Favourite labels don’t often grab the attention right from the start, and Deaf Crocodile was launched in early 2022 in somewhat low-key fashion, as a “partner label” (one of many) to established exploitation specialists Vinegar Syndrome. They first caught my eye with their third release, Ilya Muromets, mainly because I’d actually seen it – and the mere fact that someone was restoring and reviving one of Alexander Ptushko’s lavish Russian fantasy masterpieces in high definition was noteworthy enough in itself.

Ilya Muromets

Despite this considerable temptation, I still didn’t take the plunge, as I import very little these days (the pound has never come close to regaining even its $1.40 value on the day of the Brexit referendum, never mind the two-dollar rate that it achieved in the mid-2000s; as I’m typing this now on 16 January 2025, it’s a mere $1.22), but I kept an eye on what they were doing, and finally decided by about their ninth or tenth release that this was a label that could hardly have been targeted more precisely at me. Or rather, while I hadn’t seen most of their titles and hadn’t even heard of many of them, those that I had seen were all firm favourites, a formula that has happily continued to this day. As of the turn of 2024/5, there’ve been 32 Deaf Crocodile releases (all on Blu-ray, two on 4K UHD), released more or less monthly, although more recently they’ve doubled that output.

Before plunging headlong into their first release, The Unknown Man of Shandigor, here’s a quick historical overview. Like its near-twin Radiance Films (and like Indicator a few years earlier), it’s a new (or newish) label that was founded by some very experienced people. Curator-filmmaker Dennis Bartok alternated thirteen years as head of film programming at the Los Angeles-based American Cinematheque with working on projects of his own as writer/producer (his 2006 anthology film Trapped Ashes, made in league with Joe Dante, Monte Hellman and Ken Russell, is a recent Deaf Crocodile release; in fact, their 4K UHD debut), while Craig Rogers is the in-house restoration expert, having previously cut his technical teeth at IMAX, Cinelicious Pics and Arbelos Films, the latter of which he co-founded. One of his recent 4K restorations was for Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, which was featured on both the Arbelos (US) and Indicator (UK) releases, the latter of which was reviewed by Slarek here.

Solomon King, restored by Craig Rogers

As for their current Blu-ray catalogue (they also have a streaming platform), it’s overwhelmingly European in origin, with a very strong lean towards central and eastern Europe – a part of the world which, as Second Run has already amply demonstrated, has produced any number of hitherto little-seen and sometimes even wholly unknown gems. Happily, there’s been no overlap with Second Run’s catalogue to date; Second Run favours auteur directors at the arthouse end of the spectrum, while Deaf Crocodile prefers genre films in general and feature-length animation in particular. (That said, Second Run’s Ikarie XB-1 and Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea would fit perfectly into the Deaf Crocodile catalogue.) There is, however, an overlap with the BFI, as they’ve both released the long-unseen Irish folk-horror film The Outcasts (1982), although in substantially different packages.

As for their delightfully eccentric name and mascot, it derives from a much-recounted anecdote involving Hollywood hunk Victor Mature. Deaf Crocodile’s website quotes a version published in 1963 in a Kansas newspaper:

Victor Mature has no “anything-for-arts-sake” illusions about his craft. He tends more to the “survival-comes-first” practical school.

While he was filming in Africa with Janet Leigh, a double was hired for his dangerous scenes in the jungle. Then the director suggested that Mature be shown leading Miss Leigh from a canoe in a jungle stream.

“We’ve brought you all the way to Africa”, said the director, “This, at least will give us a closeup of you with a genuine African background.” …Mature mentioned the presence of crocodiles in the jungle streams. The director sent for the British technical advisor – an expert on the jungle – who said he had the solution: “Crocodiles are afraid of noise. If you clap your hands, a crocodile will flee in fright. Tonight I’ll fire my elephant gun at 30-minute intervals, and I give you my word there won’t be a crocodile around from here to Cairo.”

