aka Bloody Friday
Freshly broken out of custody by his buddy Luigi (Gianni Macchia) and some other guy we don’t need to care about, rather violent criminal Heinz (Raimund Harmstorf) is planning the big score. Together with Luigi, Luigi’s girlfriend Heidi (Christine Böhm) and another guy responsible for a distraction, Heinz is going to assault a bank, take some hostages and get more money out of selling those hostages back to the police than they could reasonably get from the bank. In his mind – which isn’t exactly a vast space – his plan is completely fool-proof, but obviously, things aren’t going to go that well.
At first, though, things actually seem to be moving upwards when Heidi’s Bundeswehr deserter brother Christian (Amadeus August) somewhat accidentally joins the gang, but general incompetence, bad luck and reverse Stockholm Syndrome are going to make things turn sour rather sooner than later.
Rolf Olsen’s ripped from the headlines style exploitation crime drama is not a terribly typical example of German popular filmmaking of the time – though there are a good handful of films made in this style - at least half seeming to take its inspiration from the crime movies of its Italian production partners. This still being a German film more than an Italian one by its inclinations, it’s not all sleaze, violence – and this is pretty outrageously violent if it wants to be - and exploitative social criticism of the times it was made in. There’s also a dollop of po-faced melodrama and quite a few scenes of that most German movie of things, people debating thrown in the mix. At times the film’s shifts between Serious German Business, ridiculous (and fun) exploitation, and hilariously bad melodrama are so extreme as to give a boy whiplash. Though, in any case, you can’t blame the film for being boring or not trying to entertain its audience any damn way it can.
Still, having said that, I can’t pretend to actually like the film as much as I should like its type of idiosyncratic exploitation. Mostly, I blame Olsen’s direction. From time to time, he manages to create a tight, or a clever, or a somewhat insane set piece, or creates a moment of fine mock realism, but just as often, he stands in the way of its film potentials, dragging out the wrong scenes for too long, putting the emphasis on exactly the wrong moments of a scene. Generally, Olsen’s directing approach feels random more than anything.
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