Directed by Sam Fuller, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße) is something of an outlier, both for Fuller and for the German TV show Tatort.
Tatort, still running after more than 50 years, translates as Crime Scene, and is a Sunday-night landmark on the German TV landscape. It offers feature-length policiers set in various different parts of the German-speaking world and is populated with a huge cast of characters, some who recur and others who don’t. Part of its formula for success is this lack of a rigid formula – it’s highly adaptable.
It’s also a proving ground for rising talent. Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), Edward Berger (Conclave) and Achim von Borries (Babylon Berlin) all directed episodes. Names, you’ll notice, with a distinct German flavour to them, something that can’t really be said about Sam Fuller’s.
His episode was the 25th in the run and aired in 1972 and, shock horror, is mostly in English. Playing around with the policier formula a bit, it injects a jovial, almost joky tone here and there. The opening credits, for example, introduce the actors in gracious bows to camera, plus the backroom staff – including editor, dolly operator, Fuller himself – everyone decked out in Carnival costumes.
The story is set in Cologne and Bonn, supposedly against the backdrop of the Cologne Carnival, and opens with the death of a mysterious character in Beethoven Street, the latest bloody manifestation of a plot involving compromising photographs of a US senator hoping to make a run for the presidency.
Enter Glenn Corbett as a moustachioed private eye known only as Sandy, who at first engages with a Tatort regular, German cop Inspector Kressin (Sieghardt Rupp), who speaks no English and has soon been conveniently sidelined after copping a bullet in the shoulder, leaving Sandy to investigate alone.
Fuller was inspired to write the story after reading about the UK’s Profumo scandal – a British politician sleeping with a young woman who was also sleeping with a Soviet spy. He takes that idea and pushes it a couple of stops further, as Sandy first tracks down the honey in the honey trap and then tries to weaponise her in a reverse-ferret operation.
Christa Lang, a German national, Fuller’s wife and undoubtedly a good part of the reason why Fuller is here in the first place, plays Christa, a woman running out of mental road when it comes to sleeping with foreign politicians, who is pushed further out of her comfort zone by Sandy’s plan to work his way back to the source of the kompromat.
On the radar mostly because of Fuller’s name, this is on the whole a scrappy affair and there are undoubtedly better episodes of Tatort. To do a ledger-style appraisal, on the plus side – alongside the basic premise there are good actors (Lang, Corbett and Anton Diffring as the criminal mastermind behind the whole thing), a good sharp image and technically smart shooting style, plus interesting locations in Cologne and Bonn, which Fuller mines for atmosphere. There’s German avant-rockers Can on the soundtrack (billed as “The Can”) and their experimental, rhythmic, synth-inflected soundscapes work particularly well. Some of the scenes ping – the final fight sequence is particularly ingenious.
On the downside, the lunges into the humorous just don’t work, the actors are under-rehearsed and the whole thing is just too long. Originally 90 minutes in its TV manifestation, it got a theatrical release in the USA, when it was around ten minutes longer. The hard copy version you might now buy comes in even longer, at 127 minutes, and it’s hard to see how longer equals better. One of Fuller’s great strengths is his ability to deliver punchy concise scenes. At this extended length they just wallow.
Quite late in the game it becomes clear that Fuller is also attempting a Maltese Falcon-style tale with Lang as a mysterious femme fatale and Corbett as the Humphrey Bogart-style detective on a case taking him up one blind alley after another. Though Corbett’s Tom Selleck moustache might also bring to mind a not particularly riveting episode of Magnum PI.
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
