The Punch Bowl

Johannes Pfeiffer is a successful writer. One evening, drinking with friends, everyone tells stories of their school years: the pranks, the teachers deceived, the lessons skipped. Pfeiffer has nothing to tell; he was taught at home by a tutor and never saw a school. His friends say this is a lack. The next day he enrols with forged papers as a pupil at a school in a small town. A grown man, in a pupil's clothes, learns to play a school prank for the first time. Helmut Weiss directs. Heinz Rühmann takes the lead. The source is Heinrich Spoerl's novel. The film was made in 1944, the last year of the war, and there is no trace of the war or the period in it; that is the most striking thing about it. Approval by the authorities of the time was not easy and a special permission was needed for it to be shown. Heinz Rühmann was the best known German actor of those years and this became his best known part. Its place in Germany is unusual: group screenings are held among university students every winter, and the audience does particular things at particular scenes; those screenings have become a tradition with rules of their own. The humour is built on the classroom and is largely verbal; the teachers as types carry the film. Its value now is as both comedy and document of a period; what it does not say matters as much as what it does. Who it is for: anyone curious about classic German comedy and film history. Who it is not for: the humour depends on language, the pace is old, and the context it was made in is uncomfortable.