The Punch Bowl

That a over 50 year old movie would make students of all faculties pour into the campus theatre year after year is a phenomenon. The secret of this films huge success is the message which hardly anybody is able to miss - that school in spite of all the hard work was fun! Remembering one's own school time will cause an emotional state of well-being, and there you have it!

Aside from these factors, the movie's humor is timeless, the actors were very talented and their characters just wonderfully weird. Many people have seen this movie so often they can speak every line - and with larger audiences, the film is starting to evolve into an interactive experience à la Rocky Horror Picture Show, with the audience shouting at the characters and carrying alarm clocks, candles and flashlights into the theatre to switch on in the exact right moment.

If there is one true German cult movie - this is it!

Even though filmed as the second world war came to a close my home country managed to sedate people not on the front yet with this humorous masterpiece that is still astonishing 56 years after its release. if it wasn`t for the nazis, this movie with Heinz Rühmann in his genuine role would have been celebrated world wide right away. it has all the wit of the 'good side' of German culture and somehow manages to leave out anything 'political' by a far cry. just a plain great amusing movie that features infantile friendship and adventure and all the fun of being young while never getting rid of the stains of being a movie people were meant to view to forget the crazy war out there.

Germany was losing the war, its cities were being bombed to smithereens, so it's easy to see why Goebbels felt the need for quality escapist entertainment like this gentle, funny school comedy.

Heinz Ruhmann plays a successful writer who was educated by tutors and never attended school, and who decides to return to his hometown disguised as a pupil to find out what he missed. What ensues is a lot of sweet-natured tomfoolery, with lots of tricks played on the teachers - something which nearly got the film banned because of its supposedly 'anti-authoritarian' tendencies.

There's no real message except that 'schooldays are the best days of your lives', and perhaps that's its secret - for it remains among the most popular of all film comedies in Germany and is cult viewing around Christmas time. Ruhmann is in his element in this film, but particular mention should go to the wonderful Erich Ponto as the eccentric chemistry teacher, who is quite best thing in the film.

I've just seen this movie with several german friends and, although my German is really poor and there were no subtitles (only a good friend helping me to understand it), I found it quite a sweet classic film which I feel really happy to have discovered. The simple and yet funny story about a man that "returns" to childhood in order to make all sorts of jokes to the grownups is just so well carried out that, despite not even being german-speaker, can be easily watched with a smile on the face. Sure enough, most of the jokes can't be understood for non-german speakers (and sometimes not even for german themselves!) but the performers play sincerely great roles and at many times a face is worth a thousand words. To sum up, a film I would like to see once again (I hope next time with subtitles, at least ;) and quite a cult-movie in its home country, where many people watch it as a tradition once a year... It's tender, it's sweet, somehow naïve... Eine wuenderschoene Filme, wuerde ich sagen!

A German film from 1944 is suspect. What to expect?

A propaganda movie? There are some reviews who have discovered some elements of Nazi ideology deep down in the movie, but in general I would not call this a propaganda movie.

A comedy? That makes more sense! The war wasn't going very well for Germany at this point in time and the public public could use some entertainment to forget for a moment their everyday misery. The lead actor Heinz Ruhmann was an established comedy star in Germany from 1930 onwards.

The best characterization of the movie however is given by words like nostalgia ("sehnsucht" in German) and melancholy. Das dritte Reich has lost its glamour and the film longs for times gone by (the good old days). This is true for the main character (he longs back to his high school days) and for the film in total (it is situated around 1900).

The teachers ("Herr Professor" in German) are excentric and rather naive. There is no femme fatale in the movie, but one can imagine that they would have ended just like Professor Rath in "Der Blaue Engel" (1930, Josef von Sternberg) had there been one. For a moment the Nazi regime kept the drollery of the students for rebellion against the authority of the teachers and didn't give permission for the release of the film. It took a visit from Ruhmann to propaganda minister Goebbels to change his mind. One only has to compare "Die Feuerzangenbowle" with "Zero de conduite" (1933, Jean Vigo) to understand how exagerrated the fear of the Nazi regime was.