6 - Ironizing Identity: The German Crime Genre and the Edgar Wallace Production Trend of the 1960s

Summary

From 1959 to 1972, Germany sustained a wave of some thirty-eight filmic adaptations of Edgar Wallace's crime novels, most of which were produced by Rialto Film, a Danish-German film company. The Wallace wave paralleled, in many ways, the success of the Karl may adaptations (also produced by Rialto) and remains one of Germany's most popular cultural artifacts of the postwar era. Preben Philipsen, head of the Rialto production company, filmed the first installment, entitled Der Frosch mit der Maske (The Frog with the Mask) in 1959, followed by Der rote Kreis (The Red Circle) in the same year. Although both films were made in Denmark, they targeted the German film market and were enormous box-office successes. The production was subsequently relocated to Germany, and the German Rialto was founded as a subdivision of Constantin-Film, which then exclusively distributed the Edgar Wallace films. What followed in the next fifteen years was Germany's longest feature-film series, with thirty-two films produced by Rialto.

At first sight, the relatively low production costs of each of the series' films—Der Frosch mit der Maske cost only around 600,000 DM—contrasts with the cycle's audience appeal, yet they also help to explain some of the series' generic aspects. Very few scenes and sequences were actually filmed on location in Great Britain and inserted into the films later. A great number of location shots were overdubbed and reused several times throughout the cycle.