 3 years later - even if the collaborations with Italian
talent infused new blood into the series.
But even during the
1960's, Alfred Vohrer's career wasn't limited to Edgar Wallace - though
one wonders where he got the time to do anything else -, after the success
of The
Dead Eyes of London,
Rialto Film, entrusted their new golden boy with directing their
first ever feature in colour, Unser Haus in Kamerun (1961), a
romance/drama partially set in Cameroon. In 1964, Vohrer made the
crime drama Wartezimmer zum Jenseits/Mark
of the Tortoise/Waiting Room to the Beyond (1964), a crime drama starring Hildegard Knef and
Götz George that's based on the novel Pay Or Die by James Hadley
Chase. And also in 1964, Alfred Vohrer was
slated to take over yet another successful
Rialto-series, Winnetou. The
Winnetou-series
was a series of Westerns centered around the Apache chieftain Winnetou
(played by Pierre Brice throughout the series [Pierre
Brice bio - click here]) adapted (more or less
faithfully) from the novels of popular German writer Karl May. The Winnetou-series
first hit cinemas in 1962 with Der Schatz im
Silbersee/Treasure
of Silver Lake, directed by Harald Reinl (who incidently also
directed Fellowship of
the Frog, the first of the Edgar
Wallace series), who re-created the Old West as a romantic
adventureland in Yugoslavia - and was enormously successful in doing so,
both at the box office and concerning quality.
Reinl's subsequent films of the series, Winnetou
I/Apache Gold
(1963), Winnetou II/Last of the
Renegades (1964) and Winnetou III/Desperado Trail
(1965) were almost equally successful and of equal high quality.
Unfortunately,
unlike with the Edgar
Wallace films, Vohrer missed to grasp the essence of
the series this time around, which in part can be attributed to the lower
budgets Vohrer was given compared to Reinl's extravaganzas, in part to the
fact that he couldn't work with Lex Barker [Lex
Barker bio - click here], who was perfect as the series' dead
serious second lead Old
Shatterhand, in part to the fact that the market once again
has become oversaturated way too quickly, in part because contrary to
Reinl's fairy tale approach to the genre Vohrer' directing style more
closely resembled the traditional American B-Westerns, and in part to the fact that in
the mere two years since Der Schatz im
Silbersee was made, the genre had changed with the advent of the
Spaghetti Western (remember, Per
un Pugno di Dollari/A
Fistful of Dollars [Sergio Leone], the archetypical Spaghetti
Western was also made in 1964). So even upon their initial
release, Alfred Vohrer's Winnetou-films
looked like desperate rehashs of a bygone era - despite the fact that when
he released his first Winnetou-film
in 1964, Winnetou III,
the last great/classic film of the series, wasn't even made yet. And
then there was of course the second lead: as mentioned above,
Vohrer did not get the chance to work with Lex Barker, who played his role
straight and dead serious and has thus become an icon of the series.
Instead, Vohrer got Stewart Granger for his first two Winnetous,
Unter Geiern/Among Vultures (1964) and Old Surehand/Flaming
Frontier (1965). Now Granger was without a doubt a better, more
versatile actor than Lex Barker, but his (self-)ironic approach to his
role and the series as such sat ill at ease with the films' overall
atmosphere. For his last Winnetou-film,
Winnetou
und sein Freund Old Firehand/Thunder
at the Border (1966) it got even worse when Vohrer got Rod Cameron
as the second lead, a wooden American B-actor who proved way too old for
his role of a tough Westerner. Plus Martin Böttcher's usually romantic score -
one of the trademarks of the series as a whole - was susbstituted by a
more hard-hitting Peter Thomas-score. True, Peter Thomas was the better
composer than Böttcher, but his music sat ill at ease with the Winnetou-series.
Furthermore, an unspectacular script did not help the film one bit either. It
should come as little surprise that Winnetou
und sein Freund Old Firehand failed to succeed at the box office,
and after it,
Rialto Film gave up the
Winnetou-series
for good ...
Despite his schedule being incredibly full doing
work for
Rialto Film (series films mostly) during most of the 1960's,
Alfred Vohrer still found time to work for other producers on two
occasions:
Ein Alibi zerbricht/An Alibi for Death
(1963) is a murder mystery starring Peter Van Eyck produced by Austrian Sascha-Film,
and Artur Brauner's CCC-Filmkunst
produced Lange Beine - Lange Finger/Long Legs, Long Fingers
(1966), a crime comedy starring Joachim Fuchsberger and Senta Berger.
When
Alfred Vohrer's long run on the Edgar
Wallace series ended with Der Mann mit
dem Glasauge in 1969, so did his association with
Rialto Film ... which didn't mean he stayed out of work for too
long, because he soon hooked up with Roxy-Film to continue to make
film upon film well into the 1970's, again mostly series films, even if they
were not as memorable as his Edgar
Wallace films from the 1960's by far.
Sieben Tage
Frist/School of Fear/Seven Days Grace (1969) was Alfred
Vohrer's first film for Roxy
Film, a whodunnit starring Joachim
Fuchsberger as investigator - a role that he also played in many of
Vohrer's Edgar
Wallace films - and Horst Tappert, who was also in some of
Vohrer's Edgar
Wallace films (Der Gorilla von Soho, Der Hund
von Blackwood Castle and Der Mann mit
dem Glasauge) but would grow much more important later in his
career ... His second film for Roxy-Film though was a complete
change of pace: Herzblatt oder Wie sag ich's meiner Tochter/Heart
Break (1969) was not a Krimi at all but an erotic comedy (a genre that was back then booming
in Germany) about a father (popular German comedian Georg Thomalla) who
desperately tries to get his daughter (Mascha Gonska) interested in the
opposite sex. Vohrer stayed true to erotic comedy with his next film, Das
Gelbe Haus am Pinnasberg/The Sex Nest (1970), a film about a
brothel for women that once again starred Mascha Gonska, along with
Siegfried Schürenberg and Eddi Arent, two mainstays of - you guessed it -
the Edgar
Wallace series. Inpsektor Perrak greift ein/Perrak
(1970) is a trashy sex-and-crime film starring Horst Tappert as an
investigator of the Hamburg vice squad. The film is significant not for
its own sake but because the character of Perrak (and Tappert playing him)
is seen by many as a blueprint for Tappert's later title role in
incredibly successful crime TV-series Derrick which ran from
1974 to 1998 (!) and for which Alfred Vohrer would come to direct quite a
number of episodes.
