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Der Kommissar - Noch zehn Minuten zu leben
episode 90
West Germany 1975
produced by Helmut Ringelmann for Neue Münchner Fernsehproduktion/ZDF
directed by Theodor Grädler
starring Erik Ode, Reinhard Glemnitz, Günther Schramm, Elmar Wepper, Helma Seitz, Christine Wodetzky, Wolfgang Stumpf, Gerlinde Locker, Ute Willing, Luitgard Im, Eric Pohlmann, Jürgen Goslar, Tilo von Berlepsch, Margit Symo, Rolf Wanka, Ingrid Capelle, Hanns Stein
written by Herbert Reinecker, series created by Helmut Ringelmann, Herbert Reinecker, music by Hans-Martin Majewski, title theme by Herbert Jarczyk
TV-series Der Kommissar
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Industrialist Lenhard (Wolfgang Stumpf) arrives late to a party at his
own house, goes upstairs to change, and a few minutes later, the guests
downstairs hear a shot and then a man's death scream. Bottner (Jürgen
Goslar), the proxy of Lenhard's company, is the first up the stairs, but
he only finds Lenhard's dead body. He also finds his room's window opened
and is quick to suggest a burglar. He suggests for all the guests to go
outside to try and capture the burglar, but not a trace of him (or her) is
found. Inspector Keller (Erik Ode) and
his team (Günther
Schramm, Reinhard Glemnitz, Elmar Wepper) investigate, and it doesn't take
them long to find out that Bottner is having an affair with Lenhard's wife
Charlotte (Christine Wodetzky), and now that Lenhard's dead, the two don't
even try to hide it, to the point where Bottner moves in with her only
days after the murder. So quite obviously, there's a motive for the
murder, but both have airtight alibis, as they were downstairs with all
the other guests. Still, since there's nobody else around who has a
motive, so it must have been them, so Keller asks question after question,
until he learns about a fishing cabin Bottner, not a fishing man by
character, has rented of late, and that's when things start to fall
together ... In the finale, Keller invites all the party guests back to
Lenhard's house, and to everybody's surprise they once again hear a shot
and a man's death scream, just like at that last party, and now Keller
reveals this all came from a tape Bottner recorded at the fishing cabin,
and that he actually shot Lenhard earlier using a silencer to have the
perfect alibi when the recording kicked in. To be perfectly
honest, this episode gives its whole game away in the first five minutes,
so much so that one has to ask why our TV detectives couldn't come to the
same conclusions much sooner. That said, in terms of logic many questions
are left unanswered, like where did Bottner hide the murder weapon or why
didn't anybody spot the quite massive tape player in Lenhard's room? But
that said, Der Kommissar was never big on narrative logic,
and nostalgia glosses over at least some of the series' shortcomings,
maybe even endears us to it for them - and in all, this one's actually a
pretty entertaining episode, even if nothing to write home about.
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