The Hand of Power (1968)

Another of Rialto's seemingly endless cycle of Edgar Wallace derived 'Krimi' movies, The Hand of Power (1968) is a relatively late entry in the series, boasting colour photography and some location shooting in swinging London.  Nevertheless, it still presents the series' usual interpretation of London, (and the UK in general), as a damp and fog shrouded land populated by eccentrics, upper class nincompoops, stern matrons, cheery cockney working class types and rustics.  All kept in line by laid back Scotland Yard Detective Inspectors who remain unperturbed by even the most bizarre of plot developments. Here, it is Joachim Fuchsberger's Inspector Higgins who finds himself investing the case of the 'laughing corpse', aided and abetted by a girl reporter and his incompetent, comic relief, boss Sir Arthur.  Like all of the films in this series (and, indeed, many other West  German productions of this period), The Hand of Power is essentially a B-movie.  The stylistic inspiration for the Edgar Wallace films seems to have been the Basil Rathbone starring Sherlock Holmes programmers turned out by Universal in the forties.  Although ostensibly  mystery, it has strong horror elements, much like the Holmes films.  Even the design of the sets and many of the studio exteriors look like they've been taken from the Universal backlot.  

I caught an English dub of this one, (which looked as if somebody had videoed it direct from an actual screening of the print, but had been too close to the screen, as the right hand side of the picture kept getting cut off), on a dodgy streaming service the other day.  It made for perfect late night viewing, with the murkiness of the video adding to the film's dank and fog bound atmosphere.  As befits an Edgar Wallace adaptation, red herrings proliferate bizarre characters populate the plot and there's a lot of wandering around crypts and secret passages.  Although clearly cheaply made as part of a production line of such films, it still contains some striking imagery, most notably the masked villain who wanders around in skeleton outfit, (recalling the Italian fumetti character Satanik), killing people with his scorpion ring, (the scorpion's tail springs up to inject poison into his victims).  Director Alfred Vohrer, (a veteran of the Edgar Wallace series, who went on to direct bigger budgeted thrillers and dramas in the seventies), moves it all along at a sufficient pace that you don't really have time to worry about all of the plot's implausibilities and, in spite of all the horror trappings and brutal murders, keeps the tone quite light, with Hubert Von Meyerinck's bumbling and pompous Sir Arthur providing much of the comic relief.  (Von Meyerinck returned twiec more to the series as Sir Arthur, but with Horst Tappert as Inspector Perkins replacing Fuchsberger's Inspector Higgins as the hero).  

In common with most of the Rialto Edgar Wallace series, The Hand of Power is a lot of fun if you are in the right mood: a throwback to the heyday of B-movies which also provides a fascinating foreigners' perspective on then contemporary Britain and the British.  The Rialto films also make for a fascinating contrast with the contemporaneous series of Edgar Wallace adaptations put out in the UK by Merton Studios, which are presented as straightforward crime dramas with an emphasis upon mundane realism, whereas the West German films play up the more bizarre elements, reveling in their hints of the supernatural.  I have to say that of the two, I do find the German approach of playing them like forties horror pulp stories the more entertaining.