Zimmermädchen
A former bank clerk conceives a one-man robbery at the bank he works. He had before established an alibi for himself pretending and declaring him legally dead. Further complications ensue when he rejoins his estranged wife.
In Hamburg, West Germany, a rocker biker gang helps a kid avenge his brother who was murdered by a two thugs.
Gänseliesel
An intriguing Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice over narration. Sudden Wealth is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry Men, only to be betrayed by their inescapable selves and systematically dehumanized (think bucolic Orwell) and reprogrammed by what we'll put under the rubric of God and Country.
Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's girlfriend, Hanna, humors their plan, but really just wants to get married.
Schallplattenverkäuferin
Herr Raab is a technical draftsman. His wife pushes him to seek a promotion, which may be a long shot after he gives a dull and tipsy toast at an office dinner. But why would Herr Raab run amok?
Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’
