Der unheimliche Mönch (1965)

As he lies dying, the lord of Darkwood has his will changed. He leaves the castle to his daughter, Lady Patricia, who runs a girls’ boarding school there. The entire remainder of his estate goes to his granddaughter, Gwendolin Gillmore, the daughter of his son Reginald, who is imprisoned for murder. His sons, Sir Richard, a lawyer, and Sir William, a doctor, as well as Patricia’s son Ronny, are disinherited. Richard causes the notary to have a car accident and steals his father’s will. He blackmails the surviving family members into signing a general power of attorney, under which each of them would receive ten percent of the inheritance, while he would inherit the rest. Otherwise, he threatens to publish the will, which would suspend the statutory order of succession. To protect Gwendolin from her greedy family, Patricia invites her to Darkwood Castle. There, Gwendolin meets the boarding-school girls, as well as the caretaker, Smith, and the artist Alfons Short, a breeder of carrier pigeons who makes death masks. Short tells her about a hooded figure in a monk’s robe who wanders around the park at night. Lady Patricia tries to request police protection from Sir John, the head of Scotland Yard, but he brushes her off. Shortly afterwards, Scotland Yard Inspector Potter stops the hooded monk on the road to Darkwood in order to arrest him. The monk snaps Potter’s neck with a whip. Potter had been investigating a girl-trafficking ring. When the student Lola walks through the castle grounds at night, she nearly falls into the traffickers’ hands. She escapes, but the monk kills her with his whip. Inspectors Bratt and Sir John initially focus on Ronny, who harassed Lola on the day she died. The family members also accuse one another. It becomes clear that Gwendolin’s father was wrongly convicted because of his brothers. Ronny, too, once killed a girl in France, but was acquitted thanks to his uncle Richard. The French teacher, Monsieur d’Arol, also arouses suspicion; it turns out that he is the girl’s brother. Gwendolin learns from an anonymous letter that her father is innocent. When she is about to leave for London to do some shopping, William drugs her in order to stage an apparent act by the monk as a diversion from their schemes. A short time later, the monk murders William. Meanwhile, the boarding-school students Mary and Dolores are kidnapped in London. Inspector Bratt has a helicopter monitor the flight paths of Mr. Short’s carrier pigeons. At the same time, Gwendolin receives an invitation to the home of a stranger who says he will tell her the truth about her father. Ronny follows her and is murdered by the monk in his garage. Bratt and his assistant Cunning are captured at the pigeons’ destination, but manage to escape. The pigeons’ trail leads them to the girl-traffickers’ headquarters in a scrapyard. The monk appears there too and lures Bratt into a trap. In a disused industrial hall, Bratt shoots the monk during a fight, and the monk flees by car, badly wounded. By this time, Gwendolin has arrived at the stranger’s house. After a while, Richard arrives as well; he, too, has received an invitation. Richard again tries to force her to sign the general power of attorney, threatening to destroy the will. The monk appears and proves to Gwendolin, using a recording of a conversation between Richard and his siblings, that her father Reginald is innocent. He then kills Richard with his whip before dying himself. Bratt enters the house and removes the monk’s mask: it is the caretaker, Smith. Hating women, he founded the girl-trafficking ring. Driven by a desire for revenge, he adopted the symbolic disguise of a monk and, together with his accomplice Alfons Short, took jobs at other girls’ boarding schools as well. They communicated with their accomplices by carrier pigeon. Short’s death masks were used as identifying marks for the girls. Inspector Potter and Lola knew Smith’s secret, or recognized the criminals, and were murdered for that reason. When Smith fell in love with Gwendolin, he wanted to prove her father’s innocence. Smith also used the lead ball on his whip to break the necks of the inheritance hunters in order to protect her rightful inheritance. In the end, Bratt and Gwendolin become a couple.