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London: Mary Wilkins is killed, apparently by the Strangler of the
Tower (Ady Berber), and her daughter Jane (Christa Linder) is
kidnapped, but not before revealing to police inspector Harvey (Hans
Reiser) that the killer was apparently after the Parvati emerald her
mother owned ... It takes the inspector quite a while to find out what
the Parvati emerald actually is, because the only book on the subject is
stolen from the public library: The Parvati emerald was an emerald from
India, consecrated to the goddess Kali, but then explorer Livingstone
(Gerhard Geisler) found and stole it, split it into five pieces and sold
them. But while the inspector has tried to figure that out, the other
owners of the pieces of the Parvati emerald - a writer (Kai Fischer), a
horse breeder (Alfred Schlageter), a rich socialite (Ellen Schwiers) and
jeweller Clifton (Charles Regnier) - drop like flies, all killed by the
strangler, who's apparently backed by a brotherhood of hooded man who want
to return the Parvati emerald to India in one piece. Interestingly enough,
while they kill everybody else in their way, they keep Jane alive and want
to force her to become a nun in India. Eventually, the Strangler of
the Tower is revealed to be nothing but a contract killer for the
Brotherhood, that by the way really resides in the catacombs below the
Tower ... but in even deeper catacombs lives explorer Livingstone himself,
who has put the strangler on his payroll too, to ensure the Parvati
emeralds get delivered directly to him. After the job is done, Livingstone
shoots the strangler in cold blood. Eventually, it turns out that the
police has infiltrated the Brotherhood, and when they force its leader to
unmask, they find him to be jeweller Clifton, who hasn't died after all
but killed his twin brother in his stead, and isn't interested in
returning the emerald to India but in smuggling it to Rio. But Livingstone
soon kills Clifton, then takes off in a boat over River Thames - a boat
that is sunk, and thus Livingstone takes the reunited Parvati emerald, all
of it, with him to his watery grave ... or does he? Nope, Clifton's
wallflowerish secretary (Ruth Jecklin) has long gotten wind of her boss's
sinister business ventures, has substituted all the Parvati emeralds with
fakes, and is now travelling to Rio herself with the real ones ... An
obvious attempt to cash in on Rialto's
Edgar Wallace series, this is your typical thriller/murder
mystery based on a symplistic yet overconvoluted storyline, garnered with
all the typical pulp elements, like stranglers, hooded killers, weird
brotherhoods, strippers (no nudity here though), and a very clichéed
portrayal of British society. All of this doesn't make a great, not
even a particularly good movie, but it's at least some (nostalgic) fun to
watch nevertheless.
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