Sumuru, the Heir to Dr. Mabuse

Thesis:  "The Girl From Rio" owes much more to the (then) unpublished fragment "Mabuse's Kolonie (Colony)" than to any Sumuru book. 

If you have not read it, please check my post on how Jess Franco killed off Sumuru first, for a better understanding.... ... and then to how Jess Franco exterminated Dr. Mabuse .... now you can start: 

In 1930 Norbert Jacques wrote a fragment called "Mabuses Kolonie" which was abandoned for "Testament of Dr. Mabuse". In this fragment, a new "villain" called Frau Kristina is after the heritage of Dr. Mabuse to build an utopian colony, ruled by her to give peace and prosperity to mankind ... in Brazil. Something that Sumuru never did in her books...

The story: Slender, young "Frau Kristina" (yes, FRAU is part of the name!) is a master thief with the ability to appear and disappear miraculously. She can also detect if somebody tells the truth. She uses these powers to infiltrate an organisation called  EITOPOMAR that raises money and appears to attract mostly female settlers/donors to create an utopian settlement in Brazil. This organisation wants her to find the lost documents of Dr. Mabuse that would give ownership to the land that Mabuse bought in Brazil as well as to his financial assets. 

Meanwhile Reichs-attorney and enemy of Mabuse Dr. Wenk is being killed in his home-office. Frau Kristina, looking for clues, steals the asylum case files of Dr. Mabuse which are now part of the murder investigation by the police. 

She discovers that the crucial one (no. 299) is already missing and must have been stolen either by the killer of Wenk or his widow. Interrogating the widow, she detects that Mrs. Wenk does not know anything about these files. 

Frau Kristina travels from Berlin to Cologne. There the Reichswehr has taken over power after fighting nazi AND communist revolutions (Jacques throws both groups together and calls the movement "The Greens" (sic!)). In the seedy quarters of Cologne she is sure to find information about the killer/thief. She is attacked there but "saved" by the charming mobster Orbs whom she identifies as either having the files or looking for them as well.

The crime-lord and the master-thief now battle all over the world in various manners, but the final confrontantion will be in Brazil, where Frau Katarina is to create an utopian, women-ruled state on Mabuse's land. The head of EITOPOMAR is killed in a plane-crash that seems to have been plotted by Frau Kristina to take over the organisation. Meanwhile it becomes clear that Orbs is the killer of Wenk but that he did not take the file either.

Basically this is where all the information (written pages and story outlines) by Norbert Jacques stop. Whether or not he had discussed further developments with Fritz Lang or Artur Brauner is not known. Maybe we will find the missing Dr. Mabuse scripts, then we will know more.

We do not know whether Orbs is in fact in possession of the money and how the story will end. But let's make a sensible suggestion for a sequel:

Frau Kristina  has erected the colony by using Mabuse's land in Brazil. Building it up she used the money and (mostly female) settlers of EITOPOMAR. Meanwhile a male master thief  steals the remaining heritage of Mabuse (=the money) from the crime-lord. After doing so, he escapes on a plane that coincidentally flies to EITOPOMAR, full of female settlers who had already been equipped and trained in Europe. Following the trail, the crime-lord then attacks Frau Kristina's settlement to finally get the complete heritage of Mabuse. 

What I wrote here is basically the story of "Girl from Rio". Just replace the names. That would explain a lot of things in the movie.

One could even twist this further: The thief was originally sent by Frau Kristina and Orbs did let him escape on purpose to lead Orbs to EITOPOMAR - something that would be more in the vein of N. Jacques.

Background info: Frau Kristina comes across as very gifted but extremely idealistic figure. She has borderline-superhero abilites, a cross between Fantomas and Mabuse being physically and mentally superior. But she believes in an utopian state where peace and harmony rule and wants to get out of Germany that is being taken over by military coups to prevent extremists to gain power.

Frau Kistina imagined by Jean Rollin as 
Countess Ixe (maybe not, but the first image that came to my mind 
when I read Mabuses Kolonie)

So she wants to use Mabuse's heritage for higher purposes but her means are criminal. 

The organisation "Eitopomar" is like the jewish utopian settlement organisations that came to life all over Europe in the 1930s with training (warfare and agriculture), where money was raised and jews were trained to set up "kibbutzim" that would be socialist dreamlands.

The building of a "modern" colony in south america was popular after "Fordlandia" had been founded. Norbert Jacques had travelled there with a german documentary film team. Later the movie "Kautschuk" was filmed, based on his experiences, whose writer "Franz Eichhorn" is also credited for "Girl from Rio" in ImdB

.

The Reichswehr-coup is interesting. In the troubled Weimar end-game, only the Reichswehr was a guarantee for NON-communism, -nazism, an -monarchism, so the Reichswehr was the key for the "Iron Front" that tried to stabilize the Republic from the extremist's onsloughts. In "Mabuse's Colony" the military has taken over control and as Frau Kristina is trying to do the right thing by doing the wrong thing, establishing a military dictatorship. 

In the real Weimar Republic, the only mass movement to actually fight for democracy and against nazis, communist and monarchists were the social-democratic "Iron Front", that originally used three arrows that were painted over hanging NSDAP election posters. This will become important later...

The original design was meant to easily grafitti over the nazi flag,
Now the design is still being used by the Antifa in the red/white/black coding.

The 1930 story has a slight sf-utopian character with high-speed travel by car and a "new british aircraft" that flies to Brazil obviously has the capacity of a Boing 747 and space to walk around like in a Zeppelin (and crashes in Portugal).

Fancy Black/Red/White uniforms, where have I seen 
this ticolor before???

Norbert Jacques annotated that this story is basically not about Dr. Mabuse but only about the hunt and the purpose of his heritage (not testament!), and allowed the name to  be left out in possible movies based on the fragment!!! - Furthermore, the EITOPOMAR-storyline is already in the original Mabuse novel but was not used by Lang. Thus, Lang had no "rights" in it. There are three important conclusions: 

1st: This could very well be a legally correct movie just that they decided to go with the Sumuru-name in germany as no-one would understand this movie to be a Dr. Mabuse film.

2nd: Fritz Lang's developmental rights on Mabuse are not touched because it is only based on characters written by Norman Jacques before he recreated Mabuse  together with Lang and Thea von Harbou.

3rd: The same-sex relationship that Sumuru has in "Girl from Rio" is described (sort of) in the originial "Dr. Mabuse" novel as that of Countess Toldt (later Miss Wenk - the widow) with an exotic, red haired dancer , who Mabuse both had brought to EITOPOMAR. Franco very well catches the steamy, fever-dreamish-like quality that N. Jacques used in his description. That scene featured Shirley Eaton intercut with another actress with blond hair.

No joke but an impressive art-installation:
by Eva Grubinger "Embassy of Eitopomar" on
display at the Galeria Vermelho Sao Paulo

The question is: 

Did they know what they were doing?

Come on, I hear you say, this could all be incidental. Franco came up with the idea beacuse of feminism (Femina!!) and the boys wanted to have fun and film cheaply in brazil.  The rest is spy movie standard fare. Well. Almost.

Franco had worked with Artur Brauner (the license holder for Mabuse) before in the spoof-spy film "Lucky the inscrutable" which takes (again) some elements of Mabuse (this time the satirical "Mabuse at the Press Party"). At that time, Brauner was deciding whether he should do Mabuse in color or finish the series and was tossing around possible scripts for a follow up. Mabuse original material is very rare (only 3 1/2 slim books and one essay (basically 500 pages of original material)) so this material was all on the table for possible partners.

Jacques and Lang had developed Mabuse from "The Gambler" on to "The Testament", which made all movies based on "The Testament" to be licensed by Fritz Lang too, but not the ones not directly linked to the characters and developments in "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse". 

Here, Sumuru has to run around with a big "S" on the shirt, making it impossible to rename her Frau Kristina and basically signalling "No, I'm not Frau Kristina". Obviously Sax Rohmer's widow was not amused as this was not Sumuru here on display so the name had to be changed from Sumuru to something similar with "S" (why wasn't she called Saunara?). In 1969 it became basically impossible to alter the character against the will of the originator/their heirs.

In Germany it was crucial for the movie to be called "Sumuru" because, well otherwise one could argue that it is a Mabuse -Film all along. And maybe that is why we find a snippet of "Sumuru" in "The Blood of Fu Manchu". It looks like someone was really trying had. Really trying hard.

"Jess, do I really have to wear this stupid costume..., As if
people would not know that I am Sumuru." "No, the S is for 
Shirley, my dear" "Don't call me Shriley!" no wonder Eaton quit movie making after he
made her wear this...

A movie that N. Jacques had written in 1927 was called "The Brothel from/in Rio", which depicts "The enslaving and luring of young european girls into south american brothels" and the "amusing game two mobsters play with each other while battling for control over the market".  The movie was a scandal and is said to be bottom of the barrel morally with numerous scenes of rape and humiliation shown. It also was a huge hit. Of course. It was remade in 1950 under the title "Export in Blond". Jess Franco would never watch these kinds of movies.

uhh."Trade with naked female slaves"...
where have I heard of this one before...???

These license-things going back and forth between AIP, Towers and Brauner in the second half of the sixties are very hard to decipher. But I think it's save to assume that Franco had knowledge of "Mabuse's Colony" and had worked it into the Sumuru-sequel. That sequel could not be named "Sumuru" as it violated the character Sax Rohmer created  - at least that's the story Towers told .

Why it could be sold in Germany as Sumuru (and in fact had to because otherwise the heirs to Norbert Jacques would have sued for the Frau Kristina license) is an open question as of now. Please add a comment, if you got more or even condradicting information. I appreciate it all.

If you've come here, maybe you will think, this is all a bit far stretched, so let's finish with a cliff-hanger:

In which Mabuse movie, made around the same time as Girl from Rio and also distributed by AIP do we find this symbol?  Have a good night...

Here's what the AI thought:

Still here?

Dr. Mabuse has 1000 Eyes, I got 
a million! In the movie business it's all 
about competition.

And here is a nice post about "The Brothel from Rio" --- see you! 

Jess Franco, the walking death of Eurocrime (Part VI): The Case of Dr. Mabuse

   The Thesis: Every Eurocrime-Franchise that Jess Franco touched, had to be buried afterwards. Basically his movies are the sleazy epitaphs of once-well-regarded serials and characters: the last chance to squeeze some money out of an already dead topic.

Jump to each chapter HERE 

Jess had delivered the "Akasava" on time, had sheltered the money put into "Deadly Avenger" by Tele-Cine and now obviously the last of Arthur Brauner's investment opportunities had quickly to be made into celluloid, Dr. Mabuse.

This leads us to "The Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse" or "Dr. M schlägt zu", the semi-inofficial entry in the Dr. Mabuse series. Semi-official because the original holder of the rights, CCC-Films, never used the name on this film. And in the german dialogue, Dr. Krenko, the main villain, is only subordinate of an unspecified "Organisation". Anyway, the movie had already been sold to the partners as "Mabuse" movie and so you get the name in basically all foreign versions of this movie.

CCC-Films today  do have an own "Jess Franco" category in their "classics" department (so it is "Karl May", "Dr. Mabuse", "(Bryan) Edgar Wallace" AND "Jess Franco" (!!!) on their official website!) and there it is complete with all foreign titles referring to Dr. Mabuse. CCC-Films too give the original working titles as "The Man who called himself Mabuse" and "Mabuse 70". 

Official CCC-Films archive-card for Dr. M

The Franchise:

You know him. Let's make it short. Based on a pulp-novel, the first two silent adaptations of Dr. Mabuse by Fritz Lang are absolute milestones of crime-cinema and if you've not watched them by now... come on. There is NO excuse.

Dr. Mabuse is a crime-lord in the booming black markets of defeated germany, he has the power of mind-control and uses various disguises for his deeds. He tries to found an international organisation with the money gained by his crimes. 

Aim of the stories and of the first movies is to show how rotten the capitalistic society was. These are highly political films, with the third, the talkie "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse" actually replacing Mabuse with Hitler, the movie cannot be released and director Lang went to the US on a long vacation until 1950....

