This is so lame. After years of hearing about this "legendary realistic street drama" I watched it last night. And WHAT a disappointment! Stereotypical characters wherever you go: the typical stubborn unsocializable street kid getting started on his criminal career, the embarrassing wannabe-philanthropic journalist (Degen) who cannot live up to his ideals, the sad alcoholic prostitute (Mattes) with a child... even the police are as clichéd and cruel as any late 1968 "revolutionary" desires them to be... And there is of course the rich homosexual guy trying to seduce the street kid, then humiliating him. No, please! OK, finally i know where the German masochistic "street kid" tradition ("Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo" and similar schmonzetten) came from. Nothing is more useless than false realism by stiff and dogmatic literature or film students! The horrible acting (from the amateurish stiff movements of the male lead Wierczejewskito the usual stage-like overacting of the autorenfilm-zombie Eva Mattes) makes it worse. (the short scene with the extremely funny Alfred Edel obviously READING his part from the sheet in front of him is a highlight, of course.) Also, the fact that the whole film is dubbed, partly by other actors as it seems (maybe the original performances were too bad) does NOT add to the alleged "realistic" feel.
Of course, a film with only stereotypical characters in stereotypical situations has one big disadvantage: It's completely predictable. You KNOW right from the beginning that things will end badly, that the boy WILL eventually commit his first murder, etc. truly boring.
The camera work of Vacano is not very remarkable. He does not compare to Ballhaus (ho rescued some Fassbinder films). I've seen better in the Derrick episodes of the time. Lucky we are that Roland Klick didn't get a chance to misunderstand the experiments of Lars von Trier yet. Otherwise i bet my boots he would have used heavily shaking hand camera to make things even more realistic. What? I'm not shaking half as much as the camera in "Breaking the Waves" - where's the realism in that? Sorry, I digress.
Again, even after watching this legend, i must hold up my thesis that Germany's finest cinematographic achievements in the seventies are the early Derrick episodes. This is truly embarrassing for German cinema, but since German cinema in the autorenfilm era produced only such clichéd boring time wasters as "Supermarkt", the conventionalized (cop) stereotypes in the Derrick series at least give you enough identification to sit through the 55 minutes.
The scene in "Supermarkt" where they pathetically try to rob the supermarket is kind of funny, though. However, I recommend "Take the Money and Run" for some truly funny slapstick along such lines.
Since I'm a nice person, I'll give Klick's "Deadlock" a try, though. Looks significantly cooler, judging from the first ten minutes which I watched.
Of course, a film with only stereotypical characters in stereotypical situations has one big disadvantage: It's completely predictable. You KNOW right from the beginning that things will end badly, that the boy WILL eventually commit his first murder, etc. truly boring.
The camera work of Vacano is not very remarkable. He does not compare to Ballhaus (ho rescued some Fassbinder films). I've seen better in the Derrick episodes of the time. Lucky we are that Roland Klick didn't get a chance to misunderstand the experiments of Lars von Trier yet. Otherwise i bet my boots he would have used heavily shaking hand camera to make things even more realistic. What? I'm not shaking half as much as the camera in "Breaking the Waves" - where's the realism in that? Sorry, I digress.
Again, even after watching this legend, i must hold up my thesis that Germany's finest cinematographic achievements in the seventies are the early Derrick episodes. This is truly embarrassing for German cinema, but since German cinema in the autorenfilm era produced only such clichéd boring time wasters as "Supermarkt", the conventionalized (cop) stereotypes in the Derrick series at least give you enough identification to sit through the 55 minutes.
The scene in "Supermarkt" where they pathetically try to rob the supermarket is kind of funny, though. However, I recommend "Take the Money and Run" for some truly funny slapstick along such lines.
Since I'm a nice person, I'll give Klick's "Deadlock" a try, though. Looks significantly cooler, judging from the first ten minutes which I watched.