The Devil Strikes at Night (Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam) is a 1957 film from West Germany directed by Robert Siodmak.
The setting is 1944 Berlin. A waitress named Lucy Hansen is murdered, and her lover, a married low-level Nazi functionary named Willi Kuhn, is arrested. The only problem is, he didn't do it. Lucy was actually killed by one Bruno Luedke, a mentally challenged day laborer who is also a Serial Killer.
Enter Inspector Axel Kersten, who has been transferred back to the civilian police after a knee injury on the Eastern Front left him with a permanent limp. Kuhn's arrest notwithstanding, Axel thinks the Hansen murder is tied to other cases that share a similar modus operandi. Soon he is proven right when Bruno is caught with Lucy Hansen's purse. Bruno confesses to some fifty murders, and the case is seemingly closed—except that the Nazi leadership, unwilling to admit that a serial killer has gone unchecked for 20 years, decides to hush everything up and execute the innocent Kuhn anyway.
Tropes:
- Chiaroscuro: Berlin is under wartime blackout, which is why it's dark and shadowy when Bruno strangles Lucy to death in the stairwell of her apartment building.
- Creepy Souvenir: Bruno has a box in the basement where he lives that has various souvenirs. Among the items seen in there when he is rooting around are a doll, what appears to be a bra strap, a woman's shoe, a woman's shawl, and Lucy Hansen's purse. That last one is fatal to him, as the lady who sees him with it insists that he turn it in, which leads to his arrest.
- Dies Wide Open: The unfortunate Lucy Hansen when she is found dead in the foyer of her apartment.
- The End: The movie ends with a telegram reporting that Bruno was executed. His case file is closed, a "CASE CLOSED" stamp appears on the folder, and the film ends.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The immediate villain is Bruno Luedke, a Serial Killer. But the Greater-Scope Villain is the Nazi Party, which has turned Germany into a lawless, brutal, violent state, and which executes an innocent man rather than suffer the bad publicity of admitting to the existence of a Serial Killer. The judge in the Kuhn case makes this explicit when he tells Axel that concepts like justice and the rule of law are a dead letter in Hitler's Germany. This is further underlined in a scene where Bruno worms his way into a woman's apartment, only for the woman to tell him that she's hiding there because she's Jewish, and her husband was killed in Auschwitz.
- Match Cut: An amusing match cut matches Nazi soldiers filing into a building with sheep being herded down a country road.
- Miscarriage of Justice: Willi Kuhn is executed for a murder he didn't commit, because the Nazi Party hierarchy—reportedly, Hitler himself—wishes to avoid admitting that a serial killer has been operating undetected in Germany for years.
- Noodle Incident: The opening scene shows people walking across a field, only for the camera to pan to Bruno Luedke, hiding from them in a creek on the edge of the field. This scene connects to nothing else in the story and there is no hint as to when or why this happened.
- Phoney Call: Axel, having made an emergency trip to Hamburg in order to meet the judge before Kuhn is executed, calls his Gestapo boss Rossdorf from the judge's office. Axel begs permission to let the judge see the Luedke file, but Rossdorf tells him to stop meddling and hangs up. Axel then pretends that Rossdorf is still on the line and has told him to hand over the file. The judge picks up on this, saying "I wonder if Rossdorf really heard your last words?".
- P.O.V. Cam: The cops take Bruno out for a field trip, where he recounts for them how he chased down and killed a woman in the woods, then dumped her body by the seaside. The latter portion of this scene is filled with P.O.V. Cam shots, complete with Jitter Cam, showing Bruno's POV as he tells how he chased down and strangled the woman.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Rossdorf, who has had his fill of Axel's inconvenient questions, reassigns him to the army at the end of the film and sends him off to the front lines in Courland. Germans watching this film in 1957 would have known that very soon after the setting of the movie, Courland was cut off by the advancing Red Army, and the troops there were besieged for nearly a year until Germany surrendered.
- Romantic Candlelit Dinner: Axel makes a point of flipping the lights off so that he and Helga can enjoy their dinner by candlelight.
- Second-Face Smoke: Major Wollenburg is Helga's fourth cousin, but he still wants to have sex with her. When a drunk, horny Wollenburg gets up in Helga's face and says "What do you think about love?", she blows smoke in his face.
- Serial Killer: Bruno Luedke, who has killed some 55 women, or so the police think as Bruno has lost count. He strangles a woman in a stairwell in the first act, and he is about to murder another when he's interrupted by the woman's host coming home early from her work.
- Stock Footage: Stock footage of a bombing raid seen briefly in the opening Hamburg scenes.
- Train-Station Goodbye: Helga rushes to the train station to say goodbye to Axel before Axel is shipped off to Courland. Then as the train is getting underway, he sees Bruno Luedke's friend Anna, who recognizes him and asks what happened to Bruno. Axel shrugs his shoulders and says that Bruno Luedke never existed.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Based on the true story of Bruno Luedke, although most everything is fictionalized except his name, the fact that he was mentally disabled, and the allegation that he killed several dozen women. In Real Life, the case remains controversial, with many people thinking the Gestapo tortured Luedke into a False Confession. In the movie he's definitely a serial killer.
