Summary
In the soot-choked back-alleys of a Copenhagen still licking its Great-War wounds, a one-handed crime-lord known only as “The Nine-Fingered Man” emerges from the fog like a marionette of Fate, his missing digit replaced by a retractable stiletto that clicks out with the crispness of a typewriter key. Alf Blütecher, face gaunt as a death-mask, plays this specter of reprisal: a former bank clerk who lost fingers three to seven to a creditor’s shears and now keeps the city’s bourgeoisie dancing on a marionette wire of blackmail. Around him orbits a gallery of the damned—Franz Skondrup’s morphine-addicted journalist scribbling confessions he will never publish; Arne Weel’s bankrupt count who auctions his ancestral portraits only to buy them back with counterfeit bills; Aage Hertel’s mute bellboy whose every gesture is a Morse code of guilt. A.W. Sandberg’s script, colder than a morgue slab, stitches their fates into a Möbius strip: every crime funds the next restitution, every act of mercy births a crueler reprisal. When a midnight train carrying gold to war-orphans is hijacked by the Nine-Fingered cabal, the film tilts into an oneiric heist staged entirely in negative exposure—white pupils, black snow, charcoal blood. The final reel unspools inside the abandoned Tivoli concert hall where chandeliers crash like crystal guillotines and the hero’s prosthetic blade jams between the teeth of a massive music-box, grinding out a lullaby that once accompanied royal waltzes now scored for screams. No one is redeemed; digits roll across parquet like dice, and the last shot freezes on a child’s hand—nine fingers intact—sliding a coin into the cigarette machine that first financed the villain’s ascent. The city awakens to morning bells, unaware its debt has merely changed palms.
