Saturday | July 18, 2015 7:00 pm

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
(Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße)

Christa Fuller in person

Directed by Samuel Fuller.
With Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang, Anton Diffring.
West Germany, 1973, DCP, color, 127 min.
English, German, French, Mandarin and Italian.
DCP source: UCLA

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Christa Lang Fuller. Read transcript

Audio transcription

Christa Lang Fuller 7:19

He never heard of Beethoven. And he said, “No, you know, Beethoven! Ba-ba-ba-booom.” And he never heard of Beethoven. He said, “Oh, like Irving Berlin! Oh, I get it.”

[LAUGHTER]

Christa Lang Fuller 7:31

So, years went by, now the Beethoven House has become a great museum. Everybody has rebuilt. And we got permission from the director of the museum to shoot there, when he heard the story. We also have great locales, like the Krupp factory, the part with the Chinaman, you know, it's a real locale. And that's because of my dad, who was a union labor leader for Krupp workers. We got permission to shoot in the real locales. My mum and dad are in the picture, by the way, for a second, during the Carnival in Cologne. They're holding up Charlie Umlaut. That's my mum and dad, who are not here with us anymore. But they're in the picture. So it was fun, looking at it now. But during the shoot, man, it was so cold that we were high on grappa all the time. I'm drunk most of the time in the film.

Fuller's sole film comedy is a delightfully self-conscious and satiric detective thriller, a low-budget neo-noir confection funded by the popular German television series Tatort and buoyed by a lighter strand of the bold Pop sensibility defined in The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor. Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street is perhaps best understood, in Fuller's own words, as a "cartoon caper,” with Fuller outdoing even himself in outlandish action sequences—such as a gunfight in a maternity ward—and a cast of loony caricatures led by The Crimson Kimono’s Glenn Corbett, as a bumbling American detective in Berlin to track down his ex-partner's killers, and Fuller's wife Christa Lang as the beautiful and mysterious fräulein guide to the Berlin underworld. All-too-long unseen in its true form, Dead Pigeon has recently been expertly restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who reconstructed Fuller's director's cut with the addition of twenty-five minutes that had been removed for the film's original release.