Release Year: 1967
Country: Turkey
Starring: Ekrem Bora, Sema Ozcan, Gulgun Erdem, Engin Inal, Tanju Korel, Meltem Mete, Nevin Nuray, Nurhan Nur, Zafer Onen, Guzin Ozipek, Yüksel Papatya, Sevim Sevil, Buket Sokollu, Erol Tas, Suphi Tekniker, Reha Yurdakul.
Writer: Ilhan Engin
Director: Ilhan Engin
Cinematographer: Memduh Yukman
Producer: Ilhan Engin
Alternate Titles: Woman Despiser

We come to the seedy Turkish thriller Kadin Dusmani via a circuitous but highly entertaining journey through a number of different types of film that built on a central theme — the simply murder mystery — and made it increasingly outlandish and bizarre. Picking a solid starting point is almost impossible — even if one could distill down to the “the first of its kind” in movies, there’s the fact that the early efforts were all based on various types of novels and pulp stories that underwent a similar evolution to the film that would eventually grow from them. So, for the sake of not falling into a bottomless pit, let’s pick a logical point at which to begin.

One of the earliest and easiest genres of film in the era of the sound picture was the murder mystery. These were popular not just because they were entertaining, but also because they could draw upon a vast back catalog of potboilers and plays for their stories, and because they were relatively cheap and easy to make. Take a few actors, put them together in a well-appointed living room set, throw a dead body int he mix, and then watch everyone walk back and forth while acting or being suspicious. During the Poverty Row era, these parlor mysteries were cranked out in vast quantities and required very little in the way of resources or technical skill. There were usually only a couple sets, no big name actors, and the locations and equipment were often left-overs from bigger budget productions that the low budget crew could pop in and use during the bigger budget film’s down time. Which meant that even with meager resources, you could get a decent looking production (the Mister Moto movies are the best example of this — they basically went in at night, after the big budget Charlie Chan movies were done for the day, and used all the same sets and equipment, giving them a much bigger budget appearance than they would have achieved otherwise).

Concurrent with these mystery movies was the rise of the serial — shorts of an often fantastic nature, that played before the feature presentation at the movie house. The serials were big on action and adventure, and each week they ended in a thrilling if preposterous cliffhangers that were meant to lure back to the theater the next week to how the hero would escape his predicament. It was usually by stepping casually to one side or landing on a ledge. Serials drew a lot of influence form pulp magazines, and as such, there were a lot of science fiction and fantasy elements, including spacemen, hooded maniacs, underground lairs, and fanciful dreams of world domination.

Over in England, mystery writer Edgar Wallace was combining the straight-forward murder novel with the more outlandish territory explored by the pulp and serial writers. His novels often started out as what seemed to be regular murder mysteries or crime thrillers but quickly revealed themselves to be packed with bizarre super-villains in masks, secret societies, and those beloved underground lairs and hidden passages. British filmmakers adapted several Wallace novels for the big screen. Movies like The Gaunt Stranger and The Terror were quirky blends of murder, cops and robbers, and mysterious masked men — but they always erred on the side of conservative. They were a little weird, but not really all that weird.

Eventually, a war broke out and people had other things to do for a while, like make serials about Batman punching out Japs beneath the streets of Gotham. When the world started to settle down again, though, it turned out that the Germans had been rabid fans of Edgar Wallace novels. In the late 50s, with Wallace no longer being popular back in England, German film studios started cranking out movies based on the author’s stories — only these films were much more willing to embrace the weirdness. Thanks to advances in film technology, increased permissiveness in what could be in a movie, and the continental European tendency to put mood before logic, the German Edgar Wallace adaptations — or krimi, as they became known — were both similar to and very different from the old British productions.

Now, just as the krimi machine was getting up and rolling in Germany, Italian filmmaker Mario Bava turned the hoary old murder mystery on its head with his splashy, highly stylized Blood and Black Lace. German krimi filmmakers saw Bava’s psychedelic, candy-colored foray into murderous mayhem and quickly adopted the look — with great effect — for their own productions. In Italy, Bava’s trajectory was followed until it evolved into the modern (or what was modern at the time) giallo.

In Turkey during this same time, which was already proving itself quite adept at “adapting” the more outrageous examples of Italian filmmaking. They seemed particularly enamored with fumetti adaptations — outrageous superhero/supervillain adventures that were a heady blend of serials, superhero comics, and James Bond, drawing inspiration from the adult-oriented comics so popular at the time in Italy. Mario Bava presented them with what is basically, in terms of color and composition, the fumetti version of a horror film. It was inevitable that it would find itself remade for Turkish sensibilities. What was more surprising was how much of the krimi seeped into the end product as well.

Someone is killing women, then because that’s not mean enough, raping the corpses. The police are baffled. Our central cast of seedy characters are an assembly of potential victims and killers. One by one, women are murdered that cast suspicion on a man in their life, who is then hauled in by the cops and put on ice. And yet the murders keep on happening, until the police have a jail full of men, all of them with plenty of reasons to act all shifty and guilty. But still, the murders — being perpetrated by a killer who dons a variety of gruesome monster masks — keep occurring.

Kadin Dusmani, as I said, cribs much of its plot from Blood and Black Lace, including the final revelation of how the killer keeps killing even when all the suspects have been arrested. But this being a black and white film, veteran director Ilhan Engin can’t mimic Bava’s bold use of color. What he’s left with instead is shadow and light, and there were few better examples at the time of how to effectively use such things than the black and white German krimi, specifically those based on the works of Edgar’s mimic son, Bryan Edgar Wallace. Kadin Dusmani‘s world is familiar while not seeming quite like any actual city. Everything is twisting alleys, dark corners, billowing fog, and sweaty people lurking in the shadows for no discernible reason. In its visual approach, Kadin Dusmani reminds me a lot of Phantom of Soho. Despite being presumably set in a Turkish city, it has the same other-wordly feel and could very probably be taking place in the same nether-London as Phantom.

And it’s just about as effective. Possessed obviously of a nasty edge, Kadin Dusmani manages to be yet another link between the earlier krimi and whodunits and the much harder giallo that would blossom (some would say rot) in the 1970s. And like those later films, just as wit the Bava movies, logic and “that wouldn’t happen in real life” should be abandoned early. Kadin Dusmani occupies a sphere where women who are being followed down a crowded street by a sinister character will try to evade their pursuer by turning down dark, foggy, abandoned alleys. It’s a world where attractive women deal with the shock of a friend or roommate being murdered by undressing and modeling their lingerie collection in the mirror. If you want sane humans behaving rationally, you’ll be hard pressed to find them here.

But if you want gorgeous ladies, beady eyed men, determined but ineffectual inspectors, seedy nightclubs, and a killer who like to gussy himself up in fright masks, then you’re on firmer ground. Kadin Dusmani may be Turkish, but it speaks the international language of quirky low-rent thrillers. Anyone who is familiar with krimi and giallo, with Bava or Argento, is going to find Kadin Dusmani a smart and gruesome little imitation of its better known contemporaries.

Unlike many Turkish films of the era, this one can mask its low budget. This isn’t one that has a “point and laugh at the hilariously inept special effects” appeal, or one that is curious seeming because it’s so weird. It’s well-executed and, while low budget, effective. The finale in particular, which takes place in an oddly-proportioned attic space full of shadows and cobwebs, is expertly shot. It’s obvious that director Engin has studied Bava and other masters of the thrillers, and while he himself may not be “a master,” he’s at least one of those guys you hire when you want an expert copy of something a master did. Except for the title and the battered condition of the existing print of the film, this could easily pass for one of the better German or Italian films of the same genre.