The World's Craziest Army

Stories about tenants of a house.

Flanders, Hispanic Monarchy, 1616. The inhabitants of the small town of Boom are busy organizing the annual local festivities when the arrival of the Duke of Olivares, who rules the country on behalf of the King Philip III of Spain, is announced. While the male citizens cowardly surrender to panic, the brave female citizens decide to become the best hosts the Spaniards can ever meet. (German version of the French film La Kermesse héroïque, 1935.)

A man is unable to find a job. In his desperation, he plans to rob a bank together with a friend who works in a petrol station and feels tempted by the possibility of getting rich. Two different motivations drive these two good men into an immoral situation.

Two barge skippers fall in love with the same woman.

A screenwriter comes up with a story about an affair between a maid and her employer.

Two female members of the Soviet military are supposed to kidnap the new American secret weapon at a disarmament conference. The highlight is the duel between Curd Jürgens and Lilli Palmer with vodka in a diplomatic back room. The stopover on the way to freedom is the editorial office of the large Warner publishing house in the USA. The film ends with a wedding in the context of international understanding.

Berlin, 1890: Werner Ludtke is only nine years old, but this son of a shoemaker is already in love with his playmate, Felicitas von Graefe. At first, her father just laughs about this infatuation; but as the children start to grow up, the class-conscious gentlemen doesn’t find this crush all too swell. Werner’s mother has a solution: her son must join the Army and go far away from Felicitas.

A car tells its story and the story of its seven owners during the years of the Third Reich.

Three men want to escape their troubles with women by taking a boat tour on the Rhine river.

An apple juice producer can't decide between his wife and his secretary and tries to commit suicide. Being committed to psychiatry, he falls asleep and dreams of adventures as Adam and Eve in heaven and hell.

When the bank clerk Klaus Helwig is arrested on suspicion of embezzlement, his son Heintje, whose mother died at birth, comes to his grumpy grandfather's house. Heintje manages to win his heart and prove his father's innocence..

Ted Talbot is a prosecutor in Newtonville. In the course of his work, he accuses Jim Conley of robbing a bank and killing the cashier. Ted's wife Jane takes over Conley's defense. When the court sentences the defendant to death, she files for divorce. Beth Conley, the wife, goes to see the prosecutor and asks him to postpone the execution of the sentence for thirty days. When he refuses, she threatens him with revelations. Deputy District Attorney Hal Young witnesses this confrontation...

After an automobile accident, in which a man is unrecognizably burnt to a crisp, his wife's only able to confirm the corpse's identity by his talisman: a small, white spider. However, soon, there are more corpses walking around than at a comic con convention and every single one of them was a white spider sitting on or nearby the body.

Director Wolfgang Staudte who left East Germany in 1953 to make movies in West Germany, takes a few swipes at the West German judicial system in this fairly effective courtroom drama about the murder of a four-month-old baby. Police almost immediately arrest the mother Ingrid who is the mistress of the father, a rich business VIP married to another woman. His position and wealth keep him insulated from suspicion. A hot-shot lawyer has to overcome the unaccountably biased perceptions of the police, the judge, the prosecutor and almost everyone else in the judicial system. The defence lawyer, driven to an extreme, knows he has to find the real killer or his client will be convicted.