The next installment of my Eastercon report is coming, but I’ve also been blogging elsewhere.
For starters, I was at File 770, reviewing the first few movie figures from the new Masters of the Universe Chronicles collectors line, which will apparently replace Masterverse. This review only covers the three Heroic Warriors, namely He-Man himself, Man-at-Arms and Battle Cat. Part 2 will cover the three Evil Warriors released in the first two waves of movie figures, namely Skeletor, Trap-Jaw and Tri-Klops. We decided to split the review into two parts, because it was long anyway and besides one of the figures from the second wave, Trap-Jaw, hasn’t been delivered yet.
My more formal toy review – with size comparisons and a detailed look at the packaging and of course the “But can they kiss?” test – mainly go to File 770, because Mike likes publishing my toy reviews, where toy photo stories go here. And yes, there will definitely be more of those, when I find the time to do them. Also expect to see more movie toys – either here or at File 770 – since Mattel is producing a lot of those. And yes, I will probably also do a post analysing the latest trailers and featurettes about the upcoming Masters of the Universe live action film.
In other news, I was also at Galactic Journey, reviewing And Jimmy Went to the Rainbow, a bonkers spy thriller cum melodrama that is very typical of early 1970s West German cinema. There are also reviews of the horror comedy The Abominable Doctor Phibes (which I remember enjoying quite a bit, though I also haven’t seen it in ages), the Muppet fairytale film The Frog Prince, the avantgarde surreal erotic movie Pink Narcissus and another horror movie called Simon, King of the Witches. It is a weird selection of movies and in a way also very exemplary of the doldrums of western cinema in the early to mid 1970s, when TV had fully taken over in most western countries and movie theatre audiences were dropping a lot. For a while, it seemed as if studios were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. As a result, there were a lot of very strange movies, some of which were good, many of which were not. Plus, the sexual revolution had led to relaxed censorship standards, so early 1970s movies included a lot of sex regardless of genre, cause sex was one of the things which reliably drew audiences into movie theatres.
As for the movie I reviewed, it initially wasn’t a movie I was looking forward to. The main reason I agreed to review it is because it is borderline SFF (the plot is kicked off when a chemist who has developed a new chemical weapon and wants to sell it to the highest bidder is murdered) and because it is very typical of early 1970s West German cinema. Because Johannes Mario Simmel adaptations were to the first half of the 1970s what Edgar Wallace adaptations were to the 1960s to the point that some of the same people – most notably director Alfred Vohrer – were working on both. However, in my view the Simmel adaptations were a huge step down after the brilliant Edgar Wallace movies. See my dismissive remarks about the Simmel movies here.
Now Johannes Mario Simmel was a staple of West German bookshelves in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – along with Heinz G. Konsalik, Marie Louise Fischer and Uta Danella. Every shelf wall unit in every living room seemed to have books by these four authors, usually the Bertelsmann Book Club editions. My Mom had all of them. I inherited a whole shelf full of Marie Louise Fischer as well as plenty of Simmel and Uta Danella and some Konsalik, too. And yes, I read books by all of them – usually when I had run out of other reading material and was bored.
As an adult, I’d say that Simmel was probably the best of the bunch, though as a teen, his “ripped from the headlines” (headlines from before my time, at that) plots, the melodramatic romances, which inevitably seemed to end tragically and his unique journalistic style irritated me as did the obsessions with WWII and Nazis that both Simmel and Konsalik had – though for very different reasons. As for the Simmel movies, teen Cora found these just incredibly dull. There were seemingly endless blurry scenes of couples running around who would break up anyway in the end plus random revelations of deep dark secrets, which mostly weren’t that thrilling or shocking to me.
When I looked at which movies, TV shows, songs, events were coming up in Journey time, I realised that the era of the Simmel movie was about to start and that I should probably review one of them, because they were so very typical of the early 1970s downfall of West German cinema. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to (re)watching And Jimmy Went to the Rainbow (cause I’m honestly not sure if I watched it before or not, since the Simmel movies all feel kind of similar to me), but to my surprise I wound up enjoying it more than I thought I would. The romantic scenes shot through a vaseline smeared lens were still irritating and overly long – and it’s odd that I mainly remember those – but I did enjoy the spy thriller plot and – to my own amazement – the Nazi era flashbacks, too.
