“Starring Anita Pallenberg” and “Music by Brian Jones” are the big sells of Degree of Murder (Mord und Totschlag in the original German), a weird trifle from 1967 seemingly designed to showcase the almost unbearable cuteness of Pallenberg and little more.
If you’re steeped in the culture of the times, no further details about these people is necessary, but if not, then Pallenberg was at the time rock chic numero uno – though Marianne Faithfull might have challenged her to the title – being the girlfriend of the founder of the Rolling Stones, Jones. Jones is harder to explain in a nutshell, though Nick Broomfield’s excellent documentary, The Stones and Brian Jones, does a great job detailing his sad story. In short, Jones is a multi-instrumentalist who founds a band, invites Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to join it, then gets muscled aside as the emphasis shifts from playing blues songs by old black guys to the band writing its own material.
There’s an exquisitely uncomfortable moment in Broomfield’s documentary in which Jones is asked in an early interview with the Stones about various aspects of song-writing and has to tell the interviewer that he doesn’t write the songs, several times. But you’re the band’s leader, aren’t you, the interviewer never says, though the question hangs there unasked in the air.
All of which is to say that “Music by Brian Jones” does actually mean something in this movie. He had something to prove, wanted to assert himself as being more than just the guy who played the recorder on Ruby Tuesday, or whatever.
Coming a bit further down the list is Volker Schlöndorff, the acclaimed German director who wasn’t very acclaimed at all when this, his second movie, was made. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and The Tin Drum lay in the future; Schlöndorff is also in “something to prove” mode, injecting the largely formless screenplay (by himself, Gregor von Rezzori, Niklas Frank and Arne Boyer) with as much drama as he can muster through the careful use of camera movements, while at the same time holding to a French New Wave ethos of seemingly free-and-easy, fluffs-and-all film-making.
Pallenberg is a babe and the film is really about what a babe she is. The cute nose, the blonde bob, the “who me?” demeanour, girlishness with a slash of wanton animal sexuality running right through the middle. She doesn’t purr, instead preferring to coo her lines, as if speaking too loud would shatter some illusion.
As for plot, in the opening scene Marie (Pallenberg) shoots and kills her boyfriend, more by accident than design, when he arrives home angry and drunk and starts getting lairy. The rest of the film is about Marie trying to get rid of the body of Hans (Werner Enke), helped initially by Gunther (Hans Peter Wallachs) and then later also by Fritz (Manfred Fischbeck). Hans, Gunther and Fritz. Typisch Deutsch, as they say.
Silly Marie is the kind of young woman who doesn’t really know how to do anything at all, because men have always fallen over each other to do things for her. And that’s essentially what happens here. She recruits Gunther in a bar, offering him money to help her dispose of Hans’s body. He’d have done it for nothing, or for the suggestion that he might get to sleep with Marie, which he does while Hans’s body lies there on the floor of her apartment. Then later, when it turns out that Hans’s body rolled up in a carpet is too heavy for Gunther to manhandle alone down the stairs (Marie isn’t going to help), Gunther recruits Fritz, who also fancies a tilt at the beautiful Marie.
It would be easy to be scornful of Marie’s character but Pallenberg invests her with some dignity, rocking a look – blond bob, short white trenchcoat, calf-length boots – that Sienna Miller would later borrow. Schlöndorff also works hard to keep us on side, with Richard Lester-style moments of wackadoodle running about designed to show that Marie is a fun and carefree girl at heart rather than a calculating bitch.
As for Brian Jones’s soundtrack – pretty good. Jimmy Page (not quite yet of Led Zeppelin fame), Nicky Hopkins (session pianist for the Stones) and Kenny Jones (of the Small Faces) are all involved while Brian Jones plays multiple instruments. There’s the odd bit of rock, but experimental sounds, some tasty strings, the odd bit of carnivalesque jauntiness. It doesn’t always suit what’s up there on the screen, but then getting the soundtrack finished was a bit of a feat, apparently, with Brian’s deteriorating mental condition and frequent away-days on drink/drugs not helping.
For art-mirrors-life enthusiasts, the storyline of Marie shifting her allegiance from Gunther to Fritz has a parallel in reality – shortly after completing the film Pallenberg and Jones split up and she took up with Keith Richards.
Degree of Murder – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
