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Der Alte - Bis dass der Tod uns scheidet
episode 50
West Germany / Austria / Switzerland 1981
produced by Helmut Ringelmann, Hans Peter Renfranz for Neue Münchner Fernsehproduktion/ZDF, ORF, SRG
directed by Alfred Vohrer
starring Siegfried Lowitz, Michael Ande, Jan Hendriks, Maria Becker, Dieter Schidor, Hans Brenner, Sabine von Maydell, Udo Thomer, Johanna Baumann, Gustl Weishappel, Anton Feichtner, Mona Freiberg, Hans-Dieter Asner, Eva Röder, Georg Einerdinger, Heiner Lauterbach, Bernd Eckhardt, Ruth Fischer, Ernst Bröder
written by Detlef Müller, created by Helmut Ringelmann, music by Frank Duval, title theme by Peter Thomas
TV-series Der Alte/The Old Fox, Der Alte (Siegfried Lowitz)
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Holger (Dieter Schidor) has gone on a holiday trip to the Bavarian
countryside with his girlfriend Barbara (Sabine von Maydell) - but then
they got into a fight ... and ultimately Holger comes back home on his
own, without his car which he claims to have borrowed to Barbara who
wanted to visit her grandparents. Only, she has never arrived at her
grandparents, and the car is soon found in a swamp as if somebody had
intentionally tried to sink it. It's also revealed that Holger and Barbara
have had a fight before he returned home, so it's strongly suspected that
Holger has killed Barbara, and the swamp is searched for her body. Holger
confesses to his mother (Maria Becker) that he has stabbed her, but mother
is a woman who's not only over-protective but also of means, so she grants
Bonte (Hans Brenner), a man she was to evict from some land she owns, a
new leasein return for a false statement to the police that he has seen
Barbara after her supposed death and that she's his girlfriend. Inspector
Köster (Siegfried Lowitz) doesn't believe a word the man's saying though,
and let's Bonte know as much. In the meantime, Holger receives a letter
demanding half a million Deutschmarks in return for the murder weapon,
which is a sum his mother eventually agrees to cough up. At a nearby lake,
Holger meets up with none other than Barbara, who, needless to say, isn't
really dead but it was all just a ruse to get half a million from his
mother. This is where everything is derailed though, when first Bonte
confesses to Köster that his initial statement was a lie and he has never
even met Barbara, and then Barbara's dead body is found in the swamp, upon
which Holger has a breakdown, and he confesses to the police about the
attempt to blackmail his mother, claims she can of course corroborate -
and ultimately it's revealed that it was Bonte who has committed the
murder after following Holger around, learning about Holger and Barbara's
blackmail attempt and figuring this to be easy money to get his hands
onto. And the girl he killed when she resisted his attempts to rape her
... The whole episode is a little over-convoluted, with many
subplots remaining thus under-explored to fit everything in a mere hour of
running time, giving the whole thing that could have been an interesting
crime drama if well-written, a certain emptiness. However, the story is
held together competently by Siegfried Lowitz, giving another competent
performance while the rest of the cast hardly reaches above so-so. In all
then, the nostalgia value's high here, but other than that there's little
to write home about.
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