A grown woman is playing hopscotch in the street when she notices a small man hanging around the corner. He is grinning and holding a walking stick and a toy poodle, the battery-operated kind which shuffles along and yaps, and the woman immediately forgets her game to follow the little man to his boarding house elsewhere in the city. He is Olaf (Torben Bille), and he has a secret his new friend is about to discover: a collection of naked women trapped in an attic room, for which she is the latest addition. He and his ex-cabaret singer mother Lila Lash (Clara Keller) keep these captives strung out on heroin to render them compliant, then hire them out to businessmen as prostitutes - only it's Olaf and Lila who pocket the cash.
Not only that but they have an interest in the heroin smuggling business, just to supplement an income that on this evidence doesn't exactly leave them in the lap of luxury, but does offer them a chance to gratify all their sicko power fantasies, this mother/son duo being at the bottom rung of society's ladder otherwise, so having someone even further below them gives them a sense of superiority. You would be feeling a sense of superiority as well, that over the creators of this decidedly grotty sexploitation flick whose provenance has been the subject of much debate down the years since its limited release.
Now it's far more widely seen, mostly having the effect of prompting much shaking of the head or even the unintentional giggles that something this sleazy could ever have been considered a fit night out at the pictures, it seems its titular star would be the closest thing to a celebrity the producers were able to afford. Torben Bille was Denmark's most famous little person actor, with his own children's TV show, so what brought him to The Sinful Dwarf is a mystery, maybe he simply enjoyed having his name above the title? He's no longer with us, so missed out on his late blossoming of fame in cult movie circles, however limited, and we cannot inquire of his motives for taking the role, but he certainly cut a striking figure here with his devilish leer and thickly accented English.
It's not all watching Olaf alternate between his wind-up toy collection and the three unfortunates locked up in the attic, as there is something approximating a plot too. Step forward young marrieds Peter (Tony Eades) and Mary (Anne Sparrow) who are desperately looking for a room while the husband tries to get his writing career off the ground, and what do you know? They have to rent a bedsit in the very place Olaf and Lila own. No sooner have they been alarmed by the small person than they become the subject of his sexual perversity as he likes nothing better than to spy on them to get his kicks as they grow amorous (against the odds, it must be said, the surroundings would be a passion killer to most reasonable folks). All the while Ole Ørsted's avant garde musical stylings clunk and groan on the soundtrack.
On a musical trip, Lila subjects her boozy best friend (Gerda Madsen) to recreations of her glory days by belting out unlovely showtunes (no Great American Songbook for this gal) and subjects us to the vision of herself in a state of undress, not something Denmark's equivalent of the dirty mac brigade would have thanked the film for. But then, you had to ask what kind of reaction the moviemakers were after; for many of them it was the only cinematic excursion they made, so were they so disgusted with themselves that they promptly gave up the business we call show, or was The Sinful Dwarf so notorious they were unemployable? Rumour had it that Anne Sparrow, who came across as far too classy to be shedding her clothes for simulated abuse scenes in something like this, married Bille, which may or may not attest to the ability to set aside scummy fiction for a more wholesome home life. Again the mysteries remain, not least where this was supposed to be set: there are English accents mixing with Danish, yet infamous American producer Harry Novak's name was on it. Weird.
