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"Billie" Wilder's name is on the script and at once Buddy Buddy is visible, the neurotic and the assassin. The meek Berliner (Heinz Rühmann) stands before a mirror and puts a pistol to his temple, he's interrupted by the burglar (Raimund Janitschek) who knows a business opportunity when he sees one. ("None of my business, dear sir," fifteen grand changes his mind.) Turning a suicide into a homicide calls for the proper contract, the deed is to be a surprise sometime between midnight and noon, "more pleasant for both parties this way." A mordant Ufa anecdote, Robert Siodmak at the helm, Curt Siodmak and Friedrich Hollaender and Franz Waxman along for the ride. The schnook carries a chalky mark on the back of his suit in a parody of M, at the Knock Out Bar the vivacious blonde (Lien Deyers) asks for a dance as a way to ditch a handsy date. The time bomb purloined by a pickpocket, the dark room that foils the sniper on the roof, the phony patient in the runaway ambulance—Edwards in his Pink Panther films profits mightily from such shenanigans. Mock-Brecht with the hoodlum association, "Weisse Weste," a 360° pan of warbling mugs. The killing is subleased, the famed Man with the Scar (Hermann Speelmans) takes over. Trakl's "The Horror" ("There I am alone with my murderer") as brackish slapstick, the bespectacled prey and the barrel-chested hunter locked in the same jail cell. "Just wait for the punchline!" A Looney Tunes stick of dynamite for the finish, the surreal bonus is a wedding amid smoldering ruins. With Hans Leibelt, Gerhard Bienert, and Greta Keller. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |