Death at the Grindhouse: Frau Kristina

Thesis: "The Girl From Rio" owes much more to the (then) unpublished fragment "Mabuse's Kolonie (Colony)" than to any Sumuru book.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