Films based on works by Edgar Wallace

Aside from the Rialto productions, other Edgar Wallace adaptations in a similar style were made by the West Germans Artur Brauner and Kurt Ulrich as well as the British producer Harry Alan Towers.

As early as the silent movie era, German film producers discovered that the novels of Edgar Wallace were easily adapted to the screen.

Due to the perceived unpopularity of the crime genre in West Germany at that time, however, no film producer willing to take such a risk could be found, delaying the project until 1959.

Rialto soon acquired the exclusive rights to nearly all the Wallace novels, founded a West German subsidiary company and, unconcerned by the many copycat productions by others, moved towards the artistic and commercial peak of the series in the early 1960s.

Beginning with Der grüne Bogenschütze (The Green Archer, 1960/61), the leading examples of the genre were produced by Horst Wendlandt and directed by Alfred Vohrer or Harald Reinl.

Many of these Edgar Wallace krimis featured secretive, flamboyant, super villains whose faces were sometimes hidden from view, an archetype which would later become a staple of spy films in the mid-to-late 1960s.

Shady characters were mostly played by Fritz Rasp, Pinkas Braun, Harry Wüstenhagen and especially Klaus Kinski, while comic relief was offered by Eddi Arent, Siegfried Schürenberg and later Hubert von Meyerinck or Chris Howland.

Additionally, well-known film and stage actors like Elisabeth Flickenschildt, Gert Fröbe, Dieter Borsche, Lil Dagover, Karin Dor and Rudolf Forster repeatedly appeared in important guest roles.

The location of the story is, like in the novels, mostly London and its proximity, with the characters mostly moving through old castles, mansions or country houses – even if the sets were actually in West Germany.

The motivations for the crimes are mostly greed, revenge, legacy hunting, and, especially in later movies, things like white slavery and the drug trade.

Not unlike the later Italian subgenre of Giallo, the Wallace Krimi movies heavily revolve around the work of the police or a private investigator.

The movies are still very well known in Germany today and there are frequent reruns of them on television – even if a large part of their appeal is their high camp factor.

[8] (Note* - The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Das Geheimnis der schwarzen Handschuhe/ Secret of the Black Gloves) (1970), the last of the CCC Filmkunst productions, was falsely marketed in West Germany as being based on a story by Bryan Edgar Wallace, but was actually adapted from Fredric Brown's novel, The Screaming Mimi.