Bachelor of Hearts

This had the bones of a good film but just disintegrated into a poor slap stick.

After his success in 'The One That Got Away' German actor Hardy Kruger played the lead role in another British feature film. In this 1958 romantic comedy Kruger plays West German mathematics student Wolf Hauser, who is on an exchange scholarship to Cambridge University. While there he becomes involved with a Cambridge University student group called 'The Dodos', and picks up a new girlfriend. A lightweight student comedy drama which doesn't amount to much either comedy wise, drama wise, or romance wise, is episodic, and has Kruger in the central role, who (although not bad) is not convincing as a romantic lead. It does have several highlights though (thanks to Leslie Bricusse and Frederic Raphael's screenplay) including a male nighttime raid on Girton College, and documentary footage of 'Poppy Day', but the highlight of director Wolf Rilla's film is Geoffrey Unsworth's colour cinematography of late 1950s Cambridge (it sometimes almost seems like a kind of promo for Cambridge), as Wolf learns about life, love, and broadening his horizons. Naturally the romance laden ending ends with a bit of punting.

This is a quirky little movie with Hardy Kruger playing a young college graduate. Nice performance from Kruger in a sort of Brian Rix farce at the end when he is trying to entertain several girls - the reason why he is doing this escapes me at the moment. This is very much in the vain of the Ealing comedies - don't try to find the hidden depths there aren't any. Just go along with it and enjoy. Hardy Kruger is very popular with English audiences - he fits in well with our vision of the likeable German. Obviously his main claim to fame is the aircraft designer in "Flight of the Phoenix", but he has appeared in several war movies over the years.

One thing is clear from the get-go in Bachelor of Hearts: In European films, Hardy Kruger was seen for the cutie-pie he was. Americans could rarely get over a German actor's nationality (hence why Curd Jurgens probably wasn't considered for The Sound of Music), so Hardy often played Nazis - and we wonder why he retired early. But when the films weren't geared primarily towards Americans, his characters were pretty hunky! In Bachelor of Hearts, he plays a German exchange student new to England and her customs during his first year at university. Immediately, he puts the moves on the first girl he sees, despite her already having a boyfriend, and she has to force herself to resist him. He's charming, he's adorable, and it's a shame America didn't get the memo.

If you're not in it for the eye candy, however, you shouldn't be in it at all. This is a very silly movie, akin to America's High Time, but without the seriousness of the adults. It's just a gigantic advertisement for parents not to pay for their kids' college educations. They take four years, all paid for by Mommy and Daddy, to party, sleep around, and participate in stupid hazing rituals. Hardly anyone knuckles down and wants to learn, as you can see in this movie. Even Hardy, bless his heart, gets criticized repeatedly when he tries to stick to his studies. One of his professors literally says, "You can read books in Germany." Instead, to truly get an education, he has to party, sleep around, and participate in stupid hazing rituals. However, the movie isn't a total bust. Hardy is extremely cute.

Wolf Rilla did his best with this film, but it ended up looking like a fluffy cake in the shape of Cambridge, well beyond its sell by date. A few years earlier it may have worked but by 1958 it appeared still looking pretty visually but stale. John Osborne had written ' Look Back in Anger ' and from America ' Blackboard Jungle ' and ' Rebel Without A Cause ' had shaken up the insides of schools. But here in this meandering film the relentless high jinks of privileged youth and secret ceremonies still reigned causing mock havoc. Throwing Hardy Kruger as an exchange student in a mock execution into the relentlessly punting river was still ' fun ' and as the British take a long time in growing up it may still continue. Sylvia Syms is utterly wasted as Kruger's girlfriend ( not that much chemistry showed ) and Ronald Lewis tried to be funny as a fellow student but they all must have known that there was very little to do with their roles. The one plot highlight was Kruger on a hunting search for women for his fellow students to take to a ball, and that should have been cut out or shortened. It was boring and sexist and the ultimate insult was that the ' girls ' once rounded up like cattle seemed to like their moronic companions. I dreaded a joke about the Germans and ' the War ' but Rilla fortunately avoided that, and I give it a 5 for showing a boringly normal German, unlike the usual stereotyped Germans in the endless War heroics cluttering up the British film industry. For that one important element the film was refreshing.