This mid-thirties crime piece comes out of Third Reich Cinema in the period after Erich Pommer bailed and German films stopped being Art House preferred product. There appears to be no English language material that considers it. Well, it is top billed by Alfred Abel, who was once characterised to me as "the German Gielgud" and is best remembered as the father in METROPOLIS. This is the only time I recall hearing his voice, which appears rich and skilled. He doesn't speak in his fleeting appearances in The CONGRESS DANCES. I'm sure there is a story there.
Ein SELTSAMER GAST / A Strange Guest's mystery-movie poster promises suspense and atmosphere. This is enforced by an opening where the thirties car on the studio street just misses Abel in his goatee beard, floppy hat and sinister overcoat, headed to Eduard Wenck's seedy Hotel de L'Europe in pouring rain - a ringer for the opening of Michael Curtiz' silent 1921 FRAU DOROTHYS BEKENNTNIS/Mrs. Dane's Confession. In both films the promised thriller ambience fails to eventuate.
This one is set in Paris. They talk about the Luxemburg Gardens just to let you know. The action switches between the hotel with its shabby inhabitants and Jeweler Abel's (ridiculously) luxurious home, where they are about to celebrate the wedding of his daughter Ilse Petri to promising young lawyer Kurt Fischer-Fehling. Her engagement present to him turns out to be a nice new leather brief case for his legal documents while his is the heirloom necklace that master jeweler Abel recognises as having passed through his hands in years past. Complications ensue in the person of Elisabeth Wendt, the mother who abandoned the girl, and Wendt's low life associate Werner Scharf, eyeing the necklace as a chance to get rich quick in this situation.
When the necklace goes missing followed by a murder, the film bogs down in establishing the whereabouts of the characters at the time of the crimes. The investigation passes to family friend Prefect of Police Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Dr. Mabuse himself though the make-up here is closer to his Haghi, The Spy. With a couple of Fritz Lang leads and a crime movie plot, we start to expect something along the lines of noir intrigue but what we end up with is closer to Agatha Christie, offering conniving servants at the big house and the young couple leading the guests onto the dance floor for the waltz.
A couple of compositions, with suspects interrogated in bare rooms do evoke Lang momentarily and developments at the hotel occasionally spur interest - caged mice to intimidate delinquent tenants, the taxi driver and a passing car locking fenders on the studio built sidewalk, morgue attendants taking out the body under a sheet, the amateur photographer smashing a window to be able to set up incriminating pictures of lively maid Johanna Blum in a dark room, shady tenants rolling dice on the bar room counter. However these only punctuate the general tedium. Feeble comedy with the gift poodle is more characteristic.
Better might have been expected from director Gerhard Lamprecht working with Karl Hasselman the cameraman of his 1925 Die VERRUFENEN/Slums of Berlin. Lamprecht's street life silents were considered worth a Pordenone retrospective and his 1931 EMIL und die DETEKTIF/ Emile & the Detectives is cited as one of Fritz Rasp's best outings.
You'd have to strain to find anything here that connects with the then current Nazi regime but there's also nothing to redeem the tarnished reputation of 3rd Reich cinema. One for completists.
The You Tube copy is poor and has soso English titling.
