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Thesis:  "The Girl From Rio" owes much more to the (then) unpublished fragment "Mabuse's Kolonie (Colony)" than to any Sumuru book.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

 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 

After having Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution) finishing off his eurospy/crime movies, Jess Franco then put the final nail in the coffin of Dr. Fu Manchu, only to let his spirit be guiding one of his daughters. Now let's see what he did to Fu Manchu's sister in spirit: Sumuru.

3. The Case of Sumuru

Sax Rohmer had been successful with his Fu Manchu novels, depicting the chinese super-villain who had to be beaten by the western empires. Remember that was written in the early 1900s under the influence of the joint western war against the chinese uprising. In world war II, things were not so clear any more and Rohmer decided to add another supervaillain to his roster. And what was the second biggest threat to western civilisation next to the Chinese? Right: Women. So we are introduced to a sinister, beautiful eastern evil empowered woman called Sumuru (please put the accent on the last u: Sumuru). She appeared first in a radio-show for the BBC in WWII. 

Her main agenda is to rid the world of uglyness (=men) and in this world, only the beautiful people rule. To do this, she leads a secret order of female spys that use their bodies to lure men into traps. Yes.

If you read the novels, they are very explicit for the time and Rohmer turns the kink-dial up from his Fu Manchu books. Already on the first page of the first book we learn that Sumuru is "Nude under the Mink"and our hero knows, because he gets a good look. Sumuru herself has oriental looks, but no nationality attached to her.

The Franchise: 

Harry Alan Tower's 2 for 1 deal with Sax Rohmer purchased the characters (not the books) of Fu Manchu and Sumuru. Sumuru had no cinematic heritage and so Towers was free to do conceptually whatever he liked. The first installment is solid entertainment with lots of mini-skirts, a few bikinis and firmly tongue-in-cheek. Shirley Eaton is a near-perfect impersonation of the character with her green eyes, high cheekbones and obvious enjoyment of being cruel. This is an entertaining reminder of how innocent cinema used to be. The movie did not fare worse than the 3rd installment of Fu Manchu (Vengeance) but is by far the superior movie.

The title "The Million Eyes of Sumuru" certainly is a reply to the "1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse", indicating that all the women in the world are on her side. Basically her plan falters because women simply love men too much. Interestingly, Sumuru is portraied villainous, but with a good amount of sympathy. The movie itself does not take itself too seriously and basically is a typical non-essential Towers movie. Besides the character of Sumuru itself and her "million" (I counted 36) eyes in various states of undress (but not too much), this is pretty bland.

Case opened: The Girl from Rio (The Seven Men of Sumuru)

Torturing men with sex in 1969

The plot: In Brazil, Sumuru has built a city just for her and her army of women called Femina. Accidently arriving there on a plane, our "hero" is being captured and tortured as he is believed to have ten million dollars he has stolen. In the end another crimelord attacks the city and Sumuru pushes the self-destruction button, but is able to flee. 

But  this is not what this is all about. This is all about style and asthetics and in the sequences where Franco can play to his own tune, the movie looks astonishing. The HAT-scripted sequences of plot clearly fall apart as they are treated basically with disrespect by Franco. All he is interested in is creating a future world where latex-cled young amazones rule over post-modern cities. And in these parts of the movie, Franco fully (and I might say - for the last time) is able to bring his "vision" the the screen. 

Torturing men with sex in 1984

Again highly influenced by "Lemmy Caution vs. Alphaville" and other french sf-movies Franco here throws an unruly, analog man vs an organized, digital community. But as sterile as the inhabitants of Femina are, the brooding sex underneath erupts in artful episodes  (filmed with care by Franco) of lust. Obviously inspired by the emerging fetish scene around latex and using bits and pieces of "Gwendolin", "Phoebe" and "Pauline" to create a unique enviroment (that was only explored once more in the "Gewndoline in the Land of Yak-Yak" movie). 

Although the nude scenes are done with great care and restraint by Franco, the whole subject of forced sex is undeniably disturbing so that Sumuru's name had to be changed to comply to the late Sax Rohmer's widow's concerns about damaging the artistic property. Co-producer Constantin had no such problems and kept the title in, as "Million Eyes" had done good business, basically cashing in as much as the 3rd "Fu Manchu" installment of the same year.

The character of Sumuru remains untouched, more a ruthless politician with a criminal mindset than a gangster-bosslady, but the sf elements cannot be found in Sax Rohmer's work. The casting of the same actors that were used in the first part however, is an obvious sign for the attempt to establish a franchise, as is the open ending with S. being able to flee.

Nope, this did not help gaining the 
support of Eaton for another sequel

Lead-actress Shriley Eaton, the "Face of Sumuru" had decided to leave the movie industry all together. Franco stated that she basically was a housewife who would do occasional acting jobs to earn some additonal living and that she was not made to be "in the movies". 

Eaton herself expressed a deep dissatisfaction with the conditions of working for these films and made it clear (polite as they are, the british) that she would not work with Franco again as he intercut her scenes with more explicit scenes that she did not do. Eaton did not appear naked in the film, she was wearing a skin-toned suit under the see-through dress in one debatable scene.

