Paradoxically, the series’ trademark aesthetics – its black-and-white cinematography, low-key lighting and its stylised depiction of Gothic mansions and a gang-infested, foggy London – are what have ensured its longevity, but critical takes on the material have all too often marginalised these aspects. Both of these aspects make it necessary to include the formal level in my analysis. By the same token, I want to argue that the tendencies towards internationalisation that some commentators have aligned exclusively to the series’ later years, when the Wallace films were absorbed into the Italian giallo craze of the 1970s, can be detected several years before that.
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It is my aim not just to highlight how the Edgar Wallace films work as adaptations, but also to argue for the transcultural quality of the series, which goes far beyond the frequently ridiculed ways in which it mines contemporary Anglophilia to subliminally work through national neuroses.
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There have been far fewer efforts to explore the Wallace films as adaptations 2 and to unpack their transcultural baggage, even though it is clear from watching almost any film in the series that there is far too much eclectic internationalism and spatio-temporal flexibility here to simply classify the Wallace films as ‘Germanised’ versions of English source material, or as mere attempts to transplant 1920s crime stories into the post-war context. The films are viewed as emblematic of the transitional period of the 1960s and characterised as indicative of an overarching paradigm shift in the national mentality throughout this decade (see Bliersbach Grob Schneider). 1 There have been numerous critical studies of the Wallace films, often as part of a sociology of German cinema, with a distinct emphasis on the films’ ideological subtexts (see Bergfelder Gerhards). No other franchise is as fondly remembered and paid tribute to in German popular culture as frequently no other series of films ran for so long and remained profitable for more than a decade. The West-German Edgar Wallace films of the 1960s are without a match in the history of German cinema. Transculturality in the West-German Edgar Wallace Series Wieland Schwanebeck
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