khsooners

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.

After seeing some film stills, I thought this picture might have the quality of some of the later Fritsch/Harvey movies like "Glückskinder" or "Ein blonder Traum". While the film is fairly entertaining, some scenes are uneven (too long, too loud, too silly). Lilian Harvey is just as good as some of her Hollywood peers, but in some parts the parts don't make a complete picture. Rühmann's part is too long (as a kind of Ralph Bellamy character), Fritsch shows up too late and Roberts (a Saxonian actor who was in no way Anglo-American) is so slow, silly and strange that the idea of Harvey being his wife (even the gold digger sort) is nothing but ridiculous. The AD is great (Erich Kettelhut worked with Fritz Lang and many other German film greats) and Holländer's music is quite good. All in all: it is mostly a movie for people who are interested in the history of European films.