After Perrak, Vohrer turned his back
on erotica and instead embarked on a series of adaptations of the
successful German light fiction author Johannes Mario Simmel, and within
the next few years Vohrer had directed 6 films based on books of the author: Und
Jimmy ging zum Regenbogen/And Jimmy went to the Rainbow's Foot
and Liebe ist nur ein Wort/Love is only a Word (both 1971), Der
Stoff aus dem die Träume sind/The Stuff that Dreams are Made of (1972),
Alle Menschen werden Brüder/All Men Will be Brothers and Gott
schützt die Liebenden (both 1973) and Die Antwort kennt nur der Wind/Only
the Wind Knows the Answer (1974). In all these films were mediocre
thrillers that were selling more on the popularity of the author of the
source novels than their inherent quality, but they were successes
nevertheless. Besides his Simmel-films, Alfred Vohrer also
adapted one of Alexander Pushkin's novels, Snow Storm, and made it into
Und der Regen verwischt jede Spur/Tears of Blood (1972), and he
turned a novel of popular German author of the interwar years, Erich
Kästner, into a film, Drei Männer im Schnee/Three Men in the
Snow (1974).
In 1974, Alfred Vohrer's association with Roxy
Film came to an end, but that didn't slow down Vohrer one bit: The same year,
he took a novel by another popular German light fiction author, H.G.
Konsalik - who is actually very much comparable to Johannes Mario
Simmel concerning his output -, and turned it into the movie Wer stirbt
schon gerne unter Palmen (1974). The film, produced by TV 13, bears
more than a few similarities to Vohrer's Simmel adaptations.
From
1975 onwards, Vohrer starts to work for television, first for the
above-mentioned series Derrick
- a series for which he would
direct episodes every now and again until his death in 1986 - starring
Horst Tappert as a seemingly omniscient police investigator, and from 1977
onwards, he would also direct episodes of the (somewhat similarly themed)
crime series Der Alte/The Old Fox, though
Vohrer would not explode onto the TV screen until the 1980's but
more of that later ... Despite his involvement with TV, Alfred
Vohrer did not give up on feature film just yet, he tried himself on a few
more films and even a new genre - the Heimatfilm. Heimatfilms are
essentially melodramas, dramas or sometimes even comedies set in pittoresque rural
regions, often the Alps, which work as reminders of a
time when everything was pure and simple - though the films most often
block out the hardships that these simpler times and rural life as
such brought with them. Vohrer's
two Heimatfilms were Der Edelweisskönig (1975) and Das
Schweigen im Walde (1976), both based on novels by Ludwig Ganghofer
(one of the most popular Heimat-novelists) and both produced by CTV
72. Besides these Heimatfilms, Vohrer also directed another
handful of crime dramas, Verbrechen nach Schulschluss (1975), and Jeder
stirbt für sich Allein/Everyone Dies in his Own Company and Anita
Drogemöller und die Ruhe an der Ruhr (both 1976) - the last one
starring former Paul Verhoeven-regular Monique Van De Ven in the title
role -, but eventually, Vohrer had to realize that the time for Krimis and
for Heimatfilms was over ... at least on the big screen.
In the
1980's, Alfred Vohrer moved from cinema to TV for good, where he
started out with Krimi series like Derrick
and Der
Alte (see above), but soon enough he became involved with almost every
popular series of the early to mid-1980's, regardless of genre thanks to
his incredible versatility: Weissblaue Geschichten and Hessische
Geschichten were comedic anthology series most closely related to
the Heimatfim. Traumschiff was an incredibly successful
romance series set on a cruiseship that is most closely related to the
American series Love Boat. Traumschiff specials are
actually filmed
to this day (2006).
Alfred Vohrer's most successful series of
the 1980's though was probably Die Schwarzwaldklinik/The
Black Forest Clinic, a series that ran on German television from
1985 to 1989 and that was basically a cheesy blend of hospital series,
Heimatfilm and soap opera - and thanks to his versatility as a director,
Vohrer was a perfect choice for directing the series (or at least several
episodes). Critics ridiculed the series as kitsch from the very start, but
nevertheless it received top ratings in all German speaking countries ... During his whole career as a director, Alfred Vohrer
was nothing short of a powerhouse, usually turning out two to three films
a year, and he didn't cut down on productivity when he switched to
television - so it should come as no big surprise that the very day he
died from heart-failure in 1986, he was set to direct another TV-show. Of course, life went
on without Vohrer, and no TV-series was cancelled because of his death. And
in retrospect, one can hardly call Alfred Vohrer an innovative filmmaker,
actually most of his films and especially his TV-shows can nowadays be
considered as either kitsch or trash - and many were even in their time. On
the other hand though, Vohrer was the man who carried the German Krimi
genre on his own back during the 1960's when he was doing the Edgar
Wallace films, and even if none of his films is a masterpiece,
he gave hour upon hour of enjoyment to lovers of unintentionally weird
movies the world over and continues to do so ...
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