Director Wolfgang Staudte who left East Germany in 1953 to make movies in West Germany, takes a few swipes at the West German judicial system in this fairly effective courtroom drama about the murder of a four-month-old baby. Police almost immediately arrest the mother Ingrid who is the mistress of...
In 1920, an unknown 24-year-old woman was fished out of Berlin's Landwehr kanal after a suicide attempt. Since she has no papers and no answers to any questions, they soon assign them to the insane asylum Dallendorf. A co-patient believes she recognizes the Czar's daughter Anastasia Romanowa - who...
Country Dr. Robert Koch is desperate: a tuberculosis epidemic is decimating the children in his district and no one is able to do anything about it. Every fourth child is already sick and the parents must helplessly watch as their young ones die. Now Koch is undertaking to find the cause of the...
This 1936 film tells the story of the doings of foreign agents in Germany and their allies among the German population. Having placed an ad in a local paper looking for "contact with bigwigs in German industry", enemy agents Morris and Geyer end up making contact with an engineer named Brockau. ...
Bruno Stiegler, a boxing promoter with a disreputable past, returns from America to Berlin to make some big things again with his friends. Fatally, he is always preceded by some gentlemen from better circles who are developing amazing criminal activity in their old days. They are led by...
A biographical film of Otto von Bismarck, the Prime Minister of Prussia, and how he and his policies - including aggressive war - helped to unite Germany.
Vera Meiners' life was sweet but unfortunately for her, it was not to last. Her husband, Jan, left her after she met a former lover in a harmless friendly meeting. Forced to resume her disrupted medical career, she worked in a Swiss clinic but, without the knowledge of the chief surgeon, Vera...
Nacht der Verwandlung (A Night of Change) stars Gustav Froelich as a globe-circling aviator, a character clearly based on America's Wiley Post. While basking in his celebrity at a nighttime carnival, Froelich romances Rose Stradner, the unhappy wife of brutish Heinrich George. When George refuses...
Klaus is a young man in post-war Berlin. He is drawn to his friend Manfred and, under the encouragement of their acquaintance, Dr. Winkler, explore the underground world of gay clubs and electronic music. His family begins to learn of his other life and do everything they can to set him straight.
German chancellor Otto von Bismarck promises the dying emperor Wilhelm I. to be loyal to his grandson. But the gap between young Kaiser Wilhelm II. and old Bismarck is rapidly widening. It soon appears that an era is coming to an end.
Achim and Vera are friends and live an uncomplicated and happy life .... that is, until they get into their first serious argument on how they should spend New Year's Eve. Vera wants to celebrate with friends, while Achim wants to go off to a lonely mountain hut. And so, he goes off alone into the...
The delightful Johann Strauss comic opera Die Fledermaus was mercilessly lampooned in this truly bizarre production. For starters, a framing device has been added: After appearing in 300 consecutive appearances of Fledermaus (which translates as The Bat) the lead tenor (Georg Alexander) imagines...
The author Peter Ustinov has called his work "Endspurt" a "biographical adventure". Biographical because the somewhat ambitious but later successful writer Sam Kinsale meets here as a twenty-, forty- and sixty-year-old. The interesting thing about this film, however, is that the four Sams are...
A 1968 production of Hans-Werner Henze's comic opera filmed at Berlin's Deutsche Oper. With the plot centering around how a whole town is deceived into taking a dressed monkey as a young lord, the work features performances from, among others, Edith Mathis, Donald Grobe and Barry McDaniel....