All night long the elephant gun was fired every half hour. Nobody in the cast or crew could sleep. In the morning Mature was asked to step into the canoe. He refused, and said his double should do it.

“But the firing of that elephant gun all night long,” the director pleaded, “chased every crocodile away.”

“Oh yeah?” Mature replied, “How do you know there wasn’t a deaf crocodile around?”

The crocodile in question didn’t have a name until recently, but following a competition to correct that oversight he’s now called Romero. Nothing to do with George A. of that ilk; this Romero was inspired by silent-era actor Emerson Romero (1900-72), who was himself deaf – and indeed his acting career was curtailed for that reason when the talkies were introduced in 1927. So he spent the rest of his career as an inventor, producing amongst other things a vibrating alarm clock and similarly deaf-friendly adaptations of baby alarms, doorbells and smoke detectors. More pertinently, in 1947 Romero was the first person to caption films specifically for the deaf and hard of hearing, something that is now gratifyingly commonplace. Since a pretty big chunk of my own living over the past seven years has been derived from creating SDH subtitles that now take advantage of technology beyond Romero’s wildest dreams, it was fascinating to learn more about their history.

Emerson Romero

Now for the bad news. In the mid-1990s, I remember being enthralled by a segment in the BBC2 magazine programme Moving Pictures about the work of the Criterion Collection, then a laserdisc-only company, which was my first introduction to the concept of physical-media extras – in retrospect a groundbreaking epiphany for me as their curation and creation has formed a major part of my job over the last two decades (something I’d never have imagined back then).

But, after building my hopes up, then came the inevitable dousing in ice-cold water when it was explained that for copyright reasons Criterion’s output was only available in the US. And, while they didn’t mention this, I swiftly found out that jumping on that particular bandwagon at that time would require a US-friendly laserdisc player, a NTSC-compatible television and, after I’d shelled out a very substantial sum for those, individual releases wouldn’t leave me with much or in some cases any change from £100 a pop. So that was a pretty firm no, and in the event my first encounter with both extras and Criterion releases came several years later, with the purchase of my first DVD player in 1999.

Thankfully, the obstacles here are nothing like as great as they were then, but all of Deaf Crocodile’s releases to date (and I imagine all of them going forward aside from the UHD ones) are locked to Blu-ray Region A. And the other hurdle, of course, is the cost of importing them, although they signalled their keen awareness of this when they recently introduced an international subscription option whereby they ship three releases in a single package to keep postage down. But even when taking that very welcome initiative into account, we’re still talking nearer £30 than £20 for their limited editions, and possibly more than that depending on exchange-rate conditions.

But if those aren’t insuperable obstacles, there’s a whole wealth of weird and wonderful things to discover in Deaf Crocodile’s catalogue, and in the next section I’ll explore the first of them, the 1967 Swiss quasi-spy thriller The Unknown Man of Shandigor.

One of my favourite openings to a review is that of Tom Milne’s Monthly Film Bulletin take on Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981), which begins “Poised throughout on the knife-edge of pretension as a weird mixture of sadistic thriller and fairy-tale romance linked by colour-supplement chic, Diva finally resolves itself into an extraordinarily powerful… what, exactly?” And aside from the fact that its emphatically black-and-white cinematography perhaps wouldn’t be a major draw in a chic colour supplement, every word of that also applies to the Swiss director Jean-Louis Roy’s 1967 theatrical feature debut, made on the back of winning the Golden Rose of Montreux for a television feature called Happy End (1964). As with Diva, when you see The Unknown Man of Shandigor, you know that you’ve seen something – like Beineix a decade and a half later, Roy has such a singular eye that even when the film makes little narrative or emotional sense you’re still riveted to the screen. (Or increasingly exasperated, according to taste.)