Besides, it is notable that though West Germany in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s didn’t really want to hear anything about the Third Reich – the “Nazis all the time” rememberance culture which dominated my childhood and teenage years didn’t really become a thing until the late 1970s and 1980s – they were perfectly willing to read about the Third Reich and Nazis being evil and destroying lives, when a popular author like Johannes Mario Simmel wrote about it and a popular director like Alfred Vohrer made movies about it. This isn’t even Vohrer’s only Third Reich movie either – he also adapted Every Man Dies Alone by Hand Fallada a few years later. It’s also worth noting that both Simmel and Vohrer were at risk of Nazi persecution and worse – Simmel, because his father was Jewish (the plight of Valerie Steinfeld who has to denounce her Jewish husband to protect her son in And Jimmy Went to the Rainbow was that of Simmel’s mother) and Vohrer, because he was gay.
And Jimmy Went to the Rainbow also has an insanely star-studded cast. For starters, there is Ruth Leuwerik, the darling of postwar West German cinema and my Mom’s favourite actress, and the movie makes this paragon of wholesomeness, who played Maria von Trapp and Queen Louise of Prussia among others, say “anal sex” multiple times, which I imagine must have been shocking in 1971. Coincidentally, this was her penultimate film role and Ruth Leuwerik had been mostly retired after popularity waned in the early 1960s, though she did live until 2016. She obviously wasn’t lacking for money, since she was very selective about her roles in the last half of her life, so Ruth Leuwerik clearly must have wanted to play this role. Ruth Leuwerik’s former husband Herbert Fleischmann also appears in the movie as a French agent.
Furthermore, we have two future TV detectives, Derrick-to-be Horst Tappert as a lawyer, and Tatort investigator-to-be (he will actually debut later in 1971) Klaus Schwarzkopf as an assassin. Legendary film and TV villain Horst Frank, known to every kid of the 1970s as the man who bought Timm Thaler‘s smile (and was actually the devil in disguise), plays an SS-officer. Another legendary movie villain, Jochen Brockmann, who played the criminal mastermind the Masked Frog in the Edgar Wallace adaptation Face of the Frog, also shows up. Two up and coming actresses, Judy Winter and Doris Kunstmann, give very early performances, though Judy Winter as a brothel madam and double agent is more impressive than Doris Kunstmann as the female half of the vaseline smeared romance. We also get Friedrich G. Beckhaus, who played astrogator Atan Shubashi aboard the space cruiser Orion 7 and voiced Captain Future’s robot pal Grag in the 1979 anime, as a sadistic Nazi judge who also utters the word “anal sex” several times. We also get two more voice acting legends in Peter Pasetti and Karl Walter Diess, who would voice Skeletor and Man-at-Arms respectively in the German Masters of the Universe audio dramas of the 1980s. Here they play two spies who conspired to assassinate French heartthrob Alain Noury, who never had a big break, though he is certainly easy on the eyes.
In short, this was clearly a high budget movie with a star-studded cast and a very good director. It was also pretty bonkers, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would and I guess I now have a better appreciation for the popularity of the Johannes Mario Simmel adaptations of the early 1970s. Though to be fair, I also picked one of the better ones. The next Johannes Mario Simmel adaptation, Liebe ist nur ein Wort (Love is only a word), seems to be a lot more painful. It’s basically The Graduate – young college student has an affair with an older married woman – with an unhappy ending. And yes, I know lots of people believe that The Graduate didn’t have a happy ending either, but I always found it super romantic. Meanwhile, the kid in Love is only a word kills himself in the end.
As for Johannes Mario Simmel himself, his work was reevaluated in his later years and is no longer considered just popular trash, because a new generation of critics realised that Simmel was actually very clever about addressing serious subjects amidst all the melodramatic soap opera stuff and spy thriller intrigue.
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