Die Umwege des schönen Karl

Captain Ebbs is an older, experienced seaman who has, however, only sailed on freighters. While his current old barge, the Martin Luther, has to go into the shipyard for an overhaul, the shipping company gives him command of the elegant cruise ship Julia to temporarily replace a colleague who has fallen ill. The rough Ebbs finds his way into his new job only with difficulty and initially puts his foot in his social mouth.

A classical art junk dealer and an almost bankrupt hairdresser who unexpectedly makes an inheritance go hunting behind thirteen chairs from which of a 100,000 DM contains which the rich aunt has hidden there.

Postman Titus Müller returns from his daily rounds with a letter that will change the course of his modest provincial existence.

A respectable woman in her 50s inherits a local night club from her husband in a divorce settlement, provided that she shows up there every night at 10:00pm for a month. In spite of eny and provocation, she manages to meet the terms.

Diederich Heßling is scared of everything and everyone. But as he grows up, he comes to realize that he has to offer his services to the powers-that-be if he wants to wield power himself. His life motto now runs: bow to those at the top and tread on those below. In this way, he always succeeds: as a student in a duel-fighting student fraternity and as a businessman in a paper factory. He cajoles the obese district administrative president Von Wulkow and wins his favor. He slanders his financial rivals and hatches a plot with the social democrats in the town council. On his honeymoon with his rich wife Guste, he finally finds a chance to do his beloved Kaiser a favor. And when a memorial to the Kaiser is unveiled in the town where Diederich lives and works, he delivers the address. He stands behind the lectern in the pouring rain, saluting his Kaiser. The crowd is dispersed. Everything is laid in ruins...

A young shoemaker is arrested for stealing a small amount of money, and is jailed for fifteen years. Upon his release, he wants to get a permit to get a job and start anew, but finds that without a job he can't get a permit, and without a permit he can't get a job. Ensnared in the absurd net of Prussian bureaucracy, he can't see any way out. That is, until he enters a thrift shop and spots a Prussian officer's uniform that fits him like a second skin...

The young farmer Hinnerk has managed to make something of his estate thanks to the help of his servant Hannes; only his household budget is a mess. One day, Hinnerk notices a pretty young girl at the rail station and immediately recognizes that it’s his childhood friend, Ilske Roehling. But when he makes a play for her, she tells him to take a long walk off a very short pier. At a dance party at the Bakenhus Inn, he sees her again and manages to get into a fight with the innkeeper. Worse still, he kidnaps Ilske in his car; takes her to his farm; and tries to force her to consent to marriage.

Aimless Bohemians are encouraged to find their salvation in Arbeit (Work) in this propagandistic Nazi era German production.

Heinz Rühmann plays the "model husband" who, when his bored wife threatens to leave him, embarks on an adventurous night.

William MacPhab loses seven-pounds in the stock market and decides to slap the man who was responsible for the stock manipulation that caused him to lose his money. Astor Terbanks, the stock-market manipulator is surprised the next day when he gets soundly slapped by MacPhab, and the latter promises to deliver one more a day for the next six days. Terbank's daughter, Daisy, is amused by the procedure and is attracted to MacPhab.

Two dubious characters disguise themselves as Holmes and Watson to gain attention and end up chasing counterfeiters and stolen stamps.

Charley Wyckham and Jack Chesney pressure fellow student Fancourt Babberly to pose as Charley's Brazilian Aunt Donna Lucia. Their purpose is to have a chaperone for their amorous visits with Amy and Kitty, niece and ward of crusty Stephen Spettigue. Complications begin when Fancourt, in drag, becomes the love object of old Spettigue and Sir Francis Chesney.

A group of artists and journalists enjoy a series of romantic entanglements in a country hotel. An author, Vera von Eichberg "of whom no photo exists," has mentioned the hotel in her work, boosting its notoriety. When another female guest arrives, everyone assumes she is the author, despite her repeated assertions to the contrary.

A varied group of passengers boarding a ship bound for pre-WWII Germany represents a microcosm of early-1930s society.

Allan Gray, a young man fascinated by the supernatural, goes to a small village where he feels a sinister force descending upon him. There, Allan meets an old man who asks him to protect his two daughters, for one of them has been bitten by a vampire.

A group of angels look longingly upon the life of humans. Berlin now is a very different place: unified in name but overrun with crime, corruption, and—in what turns out to be a key theme here—Americans.

A beautiful young drifter comes to a small village and battles Death itself to save the man she loves.

Historical drama portraying the life of German baroque architect Andreas Schlüter.

A tense vignette about the fate of an unlucky man in poverty-stricken Weimar-era Germany.

The stories' setup: a bunch of passive weaklings being dominated by two strong and ambitious women who fight for the same man.

The search for a child murderer drags a once-respected detective into an all-consuming obsession.

Four American soldiers stationed near a German village face death in the rape of a local girl and are defended by outside counsel Major Steve Grant.

