The Curse of the Hidden Vault (1964)

The Curse of the Hidden Vault (German title Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloss) is a 1964 Edgar Wallace krimi from Rialto.

The opening sequence is pleasingly clever and witty.

The real story begins with the arrival in London of Kathleen Kent (Judith Dornys). She has been living in Australia. She is accompanied by a law student from Sydney, a Mr Westlake, who claims to be her legal advisor and bodyguard. Since he’s played by Eddi Arent we tend to doubt his competence in either of these rôles.

Kathleen and Westlake are taken to their hotel where they discover they are prisoners. It takes them, and the audience, a while to start getting some idea of what is going on. Twenty years earlier a casino operator named Real (Rudolf Forster) cheated Kathleen’s father out of his entire fortune. Real is now old and he feels guilty about his past misdeeds. He summoned Kathleen to London to make amends. He intends to restore her father’s fortune to her.

So Real is a bad guy but maybe he has now become a good guy. Real’s assistant is a barrister named Spedding. We don’t know if he’s really a good guy or not.

We assume that Connor and his associates, the men who are holding Kathleen prisoner, are definitely bad guys. But what about Jimmy Flynn? Jimmy seems very friendly with all the crooks but he’s also very friendly with Inspector Angel (Harry Meyen) from Scotland Yard. The crooks don’t know whether to trust Jimmy, and nor does Inspector Angel. Nor, for that matter, does the viewer.

And then there’s the mysterious George (Klaus Kinski), who keeps floating about silently. We have no idea whose side he’s on.

Apart from trying to figure out how to distinguish the good guys from the bad we also have to consider the very real possibility that some of the good guys will try double-cross other good guys and some of the bad guys will undoubtedly double-cross some of their fellow bad guys.

To add another complication, there’s an unknown sniper who shoots people from time to time.

Real’s fortune is kept in a secret vault protected by ingenious, imaginative and apparently impregnable security devices. Everybody would like to know how to get into that vault and out again while staying alive.

Several people have already been murdered (one of them was murdered in three different ways simultaneously) so this is a rather dangerous game.

The fact that the chief of Scotland Yard, Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg), is taking a personal interest in the case naturally gives us those of us who have seen him in action in other krimis no confidence at all.

Judith Dornys as Kathleen Kent is clearly the heroine and she’s likeable enough if not particularly memorable. We’re not sure if the hero will turn out to be Inspector Angel or Jimmy Flynn, or maybe somebody else. We’re not sure who will turn out to be the real villain.

Harald Leipnitz as Jimmy Flynn is reasonably good. Siegfried Schürenberg grown on me more and more. Klaus Kinski looks suitably mysterious and sinister.

The plot twists and turns all over the place, which is what you want in a krimi.

Franz Josef Gottlieb does a solid job and throws in some nice visual set-pieces.

Visually the movie is impressive and imaginative, especially the wonderful hidden vault complex sets.

This movie was shot in black-and-white and in Ultrascope, one of those cheaper Cinemascope equivalents that were popular at that time.

The Tobis Blu-Ray transfer looks terrific. It offers the options of the English dubbed version or the German language version with English subtitles. It is always a good idea to avoid the English dubbed versions of krimis.

The Curse of the Hidden Vault is a typical krimi and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t break any new ground but it delivers the pleasures that you expect from this genre. Highly recommended.