David Carradine stars
as an alcoholic, out of work Jewish circus performer who heads to Germany to
live with his dead brother’s ex-wife, played by Liv Ullmann. Meanwhile, a cagey police inspector
(Goldfinger himself Gert Frobe) thinks Carradine might’ve had a hand in his
brother’s death, not to mention some other unexplained murders. One night, Carradine heads to a brothel where
he uncovers a secret headquarters that specializes in bizarre experiments.
Most Ingmar Bergman
scholars and critics sort of look down their nose at this film and treat it as
one of his lesser works. They usually
cite the involvement of Hollywood producer Dino De Laurentiis and the use of
big name stars as the reason for its failure.
To me, this really wasn’t any better or worse than Bergman’s typical
snoozefests.
What sort of makes
this interesting is the setting. It
takes place in Germany just before Hitler’s rise to power. We’ve seen plenty of Nazisploitation movies
before, but this is a rare instance of Pre-Naziploitation. There are some elements here that would make
this fit right in with any offering of the genre (the morgue visit is pretty
gory and the brothel scene is fairly graphic).
However, you have to wait an awful long time until you get to anything
remotely gruesome or exploitative.
Carradine (the same
year he was in Deathsport) seems a bit miscast, but he’s not bad as the
sleepy-eyed acrobat. I’m not even sure
he could’ve saved this dreary mess even if he was at the top of his game. Frobe is pretty good as the police
inspector too. In the end, it’s just too
muddled and overlong to really work.
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