Let's play word-memory: Black Market / Crime Lord / Mind Control / Defeated Germany/ Better World/ International Organisation

CCC was founded by Arthur Brauner AND Joseph Einstein who was THE DON of Berlin's black markets after WWII. And Arthur Brauner only gets the licence for filming by the american occupiers under the obligation to re-educate the defeated german people with internationally produced movies and all will life in a better world. 

I do NOT make these things up. I just draw the line between the dots!!

No wonder, Brauner was keen to do a Mabuse film. He obtained the rights and even got Fritz Lang to do a fourth movie (The 1000 Eyes - which is not based on an original Mabuse story but rather on the very obscure "Mr. Tott kauft 1000 Augen" (transl: "Mr. Deass buys a 1000 eyes" by Jan Fethke, written in Esperanto!!!!!! and published in German 1932)). 

Before Lang decided to do "1000 Eyes", the first Mabuse script was a direct sequel to "Testament" called "Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse" (sic!), so this script is around since 1954!

After that, Lang does not want to do another one, so Brauner just takes the usual suspects of Krimi-entertiainment through 5-6 more movies, including a team-up with Bryan Edgar Wallace. All have a certain SF-element in them and gadgetry ("invisible rays") and Mabuse is using super-advanced technology. The last one as a thinly veiled James-Bond wannebe. 

Please note that after 1933's "Testament", the real Dr. Mabuse is actually dead, only his spirit is set free in the world and through mind-control he now controls subordinate "master-criminals".

You might be wondering why the figure for the french release of "Death Rays" is missing. As the CNC only records the top 30 of each month, some movies drop off the charts unnoticed. I would assume a figure somewhere between 200.000 and 250.000 would be a sensible suggestion.

The series has a steady but stable decrease in ticket sales and did well in foreign markets, obviously due to the prestigious name. Brauner stopped 1964 after "Death Rays of Dr. Mabuse" but with over 1.200.000 million tickets sold, this was still going strong. He had cut down his BEW-franchise the same year but that last movie "7th Victim" at least had had very low box-office returns. 

I do not see a reason for Brauner stopping the Mabuse-Franchise commercially. Getting in lots of co-financers from foreign fiefdoms (ha!) the financial risk was not big and Spain was virtually begging him to finally produce "Die Rache"/La Venganca, a scipt that had been lying around since before the 1st Mabuse film...

Maybe Brauner wanted to get out of the B-movie bracket that the BEW and Mabuse-Films had been. From 1965 to 1968 he would do big budgeted color-scope movies that did cost a lot of money like the Nibelungen-Remake, Kampf um Rom (A Fight for Rome) and 5 oriental Karl-May extravaganzas with whom he tried to fight the Rialto-Karl-May-Western success. 

All of these were intended to make Brauner, who - basically - had been a smut-peddler, an honorable man. Kampf um Rom was the biggest budgeted german movie up to this point but failed to reach the 1.000.000 ticket sales that the last Mabuse easily had trespassed. Brauner later fumed that he could have "produced 10 Wallace movies with the money spent on Fight for Rome". So he was regretting pulling out of these franchises and maybe decided to get back in again with Jess Franco on his side. 

The Living Corpses of Dr. Mabuse (1971)

A curiosum inside the "Mabuse"-franchise is that  Berlin-born Gordon Hessler's "Scream and Scream Again" was marketed as "Dr. Mabuse" film in Germany in 1971 (!). This could only have been done if Artur Brauner had sold or sub-licensed the rights to the name at that point. "Scream and Scream again" boasts the magnificent german title of "Dr. Mabuse's Living Corpses"

"Dr. Mabuse's Living Corpses" movie did not fare too bad just edging inside the year's Top 100 movies with around 500.000 tickets sold, still beating "Cat O Nine Tails" by 100.000 tickets. 

I have already checked into this anomaly very deeply and found some very interesting facts but that will be something for the future.... just trust me: 

Scream and Scram again IS a real Mabuse-film!

Obviously there was still flesh on the rotting corpse of Mabuse.

