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When following a gang of carthieves to their hideout, a policeman (Bum
Krüger) walks right into a trap and is murdered. When his successor Wilms
(Joachim Fuchsberger) takes over, he knows little more than the carthieves
have something to do with a dancer dubbed "the girl with the cat
eyes" - who is easily traced down to a nightclub run by Gormann
(Wolfgang Preiss), and Wilms is quick to seduce her, too ... but then
Wilms learns Katja (Vera Tschechow), his girl with the cat eyes, is only
the replacement of the original one (Nina Hauser), who has vanished from
the face of the earth only the other day, and instead of getting a few
clues out of her, he falls in love with her - and doesn't stop to realize
how close he has come to the car thieves through her: You see, without her
knowledge, Katja's father (Gert Fröbe) somehow sees himself to be forced
to lend his garage to the carthieves for fix-up jobs, because the boss of
the carthieves has made him an accessory to the murder of the policeman
that kicked everything off ... and the boss of the carthieves is none
other than Gormann - who by the way has the hots for Katja, too. Eventually,
Wilms lets it slip that the police will search her father's place, not
knowing that he is indeed her father, so as a good daughter she tips of
daddy, hoping he'd do the right thing and give himself up to the police -
but no such thing, he passes the message on to Gormann, who empties the
garage just in time and tries to ship all his goods off to Spain,
including Katja and daddy. Daddy must die, but everything else ends
happily for the good guys, and Wilms of course gets the girl. Clichéed
and even for its time a bit old-fashioned crime drama with the occasional
song-and-dance routine thrown in (after all, one of the main locations is
a nightclub), this film does take itself way too seriously, and does
suffer quite a bit from its utter predictability paired with its lack of
nuances in its lead characters/actors: Joachim Fuchsberger is just too
much of a jack-of-all-trades to really come off as cool, Vera Tschechowa
really overdoes her Katja's innocent behaviour, Gert Fröbe hams it up
rather terribly playing a drunk but benign father, and Wolfgang Preiss is
just too evil to be true. Only Hans Clarin as a small-fry, klutzy
carthief, lends some flair to his role, but it's only a minor one that's
written off half way through. In all honesty though, there are far worse
German crime dramas from roughly the same era, and if nothing else, this
should make for an evening of fun (if for the wrong reasons) nostalgic
entertainment - but that's about the best I can say about the movie.
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