Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972)

Film history is filled with movies that have been mangled by their producers, maladroitly distributed and generally born under a bad sign — they are often misunderstood by critics and consequently difficult to see. But these films also hold a special place in cinephile hearts.

Such films maudit (cursed films), as the French call them, can be cultist holy grails. Samuel Fuller’s German telefilm “Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street” (1972) is one. Ivan Passer’s thriller “Cutter’s Way” (1981) is another.

Out on disc from Olive Films in a director’s cut some 25 minutes longer than its United States release version, “Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street” was the first movie that Mr. Fuller — a prolific writer-director of offbeat, wildly energetic action films — made in full awareness of his paradoxical status. While washed up in Hollywood, he had become a revered figure first for French and later German and American new wave filmmakers.

Given the opportunity to direct an episode for the West German TV series “Tatort” (Crime Scene), Mr. Fuller appears to have enjoyed creative carte blanche, writing what he called a “cartoon caper movie” concerning an international blackmail ring in Cologne. The outfit, led by an icy professional fencer, specializes in photographing politicians in compromising positions. Intrigue follows when the ring is infiltrated by an American private eye (Glenn Corbett) representing one of the victims.

“Dead Pigeon” is self-consciously trendy in its percussive zoom shots and hyperkinetic montages, as well as casually outlandish in its locations (a shootout in a maternity ward; a cloak-and-dagger rendezvous at the Beethoven-Haus museum in Bonn; Cologne’s annual carnival, in which a killer clown lurks among the costumed participants). A wink away from self-parody, Mr. Fuller evokes his own oeuvre throughout, quoting lines and recreating bits of business from previous movies. Not all are his. At one point, Mr. Corbett ducks into a movie house showing “Rio Bravo” and cracks up at the spectacle of John Wayne speaking perfect German.

The self-referential casting also has new wave flavor. The director Claude Chabrol’s muse Stéphane Audran is given a cameo as a glamorous lesbian named Dr. Bogdanovich (a nod to the director Peter Bogdanovich). The German filmmaker Peter Lilienthal is also present, and in his memoir “A Third Face,” Mr. Fuller writes that R. W. Fassbinder tried to talk his way into a part. Mr. Fuller himself appears briefly as a blackmailed American senator, but mainly “Dead Pigeon” is a valentine addressed to Mr. Fuller’s wife, the German actress Christa Lang, playing an actress turned femme fatale named Christa.

As personal as it is, “Dead Pigeon” often feels like a home movie or even a low-budget avant-garde production. Barely distributed in the United States, it even appeared in that context. I first saw “Dead Pigeon” in late 1976. The packed one-off screening at the Collective for Living Cinema, a quasi-underground venue in Lower Manhattan, may actually have been the movie’s New York theatrical premiere. Back then, I found “Dead Pigeon” disappointing; seen again, as the filmmaker intended it and without expectation, it’s less a failure than a small, unexpected gift for Mr. Fuller’s fans.

A far better movie, “Cutter’s Way” (released on Blu-ray by Twilight Time) is a classic hard-luck story. Although comparable to classic early ’70s downers like “Chinatown” and “The Long Goodbye,” this story of three post-hippie losers drawn by chance and paranoia into a sordid murder mystery was born too late and has never gotten the recognition it deserves.

Mr. Passer, an émigré from Czechoslovakia who came to America in the aftermath of the 1968 Soviet invasion, treats Jeffrey Alan Fiskin’s script with a mixture of humanist warmth, caustic humor and detached fatalism. The director is fond of his doomed characters and, as in his lone Czech production, the rueful comedy “Intimate Lighting” (1965), he does not judge so much as observe them.