Kong, Crime, and the Passage of Time: The Everlasting Pulp of Edgar Wallace
by Anders Runestad
Scripting King Kong should be enough glory for anyone, but Edgar Wallace pulled off the famous monster movie’s first draft at the end of an already brilliant writing career. An incredibly prolific bestselling English author of popular mystery fiction, Wallace left behind more novels, stories, plays and other writing than most anyone will ever read, or probably read while he was alive. While some might sneer at that as hack work (thanks to the enduring fallacy that industrious writers are somehow lesser writers), a cursory look within Wallace’s bibliography shows that he could write as well as anyone. Certainly he was a master of plot twists, incognito villains, stately old domiciles as a setting and, in general, just not boring the reader. Whether one personally cares for his mysteries and other genre fiction is, of course, merely a matter of taste.
But suffering the fate of some of the most successful writers in life, Wallace’s fame has not endured so fully to the present. As Michael Mallory opined in a Mystery Scene essay (Summer Issue #130), Wallace may have been limited by not creating an enduring series character as iconic as Sherlock Holmes. And when King Kong-derived films in the present give him an onscreen credit because of that initial Kong script, it becomes undeniable that the most famous franchise associated with Edgar Wallace is that of the lovelorn giant ape of Skull Island.
Yet movie adaptations of Wallace’s fiction are not few and far between, and did not dry up after his death. For while a sellable name never hurts a movie’s box office, filmmakers only need a solid story from which to construct a watchable film. Wallace himself was apparently that filmmaker a couple of times, as his credits show that he directed The Squeaker and Red Aces in 1930, while he also followed the more conventional path of letting others film his writing, at least as far back as 1915. There were dozens of movies adapted from or scripted by Wallace by the time of his death in 1932, and even more thereafter. But in a unique twist, this quintessentially English writer who had experienced life in the far-flung British Empire, would be adapted in a long-running series of German crime thrillers, dubbed krimi as a subgenre. But for all his success, just what did Wallace inspire onscreen outside of Kong? And are there other high points to be noted in his cinematic legacy?
The most notable adaptation in Wallace’s lifetime may have been The Green Archer, a silent 1925 version of his 1923 novel of the same name that showed considerable longevity among Wallace’s many works. A mostly now missing serial film of ten episodes, the 1925 version was sonically superseded by a 1940 adaptation that brought the story into the sound era and was, once more, a serial rather than a feature. (Since the original novel had been chopped into magazine installments, it may have seemed the most logical way to film it.) Adapted a third time as part of Germany’s streak of Wallace movies in 1961, this time it was a feature but, like its previous adaptations featured a Wallace staple, that of the mysterious mastermind villain, in this case the title character. It’s possible that none of The Green Archer films are among the best cinema he inspired, but they do form a representative sample of Wallace that bridges the silent and sound eras, and even his unlikely German renaissance in the 1960s.
But Wallace crossed over with another cinema legend besides King Kong, and one who gives him an entrée into horror. The Dark Eyes of London was a British production that would be picked up in the United States by Monogram, and released as The Human Monster in 1939. Lugosi was on the cusp of his Poverty Row decade, moving from 1930s stardom at Universal to a string of nine Monogram productions in the 1940s, with a memorable stop along the way at Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), playing a deceptively benign doctor in The Devil Bat (1940). Shortly before, Lugosi was portraying a deceptively benign insurance agent in the multi-titled 1939 Wallace adaptation. (The same novel was later, naturally, given its own German adaptation.) An effective and atmospheric bit of old school horror, The Human Monster is better than much of what Lugosi did at Monogram, where he was sometimes used as the bad guy in comedies. In particular, starring in a Wallace adaptation allowed Lugosi to step outside the mad scientist archetype a bit, for while it’s basically a horror film, its origins in crime fiction keep it down in the realm of the everyday. There’s not a lot mad science here, but a great deal of human evil.
Despite lacking an iconic series character in his oeuvre, Wallace would become a bit of a posthumous series character all by himself. When the German krimi thrillers rolled out from the late 1950s through the 1960s, Wallace’s name became a sort of brand name in German cinema, a shorthand for this type of movie. Having passed on in 1932, Wallace could not appear in these films, but the phenomenon isn’t unlike the way Alfred Hitchcock developed an onscreen persona in cameos and TV host spots that represented his work. And toward the end of the Wallace krimi cycle was Creature with the Blue Hand (1967), set in a mental hospital with a masked killer on the loose. Along for the ride are a huge cast of characters, between the law and a wealthy old family, many of them potentially the wielder of the massive blue metal glove used to off a number of victims before wrong is righted and the truth is revealed.
Fans of krimi will debate what film is the best or worst, but Blue Hand is an entertaining example. The groovy ‘60s opening credits music (set over stills from later in the movie) gets repeated at incongruous times in the movie itself. A roomful of rats is apparently not a dire enough threat for one intended victim, and so giant snakes are introduced. Despite being adapted and filmed in Germany, the film is still deliberately intended to be very British, with a goofy chief inspector on hand and a portrait of the Queen on the wall. And Klaus Kinski, pre-70s Werner Herzog era, is in the cast, playing twin brothers with some inevitable mistaken identity problems along the way. But for all the (maybe unintended) weirdness, Blue Hand is a decent whodunit in the end, and having so many characters milling around ensures a lack of boredom.
And certainly Edgar Wallace understood that principle well. Besides an obsession with hidden bad guys, there is a commonality throughout his film adaptations that any audience will understand danger and enjoy the vicarious experience of overcoming it. And if it may be difficult to pick a true high point, there may not also be low points. Wallace did what any good fiction writer does in any medium, and put the right characters into a situation where their predicament will sustain interest until the story’s end. Little wonder, then, that his work could keep inspiring so much interest after many had forgotten his name.
Creature with the Blue Hand will be released on Blu-ray on October 22, 2024 from Film Masters. Learn more here.
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