Kinski Watch X: The Door With The Seven Locks (Alfred Vohrer, 1962)

A thoroughly enjoyable movie, the script for The Door With The Seven Locks still exhibits major structural problems, bereaving the film of any real suspense. There are two sides to the Seven Locks coin: the first half of the movie, a swift and pulpy affair that comes up with silly humor and effective photography sets up the intrigue rather nicely and hopes are raised for a consistently thrilling thriller – if you’ll excuse the pun. In the second 45 minutes, however, the plot gets unnecessarily convoluted and confusing, and the movie loses its tension and focus until the fun silliness of the first half loses all its fun.

The plot concerns the heirs to the deceased Lord Selford whose wealth is supposedly kept in a vault only accessible if one possesses seven keys necessitated to unlock the vault’s door. One by one, the heirs turn up dead with one of the seven keys on them. Inspector (not commissioner, as he specifies) Dick Martin (Heinz Drache) begins his investigation. His aides are a librarian with spellbinding legs (Sabina Sesselman), Martin’s goofy sidekick Holmes (Eddi Arendt, of course) and the shady attorney Haveloc (Hans Nielsen) who manages Lord Selford’s will.

All is well and the story breezes along until somehow Dick Martin and Holmes, who’s shenanigans are at times amusing and maddening, are relegated to be simple onlookers as a crazy scientist, a moronic hulk of a hit man, and a couple of rich aristocrats and their butler who stage several abductions find their way into the script and pretty much take over and complicate things where we just wanted to see Holmes trying to learn magic tricks while discussing clues with Martin, and feel vicarious embarrassment observing Martin hit on the allowedly charming librarian Sybil. It is telling, in that regard, that the solution to the murder intrigue comes about not thanks to Martin’s investigative skills, but because he is simply in the right place at the right moment. Not that I’m against experimentation in the way to tell a crime story, but if the leading detective doesn’t even interfere in the plot for large chunks of the film and turns up at the end to resolve everything by pure chance something went wrong.

Kinski’s presence in the movie is peripheral at best. He has one extended speaking scene, where his character Pheeny reveals to Dick Martin that he was commissioned to break open a door with seven locks but refrained from accepting because the whole affair seemed fishy. A few scenes later and not even ten minutes into the movie, Martin finds Pheeny was murdered. Given Kinski’s self-proclaimed proclivity to lure female bit players into his bed during shooting, maybe he didn’t agree to a bigger role because the only young female actress on the set was Sabina Sesselman and the prospect of spending weeks on a set where carnal release was not possible in the amount desired drove Kinski away from this one.

Or it could be that shooting for The Door With The Seven Locks had to be rescheduled repeatedly (initially, the film was supposed to be done by the end of 1961) because producer Horst Wendlandt wasn’t satisfied with the script. The Mystery Of The Red Orchid was rushed into production instead, providing Kinski with a much bigger role than he had previously had in any Edgar Wallace krimi. Even before the latter film hit theaters, shooting for Seven Locks began. It is no surprise then that a lot of actors typically cast in Edgar Wallace films were absent (Heinz Drache replacing Joachim Fuchsberger as the quirky detective) and Kinski had only a very small role. Though rejected by critics, Seven Locks was hugely successful at the box office, reaffirming the public's hunger for Edgar Wallace murder mysteries after the commercial failure of The Mystery of the Red Orchid.