The Phantom of Soho            

Pin ball, sin hall, minds in free fall

Chocolate-coloured ladies making eyes through the smoke-pall

Soho (needless to say)

I'm alone on your streets on a Friday evening

I've been here all of the day

I'm going nowhere with nowhere to go



Poor old wino turns with dust in his eyes

Begs for the dregs from the bottom of the kegs, man

You've never seen a lady lay down and spread her legs like

Soho (needless to say)

I'm alone on your sheets on a Friday evening

I've been here all of the day

I'm going nowhere with nowhere to go


Al Stewart


This Krimi is set in the Red Light area of Soho where the fog always seems to be swirling around like the barely-clad women on stage at the Zanzibar. If you see something you like, it is only a short walk across the street to a hotel where the rooms are rented out by the hour. Or less depending. Men cavort and eventually go home when they are satisfied either from the watered-down booze or the friendly come-ons. But lately not all men get what they want. Instead, they find themselves at the sharp end of a long blade. This feels like a precursor to the Giallos of the next decade. An unknown, unseen killer is coming out of the fog with a shiny new blade to murder a series of men and then leaving money in their pocket.  The morgue is getting busy. Chief Inspector Patton (Dieter Borsche) and his boss Sir Philip (Hans Söhnker) seem to have no clue how to stop this killer. Not even when the famous female crime author Clarinda (Barbara Rütting) begins looking into it for her next book. Both men seem as interested in her as they do in finding the killer.


The Zanzibar Club is where it is all happening - a cozy evening away from home and the wife - as strippers show their assets, an Arab throws knives at a women spinning around on a pin wheel, a lovely photographer (Helga Sommerfeld) walks around in a bikini talking men into a picture - who could say no - and behind the glass mirror the owner (Elisabeth Flickenschildt) sits in her wheelchair spinning her webs of deceit, hiding her scars and seeing everything along with her roly-poly doctor (Werner Peters) who stands like an obedient dog at her side. The real star of the film though is the set designer Hans Jürgen Kiebach, who won an Oscar for the sets on Cabaret. He creates an insulated world of bars, narrow streets, blinking neon, lust, women in windows and in the shadows entreating men to say yes.


Over this in the opening scene floats the soft vocals of Tanja Berg with a tune that could have come from the pen of Brecht and Weill. Shot in crisp black and white and directed by Franz Josef Gottlieb (The Black Abbott, The Secret of the Black Widow, The Curse of the Hidden Vault and of course our favorites Swedish Wife Exchange and Hot Hungry School Girls). It could have been paced a bit faster and confuses itself when the killer is finally revealed, but this is one of the better Krimis that I have seen so far.

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