It very much starts as it means to go on, with a shot of a reverse-motion nuclear explosion being a suitably attention-grabbing opener. This is then followed by a scrappy, chaotic media scrum in which a cadaverous-looking man in a wheelchair, his face partly obscured by a hood, deftly deflects various questions, but those questions at least establish that his name is Von Krantz and that he’s invented something called the Canceller (which we can infer was responsible for reversing the nuclear blast). When asked his role model, he replies “Dracula!” – and, as he grins broadly at his interlocutor, I suddenly remembered where I’d seen the extraordinary-looking Chilean actor Daniel Emilfork before: he was the mad scientist Krank in The City of Lost Children (1994), stealing children’s dreams in order to reverse an accelerated ageing process. It’s not at all hard to imagine Von Krantz doing this too.

We then get the opening credits, and the film remains just as intriguing. Emilfork aside, the cast includes Marie-France Boyer, already known for arthouse films like Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) and genre films like Riccardo Freda’s Trap for the Assassin (Roger la Honte, 1966) – she’d later make a huge international splash in the swashbuckling TV series Quentin Durward (1971) before retiring from acting to become an author. Then there’s American actor Ben Carruthers, the lead in John Cassavetes’ groundbreaking independent film Shadows (1958), and more recently seen in The Dirty Dozen (1967), which he’d have presumably made just before this. The prolific Swiss-American actor Howard Vernon flitted between upmarket Jean-Pierre Melville films (four in total) and decidedly downmarket Jesús Franco ones (more than forty!). And, most striking of all, there’s the already legendary French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg in a major supporting role. As creative casting goes, this is a pretty heady mix – and that’s without even taking less fêted supporting players into account, five of whom are completely bald.

They are in fact called “the Baldies” (“les Chauves”, in the original), and are a gang controlled by Gainsbourg, who simultaneously coaches them as musicians (their cover) and ruthless assassins. So scrupulously organised is this never-named mastermind that when one of his charges meets a premature end, he immediately announces “Prepare for embalming”, and the next scene involves the surviving Baldies doing just that to their deceased colleague. If that’s not weird enough, the process takes place in what looks like a Gothic crypt, lit exclusively by dozens of candles, and with Gainsbourg singing a part-English song called ‘Bye Bye Mr Spy’ while accompanying himself on a pipe organ. Oh, and he’s playing it while wearing giallo-style black leather gloves – a wise precaution because his visible breath suggests that the location was perishingly cold.

But the Baldies are just one faction that’s after the secret of the Canceller. There’s a Russian faction led by Shostakovich (Jacques Dufilho), and Americans represented by Bobby Gun (Vernon). Later, an unnamed assassin (Pierre Chan) walks out of the sea in a frogman’s outfit as if he’d swum all the way from his presumably Asian homeland. Since Von Krantz himself is to be kept alive at all costs, these various factions target those closest to him – namely, his albino assistant Yvan (Marcel Imhoff) and his daughter Sylvaine (Boyer). She in turn is besotted with Manuel (Carruthers), the title’s “unknown man of Shandigor”, as he’s based in a never-never land of indeterminate geography that appears to have been designed by the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. (These sequences were of course shot in Barcelona, and are nicely contrasted with the ultra-modern steel-and-glass Geneva locations elsewhere.)

Now, if I’ve made all this sound like a racy Sixties spy thriller, that’s only superficially accurate. While there’s certainly plenty of action, suspense and out-of-the-blue booby-traps to keep things ticking over narratively (there’s a great shot when we suddenly realise that Yvan has survived an attempted acid attack in a museum because it hits the bust of a man instead and starts to dissolve it), it becomes very clear very quickly that Jean-Louis Roy’s film is historically positioned between the more genre-bending products of the French New Wave (which started a decade earlier) and the  “cinéma du look” directors who emerged in the 1980s – I’ve already mentioned Jean-Jacques Beineix; others include Luc Besson and Léos Carax. Like their work, The Unknown Man of Shandigor is unrepentantly, even self-consciously stylish, often to the point where the sole raison d’être of a particular scene is to arrive at (or develop from) a memorable visual image – for instance, while instructing his underlings, Gainsbourg spray-paints a cryptic symbol that’s allegedly a plan of the villa that they’ll be casing, but it seems to bear little resemblance to what it supposedly represents. (Wittily, this dominates the on-disc artwork.)

