Supermarkt (1974)

It was the seventies in West Germany, when the national film industry was nearly completely down. Cinema releases were nearly all produced by a handful of arty-farty 1968-intellectuals who produced and directed boring, unrealistic and completely useless movies (except for some really dull commercial soft sex flicks like the successful "Schulmaedchenreport" series and its slick rip-offs).

In reaction to this situation, some young directors started making films that became famous as the "kleine dreckige Filme" ("small dirty movies") - mainly realistic crime movies and street dramas with topics on terrorism, growing-up, violence, becoming criminal, social criticism and drug abuse, but with a more thrilling edge.

Next to Wolfgang Petersen (who later became a big director with "The Boat", "Outbreak" and "Airforce One") and Hark Bohm, Roland Klick was one of the most promising German directors to make films like that. "Supermarket" (1973) is a very good example - it shows us the story of a young Hamburg criminal who can't bear social security and an all-day working life and tries to escape by robbing a mall together with an alcohol-addicted gangster.

The whole movie is thrilling, but also very depressing - the settings are dirty and mainly show us empty houses, ruins, dark back streets and the illuminated city nights of the Hamburg Reeperbahn. The main actors look really ugly, and the whole atmosphere is very nihilistic - there hardly seems to be a possible way out of this cycle of crime and violence.

The theme song is about suicide and sounds a bit like Robbie Williams' "Angel", and the incidental music was written by "Deutschrockstar" Udo Lindenberg. If you want to take a look at German society in the seventies, check out this dirty little diamond!