Not that it helped Sam Fuller’s career much, but the critics really loved him. Andrew Sarris put him one notch below Pantheon status, in his category “The Far Side of Paradise,” whereas talents like Billy Wilder and William Wyler were relegated to “Less than Meets the Eye,” and that pretender Stanley Kubrick was condemned to Sarris’ creative ghetto, “Strained Seriousness.” Fuller had worked well under studio supervision and even better when operating independently. But in the 1960s his highly personal style didn’t help get him jobs, even if the film magazines snapped up for study whatever he did. By the 1970s he was an older veteran of earlier wars (studio and real-life) and a freelancer chasing projects that didn’t bloom and producers that wouldn’t back him up.

Fuller’s popularity abroad netted him an interesting assignment in 1974, for a German crime TV show called Tatort. This happy connection gave him the opportunity to write and direct one more time, with relative freedom. The crime caper thriller Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street was filmed on a relative shoestring in several German cities, with a mixed-nationality cast, staring with Fuller’s former leading man Glenn Corbett, from 1959’s The Crimson Kimono. The pulpy story has no overt political element and instead harkens back to Yankee crime pictures about cops and crooks that infiltrate criminal organizations. Fuller had already directed a couple of these, in House of Bamboo and Underworld U.S.A..

When his partner is shot dead on a German street, American investigator Sandy (Glenn Corbett) cooperates with German customs cop Kressin (Sieghardt Rupp of Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars). They catch and then lose the killer, Charlie Umlaut (Eric P. Caspar) but he leads them to Christa (Christa Lang) and the crime ring she works for, a group that extorts big money from diplomats by staging compromising photos. Sandy pretends to be in the same line of work and tricks Christa into recommending him to her boss. Sandy helps Christa fleece several targets — consuls from China, an Eastern bloc country and an emerging African nation, but finding the ‘Mr. Big’ behind the operation proves difficult. Worse, Sandy falls genuinely in love with Christa, who sincerely wants free of the criminal ring.

The patchy visuals are more in keeping with the ‘New German Cinema’ of the day, than they resemble Fuller’s polished Hollywood products of twenty years previous. The screenplay is in Fuller’s hardboiled pulp crime style unchanged since the old days, but the scattershot direction shows the influence of the European ‘new kids’ that, when they wrote reviews, worshipped the director. Fuller sees nothing wrong with fronting a self-conscious attitude. An early action scene revisits some classic fight staging from Pickup on South Street. The title sequence in this original broadcast version introduces some crewmembers wearing carnival hats that fit in with the concluding scene at a street festival. Fuller’s title card fits over a shot of him smoking a cigar while wearing a clown’s costume.

The show itself is both slick and rough at the same time. It moves with assurance from one stock investigation-espionage sequence to another. Sandy pulls in a hipster drug expert to zonk out Christa with drugs, and then to make her think that she participated with him in an extortion grift. The individual crime scenes are staged well enough: they drug the African under the nose of his bodyguards, and successfully compromise the Chinese trade official (Anthony Chinn, an all-purpose Asian for English spy pix, including four Bond films). Oddball actor Alexander D’Arcy is given a great showcase scene, in a shakedown attempt that fizzles badly. The scenes on various German streets and shopping districts have a certain tacky realism, as when Sandy shadows Christa from location to location. For his final fight Fuller just gives his combatants a full room of fencing swords and antique weapons, and lets them go to it. Knowing he’s up against a fencing master, Sandy can fight back only by throwing things at him. The only way to keep continuity was to shoot it with multiple cameras.