Outsider in Amsterdam: The movie

In the Kittling: Books blog today, Cathy Skye posted a review of Janwillem van de Wetering's Outsider in Amsterdam here, and coincidentally I saw a 1979 Dutch movie made from the book (with the title changed to Fatal Error, and the movie has also been released with the title Grijpstra & de Gier), with Rijk de Gooyer as Grijpstra and Rutger Hauer as De Gier. Though de Gooyer sounds like an interesting person (Nazi hunter in WWII, worked with CIA in Berlin), the movie is available as a DVD only because it's an early appearance by Rutger Hauer. The picture on the DVD box, by the way, seems to be from a different movie. The movie itself (contrary to Skye's impression fo the book) is quite dated. It's not only the clothes, but the acting, camera, direction, pretty much everything. There is a lot of comedy in the movie, some of it intentional, and a bit of surrealism (a floating mouth appears sometimes when the cops are listening to the disembodied voice of the police dispatcher, a woman. Hauer is OK, but hasn't really come in to his own as an actor at this point. And the movie is unfortunately dubbed into English (a feature that the Amazon website, which evidently produced the DVD, didn't mention) rather than subtitled, so we not only lose the actor's real voices, the dubbers tried to Americanize the dialogue (talking about the IRS when the cops complain about taxes, using even street names that seem to have more to do with the U.S. than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is definitely a character in the movie as in the books, but the lighting in the movie is often so dark that it's difficult to see much--atmospheric, perhaps, in some scenes, but the screen is sometimes virtually black. So the movie is only a relic, amusing at best. It does illustrate some of the reasons for the ponderous pacing that Skye noticed in the book: van de Wetering is really more interested in his characters (the spiky Grijpstra, the Asian-obsessed de Gier, and the particular characters involved in each book's murder), in comedy, and in social observation than in a straightforward murder mystery. As a movie, Fatal Error has more in common with two TV shows, Barney Miller (of the same error, and more interested in comedy and characters than crime) and the two versions of the Life on Mars series (but particularly the U.K. original), because of the period clothing and policing but also because of the mixing of plot with odd and sometimes mystical sidelines). It was fun to watch, but I wonder whether the more recent Dutch TV series made from the Grijpstra & de Gier books might be better--or whether the British TV series made from Nicolas Freeling's Van der Valk books (also set in the Netherlands and from the '70s) might be worth looking for...