1. Dombrowski, Published on 01/01/16. Recommended Citation. Dombrowski, Lisa A., 'Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street' (2016).
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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.

[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

Copyright © 1974 Richard T. Jameson

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.

Restored and funded by UCLA Film & Television Archive

Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße

Hot on the trail of a scandalous photo of a U.S. senator with an unknown blonde, an American detective is gunned down in Bonn on Beethoven Street. His partner, Sandy (Glenn Corbett), arrives in Germany to pick up the chase, and maneuvers his way into an international syndicate of blackmailers, falling for Christa (Christa Fulller), the mysterious blonde from the photograph. She promises to help Sandy, but the Yankee gumshoe might be in over his head in this high-stakes game of global extortion.

From its cutthroat opening, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street displays the confrontational kineticism central to Fuller’s work and probes familiar themes of duplicitous identities and malleable allegiances. Approached to make a picture for the German television series Tatort, Fuller seized the chance to create a “tongue-in-cheek adventure”: “I wanted Dead Pigeon to be full of high jinks and hilarity. People expected me to be doing war movies or action pictures. I’d always dreamed of doing a comedy, a film of pure entertainment.”

Invoking the conventions of the detective film, but not taking them particularly seriously, Dead Pigeon romps knowingly through an assemblage of international diplomats and underhanded scammers, with a gun battle staged in a nursery (bullets fly overhead as the heavy, Charlie Umlaut, ducks for cover behind a row of bassinets), and a comically overwrought final showdown between the hotheaded American and the fencing-enthusiast mastermind behind the syndicate. Stylistic elements amplify Fuller’s experimental leanings: abrupt zooms, jump cuts and surveillance-like camera angles figure prominently.

Returning to Germany for the first time since his service in World War II, Fuller took full advantage of the location, incorporating Cologne’s annual Carnival and landmarks including Beethoven’s home, where Fuller reportedly spent a war-weary night sleeping under Beethoven’s piano during the capture of Bonn. Released to enthusiastic support abroad—the film was praised by Take One as “relentlessly inventive and bizarre”—Dead Pigeon’s domestic release was minimal.

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The Archive’s first completely digital restoration, we’re proud to present this unique articulation of Fuller’s artistic vision, in a never before seen director’s cut with additional footage not included in prior versions. —Nina Rao

Director: Samuel Fuller. Production: Bavaria Atelier GmbH, Chrisam Films. Distribution: Bavaria Atelier GmbH. Producer: Joachim von Mengershausen. Screenwriter: Samuel Fuller. Cinematographer: Jerzy Lipman. Art Direction: Lothar Kirchem. Editor: Liesgret Schmitt-Klink. Music: Can. Cast: Christa Lang, Glenn Corbett, Anton Diffring, Eric P. Caspar, Sieghardt Rupp. DCP, color, 123 min.

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Restored from 35mm Interpositive (IP) and 16mm print. Laboratory services by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Special thanks to: Christa Fuller.