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Manuel Aranda (Alain Noury), a young and inconspicuous man from Argentina, arrives in Vienna after receiving news that his father has been murdered there. Curiously enough, he has been poisoned by an elderly employee in a book shop, Valerie Steinfeld (Ruth Leuwerik), who then killed herself after informing the police, and who had no criminal history whatsoever. This makes Manuel very curious, and he decides to investigate more. Soon he meets and falls in love with Irene (Doris Kunstmann), niece of Valerie Steinfeld, who tries to help him in his investigations even but doesn't know much. It seems the owner of the shop Valerie worked at, Landau (Konrad Georg), knows more, but he won't tell, and his sister (Eva Zilcher) is very protective of him.

At the same time, Manuel has come iunto the crosshairs of international espionage, and the French, Russians and Americans all want to come into the possession of Manuel's dad's encoded notes as they're to contain the formula of some poison gas. However, since Manuel is under police protection, they try to dripfeed him with the backstory of Valerie Steinfeld's past to keep him in Vienna, and thus get him in touch with brothel madame Nora Hill (Judy Winter), who has been a double agent in World War II, and who was Valerie's best friend back when. Now Valerie had a son, Heinz (Franz Elkins), a model Nazi if there ever was one, but also the son of a Jew, which got him expelled from school by professor Friedjung (Paul Edwin Roth), apparently a spurned lover of Valerie's who has never gotten over the fact that she chose a Jew over him. So Valerie, Nora, Landau, and lawyer Forster (Horst Tappert) make up a scheme to Aryanize the boy by claiming in court that Landau is the actual father of Heinz. Thing is, as soon as Heinz is Aryan, he insists on going to the front to serve his Führer, and he's shot in the head only a couple of days in. Valerie has never forgiven the man who bullied her son for being a half Jew and drove her to Aryanize him, Friedjung. And of course, in the end Friedjung turns out to be Manuel's father - but as soon as he learns that, he's shot dead by one of the agents after him who have since gotten their hands on the poison gas and no more need for him.

In the 1960s, director Alfred Vohrer has been one of the key players in the then enormously popular krimi genre in Germany, especially due to his long association with the Edgar Wallace series, but as all things do, these films went out of vogue with the turn of the decade, with this film at hand being only a logical consequence of the development, A political thriller rooted much more in the then current here and now - Cold War - as well as in history - World War II -, a stark contrast to the wonderworld of the Edgar Wallace movies. As a consequence, Vohrer's directorial style is rooted more in realism and ditches all gimmickry and self irony of the later entries into above series - and the result shows very solid craftsmanship with the occasional moment of kitsch, on the directorial side of things. When it comes to the script (and truth to be told, I haven't read the source novel, a bestseller in the German language market in its time), one can't denie that the film is terribly convoluted, and it seems the two narrative strains (the Cold War and the World War II one) are forced together for maximum impact rather than grown out of the story, especially since its never clear why Manuel Aranda is such an important figure in the bigger scheme of things or why he has to be killed. Now sure, while the story's told, it flows very nicely, but one can't help feeling it asks more questions than it ever bothers to answer, just for suspense's sake.

The result of all of this is an ok thriller, especially when seen through the glasses of nostalgia, but not something that's really memorable in any way.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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