On November 11, 1918, the last day of the First World War , Lieutenant Colonel Klaus Olden desperately tried to hold a lost post with his unit. The rescue appears in the form of pilot Jochen Wendler, who shows up with his plane and drops ammunition. When Jochen's machine is shot down immediately, Klaus manages to pull him out of the wreck at the last second. Both are injured and taken to the hospital , where they are cared for by the attractive nurse Barbara, a childhood friend of Jochen. The two men form a blood brotherhood and drive together with Barbara to East Prussia , where they want to visit relatives of Jochen on their estate . But the relatives' yard was destroyed in the war. The post-war period turns out to be an economic disaster.

Thymian Henning, an innocent young girl, is raped by the clerk of her father's pharmacy. She becomes pregnant, is rejected by her family, and must fend for herself in a harsh, cruel world.

Biopic about the Rothschilds, a Jewish family whose members rose to the top of the European banking community during the Napoleonic era.

This film is a fascinating showcase for Emil Janning's theatrical play. He's a gentle school teacher who believes in his boys and is easily fooled about all things, while the other town officials want him dismissed. Curiously it's very hard to see what the film is exactly aiming for. Disaster strikes and the lax prof proves to be too far removed of the real problems of the world, on the other hand his enemies are shown in the most unsympathetic, satirical way denouncing the militaristic, bourgeois ideology of the Kaiserreich.

After World War I, a war hero returns to Berlin to find that there's no place for him--he has no skills other than what he learned in the army, and can only find menial, low-paying jobs. He decides to become a gigolo to lonely rich women.

Walter Gruber once belonged to a group of unscrupulous, money-grubbing poachers. Now released from prison, he is determined never to touch a gun again. He was imprisoned for poaching, but they couldn't prove he fired the shot that wounded forester Kuhnert. Upon his return home, Walter is horrified to discover that his former lover, Kuhnert's daughter Grete, has since married someone else. Grete still loves Walter, with whom she was pregnant. But her father would have made life a living hell for her and the child had she not married another man. This man, Robert Thiele, is still poaching and is extremely ruthless in his methods. Robert eventually blackmails Walter into rejoining the poachers. When the gang shoots the old forester Kuhnert, Robert shifts suspicion onto Walter.

A pretty girl helps a popular Berlin policeman solve the murders of a woman he knew and the crooked banker the victim worked for.

Espionage, war and romance in the Far East in 1904: Russian naval officer Boris Ranewsky marries Youki, the sister of a fanatical Japanese officer, but war is imminent.

In 1912, the Titanic embarks on its inevitable collision course with history. In the wake of the over-spending required to build the largest luxury ship in the world, White Star Line executive Sir Bruce Ismay schemes to reverse the direction of his company's plummeting stock value. Onboard the Titanic, brave German 1st Officer Petersen struggles to convince his self-important British superiors not to overexert the ship's engines.

A film actress falls for an extra on her set, he turns out to be a prince.

In a cosmopolitan city vaudeville theatre, meeting place of the most successful artistes, the art shooter gets in suspicion to have committed a murderous poster on his jealous partner. - Not particularly successful mixture of vaudeville theatre numbers, artiste's destiny and crime film tension, on an average produced and played. A production rotated in Budapest with the popular dancer La Jana.

A 19th-century London cabaret singer is deported to prison in Australia. Her crime? Taking the blame when her lover bounces checks.

King Frederick II and his leading advisors hesitate too long in the eyes of some officers, so Major von Schill decides to strike out on his own. He hoped that his brave move would be the catalyst for the great war of liberation. But von Schill's troops were soon defeated by a superior force of Dutch-Danish troops. The king takes a public stand against von Schill's actions and eleven of his officers are shot by summary execution on Napoleon's orders. However, one of them, Lieutenant Heinrich von Wedell, escapes death and is sentenced to forced labor for life. When Wedell's brother Karl, who opposed von Schill's unauthorized actions, learns of Heinrich's fate, he decides to help him in a risky way...

Ursula Gothe is the mother of a son, husband Richard is to be promoted soon. Her orderly life in the pretty villa gets out of joint when Ursula discovers a girl's newspaper ad. Is "Suchkind 312" her illegitimate daughter Martina, whom she had lost while fleeing from the East?

A poet is hired by the owner of a wax museum in a circus to write tales about Harun al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. While writing, the poet and the daughter of the owner, Eva, fantasize the fantastic stories and fall in love for each other.

F.P.1 is a huge airplane landing dock in the Atlantic where pilots making the transatlantic flight can stop. Yet a saboteur tries to sink the technical wonder in this classic German science fiction film from 1932. The film was also created with English and French speaking actors at the same time.

A group of people gathers back in the post-war ruins of a luxurious Munich hotel they inhabited at one point or another years before; each trying to cope with the tragic consequences of the war and their own actions.

Young factory worker Mecky Berger doesn't believe in "true love." For him, his female acquaintances are just a pastime. In his eyes and those of his friends, romance is something a man should be ashamed of. But then he meets Christa, who is so different from the women he has had affairs with in the past. His feelings for her are also of a previously unknown, confusing intensity—Mecky has fallen in love. But he first has to learn how to deal with this feeling...

German all-star musical from 1938 that was a big commercial success.