The Blood-Stained Silver Crescent - The story of the last ever Edgar Wallace Krimi

Rialto decided to enter the Edgar Wallace Krimi market again in 1970 after seeing their competitor CCC films making good money with a small italian-german co-production called "The Bird with Crystal Plumage". Marketed as "new and even harder" (Bryan) Edgar Wallace Krimi, this movie did quite well, given that CCC did not have the marketing muscle that Rialto had. With the money needed to produce one german Krimi, you could easily co-produce 3 foreign ones, still holding all the cards for the domestic markets in their hands. Simultanously, a "real" German Krimi would be produced, ROIs would be compared and then decisions would have to made how to go on further with the franchise. 

The Edgar Wallace franchise was still going strong, attracting about 2% overall market share per film, a number that basically stayed unchanged from 1959-1972!!

The italian co-productions "Solange" and "Orchids" were expected to be below that mark by about 1%, but then the production cost would be only about 1/3 of a german krimi for Rialto. 

The original script was written by Paul Hengge, incorporating the "Silver Crescent" the assassin has to leave behind at every cime-scene to justify the german title: "Das Rätsel des Silbernen Halbmonds" (The Mystery of the Silver Crescent) under the title "Sieben Gesichter für die Mörderin" (Seven Faces for the Murderess). Then it was given to Umberto Lenzi and Roberto Gaianniti for further work, but only slight changes were made from the original screenplay. 

Obviously Lenzi had a problem with too much germanic interference, so the number of technicians, administrators and actors from germany were cut down. 

Krimi-veteran Uschi Glas, who played the lead role, remembered in an interview that Lenzi had a very strong anti-german stance, verging on germanophobia. 

Filming took place before "Solange", but Solange reached the german cinemas first. It was a reasonable success, by far the most successful of all germano-italian co-productions. Maybe this is why Rialto decided to release this one as another Edgar Wallace Krimi, as the third one ("Le Tueur" / Der Killer und der Komissar/ The Killer and the Inspector - filmed in France with Uschi Glas and Fabio Testi) was not released as a Edgar Wallace anymore.

So, "Seven Orchids" became the last picture to be released as official "Edgar Wallace" movie in Germany.

Rialto had done one cert. 18 Edgar Wallace before "Zimmer 13", (Room 13), which had made considerably less money than the others, so they were not willing to let that happen again. This time it should be maximum efficiency, so they trimmed the movie down 20 minutes, cutting the murder sequences and a lot of plot devices. The result is a strange one, the movie is less bloody, paced faster but loses its coherence.  On Blu-Ray, Rialto did publish both versions, with the german one even scanned in 4K from the domestic duplicate negative.