Case opened: Dr. M schlägt zu ("Dr. M strikes") / Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse

-or-

Plan 10 from Dr. M

Translation of the german title is NOT "strikes back" it is "strikes", "Strikes back" would imply that this is a sequel, while "strikes" does not. Furthermore, the german movie title for the 1960 french Eddie Constantine movie "Ca va etre ta fete" was "Lemmy Caution schlägt zu=Lemmy Caution strikes" althogh this was not a Lemmy Caution movie. Check out the first installment of my series for the Jess Franco - Lemmy Caution connection. And yes... the movie title game is NOT incidential. These titles, I have learned are like a code, but more on that in my "Scream and Scream Again Post"....

Obviously A. Brauner had fun too, rewriting the script for the german version, our supervillain is called "Dr. Franco" (script), although in the actual dub he called Dr. Cranko/Krenko 

Plot: This is as bad as it can get. There is virtually nothing here except that it is something about a device used to get a deadly weapon and therefor we have to kill/kidnap some people which our trusty Andros - the one from Franco's "Secreto del Dr. Orloff "(1964) does (Andros here looks stiched together...so he is obviously one of the superhuman "living corpses" that Dr. Browning had created in "Scream and Scream again"....). 

Andros, still crazy after all these years

"Secreto del Dr. Orloff" was relased as "Die Lebenden Leichen des Dr. Jeckyll" (Living Corpses of Dr. Jekyll") in Germany. See what I mean with the name-game?

I tried to try. I tried to care. But I could not help it. This is Plan 10 from Dr. M. 

Man. It sucks, in a big way. 

If you really, really want to see some Dr. Mabuse in it, maybe it is from the "Chemiker Null" novel but this is just about stealing secrets from a scientist. So not much flesh in here.

The problem is that it did not need to. Photography is fine to stunning (with some occasional lapses) but acting and script are below the lowest par on every level. This feels like an Ed Wood movie. I honestly do not know what Franco tried here. A complete lack of stars  doing their least to hide their desintrest. This is all ridiculous but not in a funny way. 

I am aware that post-modernists in the 70ies tended to make fun of the old heritage, but this is an insult. Mabuse always had a social commentary, crime evolving out of capitalism and disproportion of wealth distribution. This here is just a Orloff/Monster on the Campus copy with no meaning at all.

Charades, charades.

As with the movie, the title and the distribution, the actors play charades. Siegfried Lowitz, who had already played in a Dr. Mabuse movie and was a staple face of the Krimis but no-one to draw crowds, here has to play a completely different character  (Prof. Dr. Orloff (!)) for a day (maybe less - obviously he owed this to Brauner as he had he had dropped out of the movie business in 1965 to work exclusively for TV).  Lowitz dubbed himself too in this movie, which would mean that a theatrical release was planned. Overall the dubbing, though done by professionals (the german actors here dubbed themselves), seems rushed, as if there had not been any second takes. 

The actors behave as if they do not have a clue what's going on and frankly I believe them. I'm with sheriff  Thomas who intentionally does not get at all what this movie is about. 

It does not help that Brauner again uses the same score he had already reused for "Deadly Avenger", taken from previous year's sleaze-crime-fest "Perrak". This whole thing just feels wrong. 

Original spanish artwork by the  co-producers. There is no german original filmposter.

Original spanish artwork by the 

co-producers. There is no german

original filmposter. 

Franco had held back this movie for over a year before handing it over to Brauner, for reasons unknown. When he finally could lay eyes on the product he had produced, Brauner was said to be furious. Instead of using the script given to him, Franco had just made another Orloff-movie.

It could well be that Franco had used the money given to him by Brauner to remake his own "Secreto" and then just delivered that in an audacious move that quickly ended the collab.

From the title "Dr. M" it is clear that Brauner did not want to use the "Mabuse" license he had optained from N. Jacques. Putting it on the movie would have cost him 1000 DM in license fee, which would today amount to around 2000 US-$ maybe even more. As a business man he would  have calculated the costs against an additional income through the use of the name. And having no star-power (or anything else) to lure people in, he  simply let it be. Maybe he was even fearful of Fritz Lang, the man who co-created the movie character of Mabuse together with Norman Jacques back in the 20ies. I don't know.

