Die Drei von der Tankstelle

I'm gonna start off with a little bit of a tangent. The scene where Lilian (Lilian Cossmann) to the gas station and meets the second attendant Kurt (Oskar Karlweis) is quite something. Kurt starts singing about how she's just a woman and needs a man with her. There's all these references to women and driving. On the one hand, he's trying to find an excuse to let him ride with her. On the other hand, it reminds me of this Schwachsinn in Saudi Arabia that denies women the right to drive. Now, Europe is being flooded with Muslim immigrants who apparently can't run their own country to go to a country that was more progressive than much of the Arab world is today about 80 years ago.

And that's what so much of this early German really is - a relic. This is a rather silly, light-hearted comedy perfect for TMC with no moral or ethic implications and little connection to the reality of the day. Yet it is still studied because it was a very financially successful, early talkie.

The dance scenes are fairly entertaining. Whenever the three men are together, it's funny and the lyrics are quite clever. However, such films seem typical of that escapism. It's no shocker that, in a world where people make such fluffy, good-for-nothing films, street battles and concentration camps would be the norm.

So how do I reconcile the progressive situation of Weimar Germany with its predilection to mass murder? Well both the Muslim world and Nazi Germany engaged in it, but at least women could drive in one of them. It's the little things.

Die drei von der Tankstelle is a good example for the quality of the UFA movies in the times before 1933, the year German film was taken over by the nazis and deprived of major talent. The fluffy story can be told in a sentence: a rich girl can't decide between three young men from a gas station, but soon she makes up her mind and has to convince her chosen one that she really means it. Apart from the dream team Harvey-Fritsch, the most popular movie couple in German film history, the other parts are also played by excellent and interesting actors: Heinz Rühmann, who later became Germany's leading male star, Austrian Oskar Karlweis, who emigrated to Hollywood just like Felix Bressart of "Ninotchka" and "To Be and Not To Be" fame. Kurt Gerron, who plays the lawyer was later killed in a concentration camp after the nazis blackmailed him into making a propaganda movie about the camp Theresienstadt. The music is quite catchy and Mrs. Harvey really sparkles in the main part. She was truly one of the first major European sound film stars, being fluent in English, French and German. The restored version is still not quite perfect in its picture quality, but for me this just adds to the nostalgic touch.

Three good friends arrive home from vacation to discover they're bankrupt and the bailiff is about to strip their home of its contents. Left with just their car, they decide to open a gas station and it's then that they meet the lovely, blonde Lilian Cossmann - Lilian Harvey in one of her biggest hits. For such a very early talkie it's an astonishingly confident film, one of the first UFA 'operettas' yet with a contemporary, rather than period, setting. The Comedian Harmonists put in a guest spot as barbershop-style singing barmen, Olga Tschechowa appears in a supporting role and Werner Richard Heymann's marvelous music helps it all move along at a swift pace. This is a perennially popular Weimar-era German musical, and deservedly so.

This operetta, so frothy that at times it threatens to evaporate, manages to hold the interest due to a charming cast led by Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey and pleasant songs by Werner R. Heymann and Robert Gilbert, particularly the jaunty "Ein Freund, ein guter Freund" and the lushly romantic "Liebling, mein Herz lasst Dich grussen." The general tone – breezy, joyous, playful -- brings to mind Lubitsch's American-made operetta films such as "The Love Parade" and "The Smiling Lieutenant."

The Comedian Harmonists (a then-popular close-harmony sextet) appear all too briefly in a nightclub scene and character actor Felix Bressart, familiar to American audiences as one of the "comrades" in "Ninotchka" and other supporting roles, gets big laughs as a barrister. The loose-limbed Harvey gets in some high kicks in the surprise finale.

This is not a kind of film which your neighborhood Goethe Institut would like to screen for you.The reason is that in the past it was not at all considered an auteur film and as it was more of a song and dance film which according to cultural authorities would not appeal to serious film viewers.However with the passage of time the official status of this film has changed a lot and fortunately it is currently considered as one of the 100 most influential films of the rich history of German cinema.The film is a very nice comic tale of three men in love with a rich girl.This may sound trite but in 1930 when it was made there was hardly any current of such type of films.That is the reason why this film is really unique in the annals of German cinema.A great film to cheer you up when you feel complete lost and return home with a woebegone look on your face.