The Canceller itself is something of a MacGuffin; the film never comes even vaguely close to explaining how it undoes the impact of a nuclear explosion (something that would presumably have to involve a modicum of actual time travel), but it really doesn’t matter. As with the original Hitchcock MacGuffins and countless similar narrative-propelling artefacts, it’s merely a convenient excuse for the various characters to converge, especially after Von Krantz prematurely departs the scene and the search switches to his papers – which, it turns out, he’s deliberately destroyed in their original dead-tree form, but not until after he’s filmed them and spliced the film into an innocuous 8mm holiday home movie reel. A more immediately graspable invention is the ‘Kamikaze suit’, which vapourises both the wearer and whatever he happens to be carrying as soon as it’s hit by a bullet. (As with Chekhov’s famous rule that if a gun is seen in the first act it must have been fired by the end of the third, once the principle of the suit is outlined, it’s dramatically essential that it be demonstrated in practice, and of course the film ultimately delivers.)

In one of the extras, Roy’s widow Françoise explains that he started out as an apprentice to acclaimed photographer Roger Bimpage, before hiring his former mentor to shoot this film – on which they had an creative rapport that she describes as “complete osmosis”. It shows. At a time when black-and-white cinematography was rapidly giving way to colour, Bimpage and Roy offer a gorgeous showcase of an art form that they’d both thoroughly mastered on both a technical and aesthetic level, which they also knew at the time was dying out, certainly in terms of it being feasible to market black-and-white feature films. This film is pretty much inconceivable in colour – certainly, it would have looked very different if they’d gone down that route.

Another particularly close rapport was with composer Alphonse Roy, on account of him being Jean-Louis’ father. Interestingly, there are parallels between the Roys and the Coppolas (Carmine and Francis) over and above that, because Alphonse Roy and Carmine Coppola both started out as flautists with world-class orchestras (respectively, Ernest Ansermet’s Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra) before striking out on their own as composers. The Shandigor score should frankly be better known; written for full orchestra with unconventional solo parts (electric guitar, pipe organ) and wordless chorus, it alternates between lush romanticism and something far more twangily ‘Sixties spy thriller’ – but, as with the cinematography, it’s always perfectly attuned to what’s happening onscreen.

In a revealing 1967 interview included on this disc (see below), Jean-Louis Roy admitted that one of his primary motivations was to establish that Swiss cinema (“or what exists of Swiss cinema”) could produce more adventurous films than straightforward documentaries. However, although his huge filmography spans 1958-2001 and includes no fewer than 95 individual entries, closer scrutiny reveals that the overwhelming majority were short documentaries made for Swiss television, and that his only other cinema feature was the intriguing-sounding but even more obscure Black Out (1970), about an elderly couple who barricade themselves into their home to protect themselves from what they’re convinced is imminent all-out war, a self-preserving gesture that eventually turns to mutual hatred. If that already sounds like a clear metaphor for Switzerland at a time of European and global conflict, Ingrid Telley’s Histoire du cinéma suisse 1966-2000 obligingly confirms it. I’ve neither seen it nor to my knowledge have ever been given the opportunity (the same goes for his TV features, 1964’s Happy End and 1980’s Talou), so I can’t tell you whether it has anything in common with the earlier film, but on the evidence of that I’d be surprised if it didn’t have at least something going for it. But even if Roy had only made The Unknown Man of Shandigor he’d deserve at least a small film-history footnote.

Both the disc and the booklet mention that this is a 4K restoration from the original 35mm picture and optical soundtrack elements carried out by the Cinémathèque Suisse and with additional restoration by Deaf Crocodile’s Craig Rogers – and it looks absolutely stunning. Framed at what I assume was the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio (the compositions are sometimes so millimetre-precise that I suspect they simply wouldn’t work at any other framing), the picture is close to pristine (I only spotted a couple of tiny blemishes), the cinematography is appropriately high-contrast without ever losing sight of essential greyscale and shadow detail in between, and a silky patina of fine grain throughout suggests that the underlying photochemical image has been interfered with as little as possible. Considering that this film was once believed lost, the presentation here is little short of miraculous.

