The naked woman and Satan
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The naked woman and Satan |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1959 |
| length | 96 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Victor Trivas |
| script | Victor Trivas |
| production | Wolf C. Hartwig |
| music | Willy Mattes |
| camera | Georg Krause |
| cut | Friedel Buckow |
| occupation | |
| |
The Naked and Satan is a German horror film by Rapid-Film GmbH, Munich, from 1959 by Victor Trivas . The main male roles were played by Horst Frank and Michel Simon .
action
The unscrupulous and ambitious Dr. One evening Ood wants to meet the brilliant scientist Prof. Dr. Visit Abel. Before entering his house, Ood sees the hump-backed and handicapped nurse Irene Sander entering Prof. Abel's house. At the open window he overhears a conversation between Irene and Abel's assistant Dr. Burke, her cousin. The point there is that Abel should soon operate on the young, misshapen woman. After the sister leaves the house, Ood enters Abel's property. Ood explains to Abel, in whose presence the surgeon Burke and Abel's laboratory assistant Bert Jäger are also present, that he has followed Abel's work on the transplantation of body parts with great interest. Shortly before, Abel had succeeded in a sensational experiment: he had separated the head of a dog from its torso and kept it alive artificially for the next four months using an apparatus he had constructed. From the beginning, Dr. Burke the strange colleague Ood, whose origin and wrong name raise questions, more than suspect. He points out the weak heart of the professor to Ood, but he only replies that he is here to work. Then Ood leaves Abel's villa and goes to the Tam-Tam bar.
There the attractive striptease dancer Lilly appears, jealously guarded by her lover, the less successful artist and sculptor Paul, for whom she is a model. Obviously, Ood chose Lilly for a specific misdeed. Back in Prof. Abel's laboratory, this one shows Ood and Burke his x-ray and that of another man. It is an accident victim. Abel's heart is badly damaged, and he therefore makes it clear to his two assistants that they should perform a heart transplant on him with the help of his ingenious apparatus. On the same evening, Sister Irene delivers the necessary body of a seriously injured person to Prof. Abel's house. When the accident victim, the future donor of the heart, dies too early so that he is no longer eligible for the daring operation, Ood still wants to carry out the transplant. Burke is strictly against it, and a fight ensues between the two men in which Ood kills Burke with medical pliers. Then he wraps Burke's corpse in a white cloth, carries it out into the darkness of the night and buries it in the villa garden.
When Abel wakes up again after the operation, he is horrified: Dr. Ood sets up a mirror in front of him, and Prof. Abel finds out that Ood has carried out the head transplant on him, which has only been carried out on the dog so far. Ood explains to his mentor that there was no other option because Abel's body died in shock during the heart operation. So, Ood, the only option left was to save Abel's head using his own method. While Abel is appalled by Ood's deed, Ood claims to have done humanity a favor by saving Abel's ingenious brain. When Hunter's assistant sees Abel's severed head, he is shocked, but doesn't say anything, as Abel had demanded absolute loyalty to Ood and his actions before the operation. A little later, Sister Irene calls and asks for Dr. Burke. She gets Ood on the phone, who, through Irene's request, states that he has to file a missing person report with the police regarding the Burke he has eliminated in order not to be suspected. Commissioner Sturm takes on the case.
In Prof. Abel's villa, Ood receives sister Irene, who has been very worried since cousin Burke went missing. Ood says that he was initiated into her case by Burke and promises to help her: he wants to be the one who will make a perfect body out of her defaced body. Ood has already identified a perfect victim for this: the blonde striptease dancer Lilly. Her name was once Stella and when Ood visits her in the bar, she recognizes Dr. Brandt, with whose previous life she is ominously entangled. Both know of each other's secret: Lilly poisoned her husband when she still called herself Stella, and Dr. Brandt lost his license to practice medicine because of illegal experiments. Over an intercom, Abel persuades sister Irene, who remains invisible, to agree to her own, upcoming operation, without her even suspecting that it will be a head transplant. Ood brings the slightly drunk Lilly to Abel's house and gives her a sleeping pill. Irene is waiting next door for the operation. Then Ood forces Abel's head to watch the operation. When Irene wakes up after the operation, she is on the one hand frightened and on the other hand delighted by her new body. When Ood tries to be intrusive, however, she pushes him back and locks herself in a room. Finally, she leaves the property through a back exit, returns to her home and first inspects her new body.
Three months later. Irene Sander follows in the footsteps of the dead Lilly, whose crushed body was found on railroad tracks. In the Tam-Tam bar she meets Lilly's former lover Paul, and they both quickly find a liking, especially since Irene's new body looks somehow familiar to him. Paul discovers Lilly's beauty mark, which he knows only too well, on Irene's shoulder blade and is then more than confused. Irene then rushes to Dr. Ood and asks what happened to that Lilly. Ood not only confronts her with the whole truth, he even leads the horrified blonde to Prof. Abel's severed head. Almost at the same time, Assistant Jäger's dog leads his master to Burke's corpse, which is buried in the villa park. It all becomes too much for Irene, she escapes the villa and goes to Paul, who takes her in his apartment. There she tells of her terrible discoveries and that her body is really the Lillys. While both of them fall asleep, Ood enters Paul's studio through a back window and sets a fire. While Paul is tending to the fire, Irene runs outside, where she is stunned, overwhelmed and abducted by the hidden Ood.
