The Fellowship of the Frog

The film that kicked off the West German krimi boom, when a Danish-German producer bought up Edgar Wallace's back catalogue and turned fog-bound England into a Berlin backlot. A masked master-criminal called the Frog runs a London crime ring while Scotland Yard flounders and Joachim Fuchsberger does the square-jawed hero routine he would repeat for a decade. The theatrical villain, the secret society and the tangled inheritance are all already in place, along with the comic-relief plod nobody asked for. It is creakier than the colour entries that followed, but this is where the whole cycle starts, and the giallo's black-gloved killer is a direct descendant.