loader image

Edgar Wallace & Horst Wendlandt

"Do what you want, but don't make it expensive."

Fog billows over the Thames and a hunchbacked murderer trudges through Soho. Hello, this is Edgar Wallace, and welcome – not to London, but to German Wirtschaftswunder cinema. The Wallace films, with their bland mixture of ghost train horror and detective story. The most original contribution to the Wallace phenomenon was probably by Peter Thomas. His compositions for 18 Wallace films have aged the least.

“Do what you want, but don’t make it expensive” was the instruction given by film producer Horst Wendlandt to his composer. Thomas has always fulfilled both: He is on budget and he has remained idiosyncratic. For the film “The Sorcerer” he mixed women’s screams, gunshots, men’s rattles, chanting and big band with a lot of swing to create perhaps the craziest music in film history – crazy and even more insane than Kinski’s infamous outbursts on the set.

Best of Edgar Wallace