The sole Swiss production in this collection, Leopold Lindtberg’s Matto regiert (US: Madness Rules) offers a variation on the closed room mystery: a closed madhouse mystery. When the director of a mental hospital is murdered, Constable Jakob Studer (Heinrich Gretler) is called in to investigate. With a hospital full of mental patients, suspects are abundant, but two immediately rise to the top: deputy director Ernst Laduner (Heinz Woester), who had feuded with the victim hours before his murder, and patient Herbert Kaplaun (Olaf Kübler) whose pleas for freedom were regularly resisted by the imperious director. Elisabeth Müller plays nurse Irma, who’s in love with Herbert. While the story stays sharply focused on the whodunit, Lindtberg makes effective use of the unusual personalities of the patients (inmates?) and takes some time to explore the nature and causes of insanity, with Herbert’s childhood trauma at the hands of his brothers genuinely sad.
By Michael Bayer
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