1969’s Double Face is a suspense thriller that is an Italian-German co-production, making it both a giallo and a krimi.  Given the first scene has a car exploding into flame after colliding with a train, I am actually going to call it a Krispy Krimi.

Klaus Kinski stars in this, thus making it a Kinski Krispy Krimi and the world has a new phrase that is difficult to say three times fast.  He is surprisingly restrained in this, as a man whose dead wife (Margaret Lee) might be alive and might not.  It appeared she died in a different fiery car crash, and Kinski may or may not have been responsible for that.  Admittedly, he looks pretty guilty, as Lee had been openly having an affair with Annabella Incontrera and was well on her way to leaving him for her.

Some time after Lee’s death, Christiane Krüger wanders into his house and disrupts his life.  Like most such productions of this time, we have a mystery woman who resembles the Janet puppet from The Muppets and is somehow both vaguely hippie-ish and richly decadent.  She will lure him to a deeply preposterous “wild” gathering of youths that includes nude dancing, a game of chicken conducted on motorcycles, and watching a porno.

That porn flick features a woman whose face is obscured but who is wearing a distinctive ring that could only be Lee’s.  This starts Kinski questioning whether Lee is still alive and the possibility somebody else was killed in that crash.  If I were him, I would be wondering why certain key moments of the grainy 8mm sex film are so startlingly clear, and that’s because the filmmakers show us some pieces of the film as it was originally shot on a higher-quality film stock.  Later, he should be wondering why Lee’s father seems so unfazed when shown a porno featuring a woman who may be his daughter.

This film is largely competently made, though with a few notable exceptions.  The most egregious of these are scenes of Kinski and Lee’s early romance at a ski resort, which might be the single worst use of bluescreen I have seen at any level of production.  Then there’s the voice acting, this is actually a surprisingly good English dub.  But anybody who has ever heard Kinski’s real voice will find hilarious the completely normal one substituted for his here.

Double Face is a middling thriller that, while not terrible, I would be hard-pressed to recommend to anybody. It is the kind of movie where too much is dependent upon a minor detail such as the clock in Lee’s Jaguar always running an hour fast.  That Kinski is so insistent on telling the police this for no justifiable reason is representative of the overall clumsiness and, frankly, laziness of the thing.

Dir: Riccardo Freda

Starring Klaus Kinski, Christiane Krüger

Watched on Arrow Video blu-ray