This programme takes us into the demi-monde of detectives, crooks, tricks, shady deals and policemen in tutus. A world full of mysteries, where we – fortunately – never really understand what exactly is going on. Freed from narrative chains we can follow the master of disguise Nick Winter, Pathé’s top detective, solving a tricky case, watch a man in a wonderful checked yellow suit who suddenly makes himself invisible, feel unexplained menace in an unidentified Danish thriller and, distracted by the brilliant Pathécolor of a French fragment, try to follow the conversation of two men – father and son? – about money. The longest fragment of the programme, Der geheimnisvolle Nachtschatten, is by German filmmaker Harry Piel, a specialist in popular adventure films who was aptly nicknamed “Dynamite Director”. The film’s high-speed action and a breathtaking chase using various means of transport are typical for Piel, and it also features many a fake beard and moustache, then indispensable props in the crime genre. Will the Komiya collection ever be digitised and accessible? In one fragment of another German Krimi, Das Souper um Mitternacht by Hans Werkmeister (not in the programme), there is a splendid image of a curtain with a word slowly punched in the fabric by bullet holes: “Hüte Dich!” – “Beware!”.

Karl Wratschko