Shadows over St. Pauli

Film by Frank Vogel.

Hamburg, shortly after the Second World War. On the Reeperbahn, a former overseas captain, who keeps his head above water as a stoker, meets a desperate and lonely woman whose marriage has been destroyed by the war. Without knowing much about each other, the two seek brief happiness and oblivion in a night of love, are separated by a raid and find each other again - this time for good.

Barbara's family is poor and she needs to come up with a way to pay the gas bill. At her job in a cinema she listens to the conversation of a cheating wife and her affair. Barbara offers the husband of the cheating wife, a wealthy chemist, to help him get his wife back. Her plan is a bizarre sharade in which Barbara plays the role of the chemist's affair to make his wife jealous. Of course, this backfires in every way imaginable.

After six years, a man shows up, whom his wife had declared dead. Her current husband is regarded by the son of the once-missing man as his father. Only after many tear can the returning man be convinced not to press for custody of the son.

A famous composer has to prove his innocence when his wife, who has mysteriously disappeared, is shot dead in the street one day.

An interfering mother plans husbands for her three daughters as they come of marriageable age. However she pays no attention to her daughters own feeling until the eventual intervention of her husband manages to bring things to a happy conclusion.

Azerbaijan, 1919. The British hope to secure control of the vast oil fields around Baku by launching a series of terrorist attacks on them. Hans Romberg, a German who is working as a security officer, battles with the British chief agent Captain Forbes and his associates. (Description from Wikipedia)

June Fifth ( Ger: Der 5. Juni) is a 1942 German propaganda war film. The storyline centers on an infantry unit during the French campaign. After the death of a war volunteer's father, the volunteer (Gefreiter Eickhoff) is treated harshly by his superior officer, Feldwebel Richard Schulz, who had been friends with the fallen father. The father had wanted Schulz to make his son a good officer. The film explores their relationship amidst the war.

This is essentially a "Kraft durch Freude" propaganda film though the organization is never mentioned. A company's three day outing might very well be the last because bankruptcy is just around the corner. The people on the trip have all their individual problems and wishes, too. This episodic film might sound quite promising considering the basic idea but its script is determinedly optimistic and leads everything and anything to a happy end. The dramatic parts are finished in a rather implausible way, the comedic are terribly predictable. There's a badly misjudged singing scene in the bus, some bavarian shtick, the Regensburger Domspatzen are singing in Augsburg and so on...