Germany in 1945 looked like the most hopeless country in the world. With cities and industry turned into rubble, with the land carved up between ideologically opposed occupying powers, with a population decimated, traumatised, displaced and impoverished by war and universally despised by the rest of the world – the once mightiest nation of Europe looked like a country without a future. But only a decade later, Germany, at least in its western part, managed to stun the world again. In less than a decade, thanks to the Marshall Plan and the "economic miracle" of Adenauer's government, West Germany not only recovered from wartime destruction, but also became a new industrial superpower with unprecedented prosperity that began to draw millions of Gastarbeiter from less fortunate areas of Europe. However, this sudden success had its darker side, which manifested itself in a scandal that would rock the West German industrial establishment in the mid-1950s. Those events were the basis for the film Das Mädchen Rosemarie, also known as Rosemary, a 1958 drama directed by Rolf Thiele.
The protagonist of the film is Rosemarie Nitribitt (played by Nadja Tiller), a beautiful young prostitute from Frankfurt. Like so many of her compatriots, she wants to get a piece of the new fortune by working her way up from the streets. After many unsuccessful attempts she finally ends up in the arms of wealthy industrialist Konrad Hartog (played by Carl Raddatz), becomes his mistress, leaves her old pimps and moves into a new, luxurious apartment. After a while Rosemarie meets Fribert (played by Peter van Eyck), a shady French businessman who noticed the effect Rosemarie's beauty and charm had on top members of Hartog's cartel. Fribert makes her a proposition – she is going to earn additional income by sleeping with and spying on rival industrialists. Rosemarie agrees and begins a career as a top courtesan while a well-hidden microphone records the most intimate words and industrial secrets of her clients. After a while, Fribert's scheme is revealed and a scandal erupts, but Rosemarie nevertheless refuses to give the incriminating tapes to the various interested and very powerful parties.
Rosemary looks rather unusual for a film that covers one of the greatest scandals in recent German history. Screenwriters Jo Herbst, Erich Kuby, Rolf Ulrich and Rolf Thiele abandoned a conventional storytelling approach – instead of sensationalism or moralising, this film presents those events from an ironic distance. West Germany of the 1950s is presented as a country with present-day prosperity torn between a shameful past and an uncertain Cold War future. Greed, corruption and other forms of moral decline are natural consequences of such contradictions. In order to emphasise his ironic distance, Thiele not only uses some interesting elements in the script (like French and German characters verbally expressing their newfound European brotherhood) but also employs various filming techniques, quite modern for the late 1950s. For example, the musical soundtrack by Norbert Schultze uses both electronic music and old-fashioned dance and song numbers. The lyrics for the latter were written by Rolf Ulrich and Jo Herbst (who appears in the film as a pimp turned Greek chorus, together with better-known Swiss actor Mario Adorf). The results of such experiments are mixed – at times this film looks unusual, at times old-fashioned, but most of the time those scenes stand in the way of the plot and some scenes tend to get rather confusing. The acting is very good, though. Nadja Tiller is very impressive as Rosemarie. Peter van Eyck and Carl Raddatz are also good in their roles. Gert Fröbe, best known as Bond's most impressive adversary in Goldfinger, here plays another business tycoon, but the role of the weak and hypocritical Bruster is another example of Fröbe's versatility. All in all, Rosemary is a flawed but interesting film that could be seen as a document of its era.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on August 16th 2000)
==
Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/ Cent profile https://beta.cent.co/@drax Minds profile https://www.minds.com/drax_rp_nc
Brave browser: https://brave.com/dra011
BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/4382-das-m-dchen-rosemarie?language=en-US
Critic: AA
