Auf Engel schießt man nicht

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for this resounding flop that finally brought the curtain down on Miss Leuwerik's amazing reign as post-war Germany's top-rated movie star.

It's a mishmash of half a dozen other scripts, exacerbated by amateurishly staged comic sequences and one of the worst performances ever given by the star. Usually a gifted comedienne, Miss Leuwerik's wide variety of grimaces, mugs, smirks and other expressions she used, killed any effort to create a character of any depth oder credibility. Judging from this disaster, you would have never guessed how wonderful Miss Leuwerik was in 'Die ideale Frau'.

The final product contained an occasional funny line, and even a gag or two that not been used before, but mostly it was déjà vu and bad déjà vu at that. All in all it represented a new all-time low in postwar Germany's cinema treatment of gifted and talented actresses.

Deservedly so the finished product was dismissed as gruel, crude and tasteless by critics, while theatre patrons avoided it like the plague. The picture was not so much released as allowed to escape.

The title says that one does not shoot at angels; hum, maybe, but do not tempt me as this is a humourless and overstrained crime-comedy with Ruth Leuwerik as a nun in a combination of Chesterton's Father Brown and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Leuwerik is totally incapable for the job and plays the part as if she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Gustav Knuth and Boy Gobert try hard to make something of their characters and sometimes succeed, but they fight a losing battle with the weak material. Rolf Thiele was very talented director, but he did not know the first thing about comedy; and probably he was another victim if the declining German/Austrian cinema in the 60's as well.