This sounds like a "amicable seperation", although Eaton stated that "she cried the whole way back in the plane from brazil"

. 

It certainly did not help that german distributor Constantin photoshopped her head on the naked body of another actress on the big movie posters! 

Franco finished the movie a week ahead of schedule and while the basic crew had to stay in brazil to film the carnival in Rio scenes for the film, everybody else was sent back and HAT together with Franco quickly filmed material for a WIP-movie called "99 Women" in the spare time. 

This is how Franco 1969 thought women in plexiglass-cages would look like in the future

Box-Office returns for Sumuru II were dismal. I mean bad, really bad. Much worse than this movie deserved. In 1969 this one came in at the bottom-10 grossing movies in germany with only about 100.000 tickets sold. This was much lower than the already dismal returns on "The Castle of Fu Manchu" (ca 350.000) . Ticket sales in other markets were bad as well so that AIP decided to sell the movie directly to Columbia TV where it was released as "Future Women" in an obviously heavily cut (75min) version. It never made it to the cinemas in the US.

It is debatable why this happened. The movie feels disjointed and offers the same kind of bland unexcitement that basically was a staple of the  previous eurospy-films. The Femina-parts however are stunning and gorgeous but few and in-between.

Maybe the brand Sumuru, like Fu Manchu smelled stained, and those folks that went in to see these kinds of films now had a wife and children and a tv-set at home. The younger audience basically did not care about the pulp-heroes of the previous generation. 

And to start with, Sumuru never had been a "hot property", she was just a "plan B" even from Sax Rohmer and thrown into the deal with HAT. Sumuru is like a third-born child that is free to do whatever it wants in life as the parents never had a plan for her. 

The 100.000 ticket sales desaster definitively led to an end of the Sumuru-franchise although HAT produced a Sumuru-movie in 2003 that takes place in outer space and sadly lacks entertainment value. A Jess Franco in his prime would have made that movie a classic. There is a 15-minutes cut of the movie on youtube. That's all you need. 

Harry Alan Towers had obtained the rights to Fu Manchu and Sumuru for the legal lifespan (70 years after the author's death), so both HAT and Jess Franco would play with the thought of re-visiting these properties. HAT stated that "Jess Franco was a good and fast director, when he was being entertained." Bsically that's HAT saying that JF is unreliable.

Verdict: There is little doubt that the bad box-office returns led to an end of the franchise, but is Jess Franco really to blame? The movie is not worse than a dozen other eurospy-flicks but contains stunning visions that were maybe ahead of it's time. The only reasonable way to continue this franchise in a commercially successful way would have been movies like "Blue Rita". But here, Elizabeth Rohmer firmly stood against the sexploitation of Sumuru.                        

Acquittal

The Relapse: Blue Rita (1977) and Linda (1981) 

Blue Rita is the head of an amazon organisation that lures wealthy men into a high-class brothel only to torture them to get money and information for different secret agencies.

The whole plot sounds like a low-key Sumuru-sexcapade. It helps that Sumuru is not specified in Sax Rohmer's work, she is merely described as seductious mistress of disguise (like some female sexual Fantomas). So now we have a caucasian "Rita" with her oriental sidekick "Princess".

The movie features a lot of outre-sf-noir stylistics and Franco obviously tries to recapture the feel of Femina. The movie is done with relative care and can be looked upon as a worthy successor to Sumuru. I can totally see this being remade in Blade-Runner style. And to me this is the inofficial "Sumuru 3: Slaves of Sumuru" - movie...

Princess explaining advanced yoga techniques to her tribe

Raquel Evans

Linda works in a hotel and gets entangled in the evil doings of Sheila, the manager of the night club "Amore". Women are drugged and given to wealthy business men to whatever use they can imagine. This sounds like a rework of "Blue Rita", and while writing this entry, I was immediately reminded of Raquel Evans, who plays the night club manager. I re-checked "Linda" and indeed again a lot reminded me of the Sumuru-movies. The scale is much, much smaller (but basically more akin the the later Sax Rohmer novels), the sf-motiv is gone,  but the care and general coherence suggest that Franco had something bigger in mind. Indeed some scenes have a direct connection to Sumuru and Raquel Evans is a perfect substitute for Shirley Eaton. 

This is how women in plexiglass-cages looked in 1981

The three Sumuru-style movies are all above-average entries in Jess Franco's work, showing his affection to the character. Sumuru seems to have been some kind of catalyst for Franco's work and the diffusion of motives from movie to movie (Sumuru in the end just cares for herself, there is no political agenda left) basically reflects Franco's own cinematic carreer.

Was Franco a male Sumuru who, with a group of acolytes (his cast and crew) tried to steal money from rich movie-producers by casting them under his audio-visual spell and basically abducting them by secretly robbing them of their time and money and getting the movie audience under mind-control??????

In the end, Sumuru failed.

99 Women was a big box-office success, as was Justine, making it clear to everybody where the money lay. "Count Dracula" and "Witchhunter" performed reasonably but the collab with Towers ended (obviously due to mutual distrust) and Franco was employed by Arthur Brauner, who held three franchises: Bryan Edgar Wallace, Doktor Mabuse and some original Edgar Wallace stuff.

Coming next: Jess Franco vs. Edgar Wallace