Die Stunde des Löwen

Is German TV really that bad - I mean worse than Australian?

We've had this one and Helmut Dietle's LATE SHOW in quick succession here, both showing the programs as sensationalised twaddle and the programmers as randy, ego maniac nut cases.

This one has Kurt as a current affairs host who specializes in ruining the lives of his guests. Well, if we think about Nick Broomfield and Fred Wiseman that's not so unlikely. However while he's making out with his P.A. (the personable blonde Frauline Jacobi) against the second hand, before he goes on air, a sinister leather gloved type kidnaps his wife and locks her up in a spooky building.

The rest of the picture is spent with every one trying to track down the abductor with aforesaid Miss Jacobi doing all the work despite the efforts of the leather coated, chiseled featured cop who has the hots for her, while the TV industry workers put all their efforts into humiliating one another and pushing up the ratings.

The cast suggest talent & experience not being given much scope and while they all look for the media savvy heavy there's reasonable tension. When we find out how dumb the plotting really is that evaporates, with a couple of reels of the film still to go.

Production values are showy and make us wonder why we don't get trash TV as well staged as the lead's `Hour of the Wolf.'.

Well, I haven't seen too many German movies, but I thought this one was very good! Whereas American cops are generally very slick and glamourous (even when they're supposed to be sleazy) and British cops impossibly sleazy (even when they're supposed to be glamourous), these German guys seemed to strike a credible balance.

One thing - why are German movies so very dark? Is there a light bulb shortage in Germany? Or is it that they have the same production and direction crew as "Derrick", another excellent but also under-illuminated German cop show?

The two sex scenes, early in the movie, were a little gratuitous. There was (the moderately pretty) Doreen Jacobi, sitting in the bath with the water not quite up to her nipples. Sigh.

And yes, I must confess, about half an hour before the movie ended it was obvious who the bad guy was. But that didn't really spoil the movie. I mean it was merely a matter of following all of the clues. And if you accept the initial circumstances that led to the scenario portrayed in this movie (and I agree that that might be a bit of a stretch), then perhaps the plot and the thinking of the bad guy might indeed be plausible.

To what other movie might this be compared? Offhand there doesn't seem to be too many. Maybe Mel Gibson's "Ransom"? Well, this movie is certainly better than that one!

There was one aspect of this movie that maybe coloured my judgement. This movie portrayed pretty well everyone involved with current affairs programs as manipulative, ruthless, callous, indifferent; caring only about image and ratings. Perhaps because I think that that happens to be completely true, this movie struck with me a very sympathetic chord. And to follow that thought, by the end of the movie my sympathies were with the cop (sort of), the bad guy and the kidnapped wife only; for everyone else I had only contempt. To my mind, that is one sign of a good movie - you think it's good even if you think all of the protagonists are a**holes....

So if you, Constant Reader, think that the Ray Martins of this world are the bees knees and the Keepers and Guardians of the Truth, then perhaps this movie might not be for you.