The original mono soundtrack is presented as DTS-HD Master Audio, and is mostly every bit as good as the picture. It’s pretty much hiss-free, and the only concession to age and the nature of the optical source materials is that a couple of dialogue scenes occasionally betray a slight harshness at the top end – but this is never dominant enough to be distracting.

Optional English subtitles are provided to translate the French dialogue. Interestingly, the same optional subtitles also include “chapter headings” in a different, larger font, and if you choose to watch the film with subtitles off via the menu, you still get the latter – although, should you wish to expunge those as well, subtitles can be switched off altogether via the remote control. Presumably the original Swiss theatrical release included similar on-screen chapter headings in French and/or German, but these have not been reproduced here.  I spotted no typos or similar mistakes, and the translation sounded accurate enough – there’s one moment when some untranslated text is briefly glimpsed onscreen via a card in a post box, but the card in question is read out and properly subtitled a couple of scenes later.

Please note that in common with all Deaf Crocodile releases, this has been locked to Region A – and I can sadly confirm first-hand that it won’t play in a Region B-only player. 

Audio Commentary by Samm Deighan
A veteran of several years’ and dozens of commentaries’ standing, Samm Deighan is a very safe pair of hands with material like this, and my high expectations were pretty much immediately fulfilled. She’s particularly good at providing well-researched context, in this case a deep dive into 1960s Swiss cinema and how it was paralleled by the far more internationally successful French New Wave. There’s plenty of close analysis of the main feature, with convincing parallels drawn between it and the work of Jacques Rivette (French cinema’s great poet of then-contemporary paranoia), as well as earlier filmmakers like Fritz Lang and Louis Feuillade – and she convincingly argues that their work has more in common with Roy’s film than do modish Sixties spy thrillers like Mario Bava’s exactly contemporary Danger Diabolik (1967). She also endorses a point that Marie-France Boyer herself makes in the next extra, which is that Sylvaine often seems like the only convincing human being in the whole bizarre concoction, and the fact that she seems to have wandered in from another film is, for once, not a complaint: she keeps things emotionally grounded when the film threatens to spiral into complete absurdity. (Her comparison with the father-daughter relationship in George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face is particularly apt.) Later on, she flags up that a torture sequence in which Shostakovich bombards Yvan with earsplitting music uncannily anticipates actual torture methods used by the US military decades later. While she’s not slavishly scene-specific, there are a gratifying number of references to what’s happening onscreen, and she’s quite happy to interrupt herself to enthuse about a particularly nifty moment – and since she talks uninterrupted throughout the whole 94 minutes, I’ve only lightly brushed the surface of what’s pretty much a textbook example of the form.

Cinéma Vif – The Unknown Man of Shandigor (29:15)
I imagine the Deaf Crocodile team punched the air when they found this. Originally broadcast on 16 May 1967 for Swiss TV’s Cinéma Vif series (1964-68), so shortly after the film’s Cannes premiere, it was shot, edited and, most crucially – and unusually for a programme like this – preserved on film, thus facilitating this genuinely high-definition transfer. A disarmingly candid Jean-Louis Roy (looking every inch the francophone intellectual, complete with pipe) does a fair bit of the talking, disarmingly admitting that in the context of Swiss cinema the film is an experiment that might well fail. Other interviewees include Jacques Dufilho, Marie-France Boyer (who admits that she was trying to prove that she was more than just a pretty face, and was consequently terrified) and Daniel Emilfork (who recalls his fascination with Roy’s gut-instinct casting approach, whereby a previous performance as a blind Arab beggar made Roy think Emilfork would be perfect as a schizophrenic, paranoid nuclear physicist). There’s also on-set footage (which initially appears to be sync-sound, but on closer inspection they appear to have overlaid on-set audio over silent footage), revealing inter alia how much effort went into pulling off a smooth tracking shot in the pre-Steadicam era, and I also liked the glimpse of the man lurking behind a garage door that isn’t quite as hi-tech as the film would have us believe. Only Boyer is still alive at the time of writing, making this doubly valuable. Everyone speaks French, and the English subtitles are burned in, but there were no typos and just one contentious translation issue (“comédiens” is rendered as “comedians”, a classic “false friend” mistake – the subtitle should have said “actors”). Interestingly, it concludes with 35 seconds of black screen accompanied by music; did the original closing credits not survive?

