Long before he played the corpulent Goldfinger, German actor Gert Froebe was a scarecrow-skinny comedian. In Berliner Ballade, Froebe makes his screen debut as Otto, a feckless Everyman who tries to adjust to the postwar travails of his defeated nation. Stymied by black-market profiteers and government bureaucrats, Otto begins fantasizing about a happier life at the end of that ever-elusive rainbow. Director R. A. Stemmle doesn't have to strive for pathos: he merely places his gangly star amidst the ruins of a bombed-out Berlin, and the point is made for him. Filmed in 1948, Berliner Ballade was later released in the U.S. as The Berliner.
The film starts in the fashionable seaside resort on the Baltic, Heringsdorf, where Renate Müller spends a secret weekend away from her husband with her bosom friend Ida Wüst. The husband meanwhile has a flirtation while traveling by night train from Frankfurt to Berlin, nice atmospheric shots of sleeper and dining car in the morning. The action continues in the luxury villas and apartments of Berlin, Renate Müller wears a string of very elegant outfits. Misunderstandings, jealousies, temporary separation of husband and wife, a few songs, wicked humour.
The athletic young widow Antoinette Peterson gets into financial troubles when a business venture backfires and has to sell her car and her villa. On the road, she meets a stranger whose car she is able to repair and whom she later meets again as the buyer of her house. It is no one else than the venturer William P. Harrison to whom she lost her whole fortune in the first place. He offers her a bet: If she manages to stay for three months as his chauffeur and behaves accordingly, he would give her back her fortune. Although Harrison makes it as hard as possible for her, she keeps up. But they have already fallen in love with each other.
Friends Franz and Bela work in a deli belonging to Mr. Wallis. Franz is the manager and Bela a salesclerk. Both get to know the lovely Lilo. But while Bela is rebuffed, the charming womanizer Franz is more successful. After a boisterous celebration in the deli, Mr. Wallis tells Franz to get lost and hires Lilo as a new salesperson. Franz and Bela take a job at Mr. Markow's deli across the street and a serious competition begins between the two delis for survival.
With a script co-written by Weimar-era sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, this enlightened drama deals with WWI soldiers who have become impotent due to wounds but still want to marry.
