Nanu, Sie kennen Korff noch nicht?

This is a highly amusing musical comedy with romance and crime elements. In spite of being made in 1938, it is more reminiscent, in style, contents, and setting, of earlier Weimar Republic movies. The music, and the revue numbers, are excellent; the criminals and especially the detective seem just funny today, but that adds to the charm. The hero, the naive flutist Niels Korff, is played by Hans Rühmann, the most popular comedy actor for such roles of the UFA and one of the most beloved German screen actors at all. How good he is can be seen by the fact that he has an adorable small dog who nevertheless doesn't steal the show. Some of the settings (Dutch beach, Hotel interior) are quite lovely time-pieces as well. A thoroughly enjoyable movie, but because of the quality of the voices, it must be seen in the original German.

This film's illogical plot is just an excuse to make Heinz Rühmann shine in his typical role as the naive and somewhat gauche man in the street who suddenly finds himself in an adventure, falls in love, and finally gets the girl.

In the first decades of his career, Heinz Rühmann was known (and loved!) only for this kind of harmless fun. At a time when many German actors had to emigrate, Rühmann came to an arrangement with the Nazis: Göbbels personally helped to arrange the safe emigration of Rühmann's first wife, who was Jewish. Rühmann stayed in Germany and continued making light-hearted, unpolitical films that provided ordinary Germans with much-needed escapism. Apparently the Nazis valued this contribution too much to try to pressure Rühmann into producing propaganda films.

In the present film, which appears to be a relatively cheap production, Heinz Rühmann's real co-star is Nils Korff's dachshund. The love story involving Austrian actress Senta Foltin as Dortje (her first cinema role) is cute but very superficial.

Even before and after the performance of a variety show that takes up the core of the film, its strengths lie in the comical scenes held loosely together by an implausible plot. Among other things, we see and hear the Danish flutist playing his instrument in various interesting situations.

Well worth watching for Rühmann fans; others may or may not like it.

'So, You Don't Know Korff Yet?' is a low-budget comedy, made in Germany during the Third Reich but largely free of Nazi agitprop. It's an amusing film, with an interesting depiction of Hollywood-style gangsters as imagined by Germans.

Vermeylen is a wealthy Dutch art collector, who lives in Amsterdam with his pretty daughter Dortje. Three crooks conspire to steal one of his paintings. The crooks are played by German actors but are apparently meant to be American gangsters (Morton and Kelly) with a French toff (DuFour) as their leader. Kelly is played by the great German actor Fritz Rasp, who must have felt he was slumming in this movie. These 'gangsters' are utterly unrealistic, but no more so than some of the gangster characters in Hollywood films of this era.

Into this umlaut-fest arrives Niels Korff, one of those implausible fictional characters who could never exist in real life. Korff is a hugely successful author of detective novels who amuses himself as a flautist, but who acquires material for his novels by working (in real life) as an amateur detective! That blurry object whizzing past you is this movie's plausibility, vanishing into the distance. Korff takes it upon himself to save the Vermeylens and their painting. He is aided in this endeavour by two bumbling private detectives: van Gaalen and Schimmelpennick (the latter's name is funnier than her performance).

I have a low opinion of German attempts at humour, so I was pleasantly surprised that this movie is actually fairly successful in blending intentional comedy with some genuine suspense during the heist sequences. The interplay of eyeballs between Korff and Dortje makes it obvious how this movie will end ... but we have some fun getting there. I found this plot line utterly unbelievable, yet that didn't stop me from enjoying it. I'm vaguely astonished that such a light-hearted trifle could have been confected during the Third Reich, yet this movie is very much in the spirit of the screwball comedies that Hollywood was making at this time ... not *as good* as those films, mind you, but in that same spirit all the same. The music in a nightclub sequence is good, too. I'll rate this movie 7 out of 10. I wish the Third Reich had devoted more resources to turning out pleasant froth like this, instead of their more regrettable enterprises.