Interview with Françoise Roy and Michel Schopfer (15:59)
A useful companion-piece to the Cinéma Vif piece, courtesy of his widow Françoise and the film’s first assistant director Michel Schopfer. Unlike the earlier interviews, this one frames them sitting side by side; it’s clear from the first few seconds that they’ve known each other for decades. Six decades, in fact, as both met Roy in the early 1960s when working for Swiss TV, and both were therefore involved with The Unknown Man of Shandigor from the start. Anecdotes include Daniel Emilfork falling out with Roy after seeing the final film (which he’d been led to believe was much more serious), while Serge Gainsbourg basically accepted every acting offer going at that time because acting paid better than his music-related income. However, as soon as Gainsbourg came on board, Roy commissioned the song ‘Bye Bye Mr Spy’ from him, as he (rightly) felt that it would be a genuine mid-point show-stopper. None of the Baldies was a professional actor – the one who gets embalmed was screenwriter Gabriel Arout. Schopfer also plausibly theorises that the name ‘Shandigor’ came from the Indian city of Chandigarh, which began construction in 1951 according to plans drawn up by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. A rather wistful coda reveals that Roy lived long enough to see (and very much appreciate) the initial restoration stages, but sadly died before the project’s completion. As with the Cinéma Vif piece, the spoken language is French and the subtitles are burned in. There are a small number of typos (‘Gainbourg’), as well as a couple of audiovisual issues – the picture quality appears standard definition for the first six-and-a-half minutes before it unexpectedly dissolves into pin-sharp HD, while for a few minutes later on the audio slips very slightly out of sync. But none of this is seriously distracting.

Restored original trailer (4:30)
Christ knows what 1967 audiences made of this, but there’s clearly no faulting the distributors’ ambition. It’s best to dive in blind, and happily Deaf Crocodile has published it on their YouTube channel, so you can do just that. It’s presumably a painstaking shot-by-shot high-definition reconstruction rather than a scan of an authentic original trailer, as it’s in just as flawless a condition as the main feature.

Booklet
The 12-page booklet showcases a blend of full-page stills and the five-page essay ‘The Mysterious, Familiar, Yet Just Plain Strange Lineage of “The Unknown Man of Shandigor”’ by Chris D, longstanding crime-film expert and former American Cinematheque colleague of Deaf Crocodile co-founder Dennis Bartok. What it lacks in detailed critical analysis of the film itself (although there’s plenty of that in the commentary), it more than compensates with a ton of valuable context-setting, namechecking dozens of intriguing Sixties Euro-spy titles while highlighting the way that Roy and his team cunningly managed to contrive the look of something conceived by the great Bond designer Ken Adam but at a fraction of the cost, thanks to well-chosen pre-existing locations. In which respect, he points out that the film has more in common with Jean-Luc Godard’s then very recent Alphaville than merely sharing an actor in Howard Vernon – and indeed they’d make a pretty convincing double bill.

This disc was originally released in early 2022, and watching it with the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that Deaf Crocodile very much started as they meant to go on, and that this is precisely the sort of eye-catchingly original but hard to pigeonhole delight that the label was set up to champion. It’s certainly not for everyone (understatement), but if the trailer I linked to above whets the appetite, the film amply delivers on what it promises, and the extras consistently favour quality over quantity. Very highly recommended.