Monday, March 31, 2008

Hotel der toten Gäste (1965, Germany/Spain)

Eberhard Itzenplitz garnered his first experience in films as an assistant director in the late 1950s – he even worked on the classic German movie Das Totenschiff (1959) – before going onto a long career as a television director. Hotel der toten Gäste is one of the few films he has ever directed that was actually made for general theatrical release. Featuring a catchy title – it translates literally into "Hotel of Dead Guests" – and one of the best and most haunting film melodies ever recorded by Gert Wilden (Germany’s semi-forgotten master of low-budget music), the movie is an unbearably boring piece of celluloid, a complete waste of the film material used to make it. Before spending your hard-earned Euro to rent the DVD to this sleep-inducing flick, you would be much better advised to put the dough towards buying the Crippled Dick Hot Wax CD release of selected Wilden movie tunes entitled I Told You Not to Cry or Schulmädchen Report. Amongst the numerous masterpieces of sleazedom and B-filmdom music found on the CD I Told You Not to Cry is the tune Beware, a slower and more haunting version of which threads its way through many a scene of this movie.
Oddly enough, despite the lack of a track record as director, Itzenplitz’s film features some pretty big German names for its day. Aside from a short guest appearance of an attractive, young, and well-coiffured Elke Summer, the leads are Karin Dor and Joachim Fuchsberger, both of which were at the high-point of their popularity when the movie was made. Karin Dor was so popular at the time that she even had a nickname in the popular press: "Miss Krimi." Still, despite her popularity within her own country and her eventual appearance in a few big, international productions – namely, You Only Live Twice (1967) and Topaz (1969) – her star was just beginning to wane by the time this film was made. (Nowadays she splits her time between occasional TV and theatre productions in Germany and her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband the stunt director George Robotham.) In Hotel der toten Gäste, Fuchsberger gives one of his typically smooth performances, but unlike normal Dor comes across much too uptight and bitchy to be very likeable. As, in fact, all the females are in the movie.
Based on Heather Gardiner’s novel Die rote Vase ("The Red Vase"), the movie is a German/Spanish co-production. Most of the movie supposedly takes place at a hotel in San Remo, Italy during a celebrated and famous annual "Schlager Festival," but the action is so interior bound that little in the movie feels "Italian." (For those of you not in the know, Schlager is the European equivalent of the music your "un-hip" parents or grandparents used to listen to in the 1960s. The word itself is usually translated into "pop tune," but the music it describes is less The Beatles or Madonna than Englebert, Vicki Carr, Connie Francis or any other of the numerous has-beens that now haunt the budget-priced polyester-flavored lounge shows in Las Vegas. (Real Schlager, however, is less "loungy" than simply "lousy.") Whereas this type of music has generally been forgotten in most English speaking countries, Schlager remains an important aspect of the music industry in both Germany and Italy, if not Europe in general. Good examples of German Schlager music at its best/worst is anything by Heino, selected cover versions by James Last Orchestra and the unbelievably atrocious Hammond organ interpretations by Franz Lambert. Elke Summer’s appearance in the movie is actually not even a speaking part: she sings a song as an example of a performance at the festival.)
Hotel der toten Gäste begins it tale in London, where reporter Barney Blair (Joachim Fuchsberger) finds a hotel detective from San Remo dead in his office. He travels down to the hotel, where fellow reporter Gilly Powell (Karin Dor) is already staying. The successful Schlager record producer Ruth Cornell (Gisela Uhlen) is debuting her new star at the festival, but before she can do so, she gets strangled. Of course, everyone at the hotel from her brother Larry (Frank Latimore) to a spurned ex-star singer to Ruth’s husband to Gilly herself could possibly have a motive. In no short order another two murders occur, all seemingly directly related to the Ruth’s missing, fabulously expensive brooch which Gilly just happens to discover in the flower vase in her hotel room…
Considering the amount of murders and soap opera aspects in the movie, one would expect Hotel der toten Gäste to feature at least a little action, but it doesn’t. A dull talkathon, the few scenes which might have lent themselves to a little life are killed by Itzenplitz’s static, unexceptional direction – it is really no surprise that he went into television, for as director his visual flare is nada. As a mystery, the movie is a flop as well, for the identity of Ruth’s murder is easy to figure out. That there is a second murderer at work as well is a little more than a contrived attempt to add more mystery to the entire proceedings…
Despite the catchy name, the cool music and the numerous name stars (and co-stars) of the decade, Hotel der toten Gäste is anything but a forgotten classic of the Golden Age of German B-Films. In fact, it is more like one of the forgotten big disappointments of that decade…

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