Meanwhile, Abel's head asks laboratory assistant Bert to free him from the cables and finally to let him die with dignity. At that moment, Ood drives up in his car. He carries the unconscious Irene into the house in his arms. In front of the awakening woman, the insane traits in the essence of Dr. Oods getting stronger by the days. He admits that experiments were once carried out on his brain. In the Tam-Tam bar, Paul confronts Ood, who appears a little later, about his machinations and also claims that he murdered Lilly. But Ood is clueless with a cold smile. When he returns to the Abel mansion, he finds that a wooden cross has been placed where he buried Burke. Thereupon Ood decides to flee the villa with Irene the following morning and to completely destroy everything in the house that refers to his experiments. Ood hears Abel's head telling Bert to protect Irene. Now there is a duel between Ood and Bert in which the mad doctor shoots Abel's assistant. In the meantime Paul has gone to the police and tells Commissioner Sturm about his monstrous speculations.
In a final confrontation between Ood and Prof. Abel, in which Ood shows ever stronger signs of insanity, the professor accuses him of having gone completely insane. Angry at Abel's claims, Ood pulls all the cables of the machine that keeps Abel alive from their sockets. Then the police arrive. While Inspector Sturm searches the property, Paul takes care of Irene and leads her out of the house. Dr. Meanwhile, Ood has started a fire in the laboratory. In the face of the full moon, the cornered criminal climbs upstairs and from there jumps to his death. He lands at Irene Sander's feet. Paul goes to her and just says: "Come on Irene, now you are free".
Production notes, backgrounds, interesting facts
The Naked and Satan is an extremely rare example of a horror film for early German post-war cinema. The first performance of the film, shot in the spring of 1959, took place on July 24, 1959. Decades later, the film was shown on television under Des Satan's Naked Slave . Both sensational titles, however, are completely misleading: Neither a nude nor a Satan or even a slave appears.
The film, shot in early 1959, is the first of two horror stories, heavily inspired by American models, that trash film specialist Wolf C. Hartwig produced that year. Towards the end of the same year, he shot a film in southern Europe, A Dead Hanging On The Net . While Ein Toten took up the popular subject of the monster animal , the insect mutated to gigantic size, on the net, The Naked and Satan stood in the tradition of the Mad Scientist subgenre, as can be seen in films like Metropolis , Frankenstein and Frankenstein's Bride , The Island of Lost Souls and Dr. Cyclops knows.
The novice actress Karin Kernke , 20 years old at the beginning of 1959 , made her film debut in Die Nackte und der Satan . She played the main female role of the head transplant nurse Irene. Barbara Valentin , who was just 18 years old , also made her debut in front of the camera (as tiny as it is textless) as the dance partner of a visitor to the Tam-Tam Bar. Half a year later, Hartwig gave her the lead female role in A Dead Hanging On The Net .
For Victor Trivas , who returned to Germany , and the creator of the legendary anti-war film No Man's Land , which was shaped by the film expressionism of the 1920s, The Naked and Satan did not mean a comeback. The severe criticism of his critics prevented him from continuing his directorial work in the Federal Republic and then allowed those who had become American-elect in emigration to move to Switzerland.
Hermann Warm designed the film structures, some of which bear Expressionist features, that Bruno Monden implemented. As always, Ludwig Spitaler was Hartwig's production manager, Otto Reinwald was one of two production managers . Orchestra director Erwin Lehn played the music of Willy Mattes with his band . Heidi Genée , who was still called Heidi Rente at the time, served here as an assistant editor. She then made her debut as a film editor at Hartwig's Ein Toter hung online .
Theo Nischwitz designed the optical special effects, such as the design of Michel Simon's detached but still speaking head . Shortly before his death in 1999, main actor Horst Frank reported that this effect “worked with a mirror trick. A mirror was mounted below the table in which Simon was stuck, in which another table of the same type was reflected again. "
Actress Kai Fischer filed a lawsuit against Hartwig in the Munich labor court in March 1959, because he had replaced her with Christiane Maybach the day before filming began . Fischer had refused to appear poorly dressed in her role as a dancer. Hartwig was sentenced to an additional payment of 4,000 DM for two days of shooting.
criticism
At the time of the premiere, the Catholic film critics reacted with reluctance. In Films 1959/61 it is called: Scary film that looks for goosebumps with absurd medical research experiments .
Kay Wenigers The film's great personal lexicon called the film briefly a "horror fairy tale" in Volume 8 of Victor Trivas' biography.
In tierhorror.de it says: “It's unbelievable that such a film came from post-war Germany in 1959. While love and homeland films are getting together, Victor Trivas shot this profoundly trashy horror-sci-fi mix. Horst Frank (Timm Thaler) is predestined for the role of the brilliantly crazy scientist and drives his crazy game to the extreme. The film raises moral questions: how far can science go, where are the limits. (...) In the end, the doctor feels like God and is above all morals. The film could have been a really ingenious trash pearl, but unfortunately it has a certain length and the actors often act like in a play, which in the film looks like artificial ".
The Movie & Video Guide reads: “Old-fashioned shocker about head transplants with the obligatory murders and blood-soaked vengeance; extraordinarily eerie but not very convincing. "
Web links
- The Naked and Satan in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Naked and Satan at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Horst Frank in an interview
- ↑ Der Spiegel 13/1959 of March 25, 1959, p. 66
- ↑ Der Spiegel 19/1959 of May 6, 1959, p. 64
- ^ Films 1959/61. Critical notes from three years of cinema and television. Handbook VI of the Catholic film criticism. Düsseldorf 1962, p. 126.
- ↑ The Naked and Satan on die-besten-horrorfilme.de ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Leonard Maltin : Movie & Video Guide, 1996 edition, p. 552. Old-fashioned chiller involving head-transplants with obligatory murders and blood-drenched revenge; extremely eerie but not very convincing.
