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Set in present day Germany (and by present day we're talking 1972), Sandy (Glenn Corbett) is an American private eye searching for the person who killed his partner. A fish-out-of-water detective story, Fuller's Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street navigates the shadows of the great crime dramas, filling the viewer's imagination with memories of the classic 'private dick' stories bringing to life.
The following is taken from my “Cannes Journal” in the September-October 1973 issue of Film Comment and corrected in a few particulars in April 2016, after seeing the restored 128-minute director’s cut on a wonderful new Blu-Ray from Olive Films. — J.R.
In theory, the Marché du Film is merely one division of the festival out of many (official selections, Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, etc.); in practice, every film and every person attending is on the marketplace, to purchase or to be purchased, and all the rest is journalistic euphemism. It was there, at any rate, that I came across Samuel Fuller’s latest film.
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Not all of DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET is peaches and cream, but the beginning is extraordinary — a brilliant burst of action that illustrates the title in lightning flashes — and the mad finale in a weapons room is not far behind. Fuller’s habitual obeisance to the title composer reaches an apogee of sorts in a scene set in the Beethoven Museum, where the head of one of the leads (Glenn Corbett) is cut off by the top of the frame in order to give one of the Master’s pianos a privileged place in the composition. Some of the personal/filmic references get pretty Baroque, too: a clip of RIO BRAVO dubbed into German; a snippet from ALPHAVILLE to reveal an earlier acting part of Christa Lang, Fuller’s wife (seen as a prostitute servicing Akim Tamiroff); Stéphane Audran doing a guest bit as a lesbian named Dr. Bogdanovich. If this all sounds like a movie freak’s nightmare, I can only confess that Sam seemed to have a whale of a time making this two-bit classic, and I for one had a whale of a time watching it. It may not have production values like ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, a conformist crowd pleaser shown in the Grande Salle — a film that aims to out-gross the highest grossers by synthesizing at least six other “hits,” heartily recommended to all viewers with like temperaments — but by God, it has style. As is customary with Fuller, the acting veers from woodblock-hard to awful-ugly (automatically turning every face into a mug shot), the violence is corrosive, the double crosses mutual, the implications perfectly bananas, the imagination fertile. As a modest entry in the Louis Feuillade tradition, this is a minor joy.
[Originally published in Movietone News 29, January-February 1974]
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DeadPigeononBeethovenStreet is Sam Fuller’s Godard movie. The title is gradually pieced together (cf. Pierrotlefou), there is a scene in a movie theater where the hero grooves on hearing John Wayne in German in RioBravo (cf. Boetticher’s Westbound with an Apollinaire soundtrack in Àbout de souffle and Jack Palance’s orgiastic response to a cinematic bathing belle in the screening room of Le Mépris), there is a plethora of clique-y movie jokes (e.g., a one-scene appearance by Stéphane Audran as a certain Dr. Bogdanovich), and the director’s wife is featured in all her punishing ineptitude (there’s even a nearly subliminal flash of her playing a scene with Akim Tamiroff in Godard’s Alphaville). Besides these factors, none of which is exactly ignorable, the movie parodies its own narrative homeground to a fare-thee-well. After a bang-up opening in which a dead pigeon and a dead man and a wounded assassin named Charlie Umlaut all fall in Beethovenstrasse, in fist-in-the-kisser images slammed into a very jagged rhythm, Fuller gives us a shot of a pair of bare soles being wheeled down the corridor of a morgue. Looking above and beyond them (which is hard), we see Glenn Corbett and a West German cop and, of course, a morgue attendant; Corbett’s voice is droning on, in four lines piling up enough hyperchromatic exposition to occupy most films for a reel. Indeed, for a moment we can’t be sure whether Corbett is telling this to the German cop or doing a Spillane-style voiceover for our benefit.
So far, so invigorating. Fuller’s sense of outrageousness does not desert him for the remainder of the film, but his capacity and quite possibly his desire to maintain faith with us bums in the audience does, at an increasingly stumbly-legged gallop. Your downtown, sock-it-to-me action flick fan may well be numbed into silence (the sparse audience I saw the film with had talked merrily to the cofeature, a program western, but had nothing to say to DeadPigeon), and even a card-carrying Film Buff may start to resent the fucking-over. A man who can make crazy and coherent movies like Underworld U.S.A. and ShockCorridor shouldn’t have to resort to home-movie travelogues. And yet already I’m backing off there, for Fuller has worked that sort of thing into his pictures before (ShockCorridor again), and besides, the thrills, the snaps of ozone among the general effluvia of rot!—like the moment when CLICK! Corbett sees Christa Lang Fuller in a restaurant CLICK! he drops a pill in her coffee CLICK! we’re tilting down the Cathedral of Köln and there, seeming to float dreamily upright against it, are Corbett and a helper supporting Lang and ushering her casually … where? Then there’s the next-to-last scene, a duel between Corbett and ace bad guy Anton Diffring (a razor-sharp you-haff-relatiffs-in-Chermany? type), and Diffring is Errol-Flynn-good with an épée, and so Corbett … No, you have to see it to disbelieve it; but what I object to is: did the outcome of this marvelously mad sequence have to be so sloppy, so perfunctory?—madness ceases to be marvelous if the chaos is absolute. But the very last moment is so good, so symmetrical, so ballsy and upfront and Godardianly self-aware that it almost … it does! … make me yearn for another look at the whole arbitrary package. Not the least of its virtues is that it throws the careless copout of TheLong Goodbye into devastating relief. Now that is a long goodbye!
RTJ
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Copyright © 1974 Richard T. Jameson
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DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVENSTRASSE
Screenplay and Direction: Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Jerzy Lipman.
The Players: Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang, Anton Diffring, Stéphane Audran, Alex d’Arcy.