Directed by Robert Siodmak
Written by Werner Jörg Lüddecke based on an article by Will Berthold
Starring Claus Holm, Mario Adorf, Hannes Messemer, and Annemarie Düringer
Running Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Now available on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Despite having been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Robert Siodmak’s 1957 The Devil Strikes at Night has been tough to track down. And lo, Kino Lorber continues to do yeoman’s work in Criterion’s shadow by re-releasing and remastering lost classics like this one. Though Siodmak is best known for his Hollywood film noir work in the 40s, he emigrated back to his native Germany after World War II and finished out his career producing German-language films. The Devil Strikes at Night tells the story of Bruno Lüdke (Mario Adorf), an intellectually disabled serial killer who was active during the waning days of the Third Reich. When homicide detective Axel Kersten (Claus Holm) starts tying together the loose threads of dozens of unsolved murders and pops up on the radar of the Gestapo, he learns the bitter truth about the incongruity of justice in an inherently unjust regime.

As you expect from most German cinema about the World War II—and from Siodmak who was Jewish and fled Germany during Hitler’s rise to power—there is a fascinating reckoning with the country’s erstwhile Nazism. In this case, the question Siodmak and screenwriter Werner Jörg Lüddecke are asking is: what happens when a serial killer is operating in a country being run by mass murderers? Siodmak brings his Hollywood noir bonafides to the look and feel of this film—Kino Lorber’s transfer looks excellent, by the way—but there’s a darkly cynical thematic edge to it that feels more in line with the films of the coming 1960s.

Because I’m a totally basic film nerd, I couldn’t help drawing connections to that other German serial killer movie: Fritz Lang’s 1931 masterpiece M. Both films skirt the notion of turning these stories into murder mysteries and show you exactly who the killer is up front. The twist with Siodmak’s film another man has been arrested for one of Lüdke’s brutal murders and the Gestapo only lets Kommissar Kersten pursue his serial killer theory because they see the propaganda potential if the killer is a non-Aryan. When Kersten learns that the killer is Aryan the whole “noble murder cop doggedly getting his man” story gets upended, and the film starts hammering its core theme of the impossibility of justice under a fundamentally unjust regime home.

The cast here is excellent, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight Mario Adorf’s turn as Bruno Lüdke. He plays the killer with a casual dead-eyed menace that is truly haunting. There are a couple of sequences here that rival the best stuff from Zodiac, The Silence of the Lambs, and the other sacred cows of serial killer cinema. In one in particular, Lüdke is happily leading the police to one of his crime scenes and we see him pantomime it from his crystal-clear memory. Siodmak films it almost like a dream sequence and as such it feels totally divorced from the standard noir cinematography style we have seen up until that point. It’s the pure synthesis between an actor and a director you live for as a film nerd, and the sort of detail that elevates a solid noir into a quiet masterpiece.