Teenage Wolfpack

Freddy Borchert, nineteen, runs a youth gang in Berlin. He has left home because he cannot stand his father, a punctilious civil servant who tyrannises the household; he works at a petrol station, leads the gang and has a confident girlfriend. The apparently good life is paid for by theft and fencing. The triangle that forms between him, his brother Jan and Cissy pushes the whole arrangement to breaking point. Georg Tressler directed from Will Tremper’s screenplay, written from his own story, shooting in real West Berlin locations in July and August 1956 for half the usual cost, and it premiered in Essen on 27 September 1956. In the American version Horst Buchholz was billed as Henry Bookholt and sold as the new James Dean.