The late 1930s. A young enemployed, unskilled worker walks through the streets of Copenhagen, sustaining himself partly on the dole and free soup-kitchen meals and partly on day-dreams. He spends time at a cemetry studying headstone inscriptions. Mild-mannered and of poetic bent, he understands little of an intellectual friend's advice and shies away from the love of a woman who shares her bed with him.
Steffen is a good kid, a teenager who has recently finished school and is looking for work. He lives with his widowed mother, a newspaper reporter. Very little throws him off his stride, whether it is his girlfriend's jealousy of his friendship with Charly, a reform-school boy, or his mother's drunken, playful amorousness one night, because he reminds her of his father.
A woman, Ilse Brehmer, finds the body of a dead man, a journalist. He has been murdered, and later when the body turns up in the harbor, the woman denies everything, even though witnesses has seen her nearby the crime scene. She simply can’t remember anything, but the detective on the case, Mørck, knows how to smell a lie and soon start to unravel this bloody mess.
Café Paradis is an award-winning Danish film made in 1950, directed by Bodil Ipsen and Lau Lauritzen Jr., and written by Johannes Allen. The film received the Bodil Award for Film of the Year, and Ib Schønberg, for what is regarded his finest performance, received the Bodil Award for Best Supporting Actor.
