The Cat

Two men hold up a bank and take the staff hostage. They demand three million marks. The police surround the building, negotiation begins, and every move is planned against the next. But there is something the police do not know: the man who planned it is not inside the bank. He is sitting in a hotel room in the building opposite, watching through binoculars and directing by telephone. He has calculated every step the police will take. Dominik Graf directs. Götz George and Gudrun Landgrebe take the leads. The idea is distance. The criminal is not at the scene and the tension is built between two places; the camera moves constantly between the bank and the hotel room. The film has a technical level rarely found in German genre cinema; the rhythm of the cutting and the use of space come close to American thrillers. Dominik Graf is a director who insisted on making genre films in Germany and this is among his known works. Götz George was then known for a police series on television and is entirely on the other side here. Gudrun Landgrebe's character is at the centre of the plan and is the soundest strand; who is using whom is not clear until the end. Its limit is the ending; the narrative speeds up as it unwinds the mechanism and some links are left open. Who it is for: viewers who like European thrillers of the eighties and heist films. Who it is not for: there is little depth of character, the pace drops in places, and the ending is predictable.