On an interesting note, although Jacques did own the rights to his creation it is said that Fritz Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou (Metropolis) held similar rights to the movie-character of Dr. Mabuse which meant that he had a say in forthcoming movies with Mabuse. But there is just one source about that.

That decision must have been made early as the original german opening titles have the new name properly displayed. Brauner obviously did not want or could not use the name here. 

Does it matter? No. This movie has nothing to do with Dr. Mabuse.

If the premiere of this movie actually took place on Dec. 26 in Berlin's very cosy Capitol Theatre I  expect that half of the audience would have walked out. I am not aware of the ownership of this theatre back then, but I would not be the least surprised that it belonged to Brauner somehow and that it was just just a test-screening and no official premiere as no poster or other material proving a german release is available anywhere.

This movie release was so rushed (Board of Censors certificate on 20th Dec!, "release" 26th Dec) and then buried that suspicion arises. Cooperation with Jess Franco was abruptly terminated and the release of the last BEW-franchise movie "The Etruscan kills again" was on Dec .31st of 1972.

Brauner stated that "he never had any problem of any kind at any time with Jess Franco" but Franco did not touch German soil in 1972 and for some years later...

In the 1990s, when Dr. M finally appeared on the surface in Germany, the heirs to N. Jacques sued Brauner  for using "Mabuse" on this film (yes, they sued him for the 1000 DM). The court however ruled in Brauner's favour that the Mabuse license option had not been drawn on this film.

So it is officially (and court-proven) not part of the Mabuse-franchise. 

The spanish version, which is significantly different though, was marketed as "Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse", the old title that already had been sold to the spanish market in the 1960s on the script with the same name, that was not used in this movie.

Verdict:

Acquittal

Did he kill "Mabuse" off? No, because the movie in question is not a "Mabuse" movie. If it were, though, Franco surely would have killed Mabuse as profitable franchise once and for all. This is more in the vein of his relapses on "Fu Manchu" and "Edgar Wallace" -- too meaningless to have any impact at all.

Parole violation: Hm. As this is an Orloff-movie and Orloff is a creation of Franco himself, of course he came back to him a 1000 times. But Franco never trespassed the line and used the Mabuse-tag somewhere. So here he behaved himself.

Cliffhanger: I don't make these things up, I just draw the lines between the dots. And one dot is a certain "Dr. M", who is not the fictional character of Dr. Mabuse but a real-life person/villain/crime-lord that actively pushed the low-budget german cinema industry over the edge in 1972. Certain things make sense, like Franco not setting a foot into germany from the end of 1971 and Brauner, clearing it all off in Dec. 1972.... but you, my dear readers have to be patient. This will still take me a year or so to fully research this complex situation.

Questions remain: 

Why did Brauner stop Mabuse in 1964 although returns were not bad at all?

Why did AIP shoot two obvious Mabuse movies while co-producing "De Sade" with CCC? (yes, two!)

Why did the METROPOL (name of the theatre of "Invisible Dr. Mabuse") distributor call Gordon Hessler's Ninja-epic "Pray for death"  "1000 Eyes of the Ninja" in Gemany???? 

Man, I am curious... I will tackle all of these questions when I get back to "Scream and Scream again", but for now, let's continue our journey:

Jess Franco did not set a foot an German soil after 1971 and purely coincidentally sleazemonger EC Dietrich had just retreated to  neutral and tax-havenly Switzerland. So after a brief stay in France (and lots of accumulated depths by Franco) both teamed up to try to feast on another film-series. Next time we have:

Jess Franco vs. The Strangler

Here is a list of the books I used (besides many, many websites with singular information):

Peter Osterried's big format, colorfully illustrated
Hardcover from 2011 is complete with stunning photos.
A bit lightweight on the actual background of the moves.
All Dr. Mabuse movies are covered. Essential.

This is edited by one Solveig Wrage, a semiprofessional
publication but with lots of real archival material. If
you want to know who wrote what to whom and when, then that's the
book to go for, very lightweight on the "why" and simply
nonchalentely omits all non Lang/CCC movies.

Good english language overview by Holger Haase,
basically summarising all you need to know. Excellent 
value for the money asked by amazon kindle.
Holger got his own, worthwile blog here:
https://krimifilm.blogspot.com