‘Stop thinking about mermaids and look over there.’
The hundred-dollar gang run a thriving protection racket in New York. However, when they resort to murder, they come to the attention of the FBI and their top agent, Jerry Cotton…
The second of the series of borderline Eurospy adventures starring George Nader as the FBI’s finest. Harald Phillipp directs this West German-French co-production, which features a cast including series regulars Heinz Weiss and Richard Münch.
An organisation selling protection is terrorising small business owners in New York. However, restaurant owner Giuseppe (Dirk Dautzenberg) won’t toe the line and gets a bullet for his pains and a quick trip to the morgue. The murder takes place in the back of his place, but young Billy (Uwe Reichmeister) is watching from the alley outside. The case lands on the desk of FBI chief John High (Münch), who assigns it to top operative Cotton (Nader) and his regular partner, Phil Decker (Weiss). The first step is to interview other local business owners targeted by the gang and ask for help, but no one will cooperate. Eventually, however, Nader convinces garage owner Sophie Latimore (Elke Neidhart) to let Weiss go undercover and operate her business so he can be on hand to deal with the gang’s frontman, Alec Korsky (Slobodan Dimitrijevic).
Meanwhile, Reichmeister has had no luck in getting the authorities to listen to him, but the gang have identified him as an eyewitness to the Dautzenberg killing. They try to rub out the youngster on the street with a small bomb, but he survives and, worse still, they make the attempt in front of Neidhart’s garage with Nader and Weiss nearby. Nader gives chase, and eventually, the trail leads to the Goldfish Club, a nightspot with the added attraction of scantily clad women swimming in a huge water tank. Nader pegs owner Wilma de Loy (Silvia Solar) as the one pulling the hoodlums’ strings but quickly suspects she’s answering to a mysterious Mr Big, operating from the shadows.
The Jerry Cotton film series often gets included in the Eurospy conversation, although its espionage credentials are pretty slim. Nader might be a special agent, but his opponents were generally criminal gangs whose agenda focused on profit rather than world domination. In that regard, this entry is probably the least outlandish of the lot, with the villains out to turn a quick buck out of organised extortion. As a result, the stakes seem pretty low compared to the adventures of other ‘Bonds on a Budget’ working in Europe at the time. Fortunately, it’s not entirely a dead loss, and it could be argued that the more grounded feel makes it one of the better of the black-and-white entries in the series. A switch to colour with ‘Murderers Club of Brooklyn/Der Mörderclub von Brooklyn’ (1967) signalled far more ambition later on.
So, the script by K.B. Leder and Herbert Reinecker may lack inspiration, but director Phillip turns it into an efficient enough crime thriller with some positive aspects. In particular, a couple of decent stunts impress, particularly the one where Nader’s stand-in leaps from a building as a box of dynamite detonates, blowing out the top floor. A chase through an abandoned factory is also nicely shot, with one of the gang coming to a particularly gruesome end in a coal bin. Some of the action scenes also feature some excellent stunt driving, although the proximity of a gravel pit to a private airfield seems a little unlikely. As usual with the series, the film struggles to convince the audience of the authenticity of its New York setting, employing a lot of stock footage of the Big Apple’s crowded streets. It is also possible to date the stock footage as a movie marquee is advertising Lon Chaney biopic ‘The Man with a Thousand Faces’ (1957), which starred James Cagney.
The production was not finished with their local reasonably priced film library either. There’s a lot of ‘behind the scenes’ law enforcement procedural footage involving ballistics tests, fingerprint checking and lab work. However, Philip is careful to have Nader check in with the forensics boys, which helps. What’s thankfully missing is a lot of the amateurish process work that marred a lot of the series. Yes, there are a couple of scenes where Nader is sat in a mockup car in front of a movie screen playing background footage, but they are mercifully brief compared to their ubiquity in some of the other entries. The film’s most ridiculous moment is actually a story beat: Reichmeister getting into harm’s way when he’s tempted out of hiding by a television commercial for cornflakes! It’s not only very silly, but it ties into the climax in a way that gives new meaning to the word contrivance.
Given the film’s vintage, it’s unsurprising that the female roles are not very complex or well-written. Despite prominent billing, Monika Grimm gets barely a look-in as Münch’s right-hand woman, and Solar’s character is a one-note ice queen who obviously can’t be the head of the gang (she’s only a woman, after all). Neidhart’s plucky garage owner is potentially far more interesting, and she enjoys some playful banter with Nader, which is unusual for the series. She also insists on being involved in the investigation, and although it’s pleasing that she doesn’t end up as the stereotypical damsel in distress, she doesn’t contribute anything noteworthy either. Cotton never made the ‘Bond’ grade in the bedroom department, and it’s interesting to speculate whether this was a production choice or whether it was the result of Nader’s status as an openly gay man.
Some way down the cast list is Swiss-born actor Paul Muller, who became a familiar face on European movie screens over half a century after debuting in the French-Italian co-production ‘Ruy Blas (1948). A significant role in Roberto Rossellini’s ‘Voyage to Italy/Viaggio in Italia’ (1954) meant appearing with Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, and he starred in Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava’s ‘I vampiri/Lust of the Vampire’ (1956). Minor roles in Hollywood epics such as ‘El Cid’ (1962) and ‘Barrabas’ (1962) helped with the bank balance, but he co-starred with Barbara Steele in ‘Nightmare Castle/Amanti d’oltretomba/The Faceless Monster (1965). Always busy, he returned to the Jerry Cotton series in ‘Murderers Club of Brooklyn/Der Mörderclub von Brooklyn (1967) but is better remembered now for his horror roles. ‘Malenka/Fangs of the Living Dead’ (1969) was followed by Jess Franco’s ‘Count Dracula’ (1970) with Christopher Lee and cult favourite ‘Lady Frankenstein’ (1971). Muller only began to slow down in the 1990s when he approached his seventies and closed out his account at the age of 81 with the French comedy ‘Touristes? Oh yes!’ (2004).
A pretty standard crime thriller, professionally delivered.