Hugo Haase (Georg Thomalla) is quite happy working as a baker, but has to do all the early work in total silence so as not to wake up his rather dominant wife. Two sub plots are established at the beginning, one for each of the Haase family children. The younger boy gets his friends to sabotage the new supermarket from the first day it opens, while the older daughter is trying to keep her pilot boyfriend a secret even though he followed her home and soon starts helping in the bakery.
Neither of these stories are allowed to develop much further when Hugo inherits zwei Millionen Mark and decides to leave his family and start anew in Venice. But the silly baker is almost immediately fooled out of the entire fortune by Clarissa the red haired trickster. The audience can see this coming a mile off, but has to endure a lengthy montage of Hugo wining and dining Clarissa and enjoying a tedious ice skating show all the same. After this it gets more and more absurd. Herr Haase commits himself to a loony bin, but is released when two wealthy eccentrics mistake him for someone called August. O brother. The female of this couple even practices Kung Fu on bricks. You might wonder if this was Willy Pribil first attempt at a screenplay, as he obviously tries to include every single comedic scenario he could come up with (according to IMDB it was his second).
When 'August' escapes from this latest predicament, he literally drops in on a couple of crooks, who decide they can use him as a scape goat and so our hero Hugo becomes a fugitive. Back at the bakery his wife does not seem to be missing him at all while their children are too wrapped up in their own little movies to notice daddy plastered all over the newspapers (ever notice that comedy characters never buy their own newspapers but always notice the right headlines when some stranger on the street is reading one?). It all culminates in a clothes store where all the various characters meet up by pure coincidence. But by this point in the story nobody will be surprised by yet another unexpected plot twist. And in the middle of this Willy the writer finally pulls out his best gag, the one everything has all been leading up to. I won't spoil it here, but it has something to do with Hugo's last name.
4 out of 10
