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It's hard to get overly excited about a director like Franz Josef
Gottlieb. Gottlieb has directed numerous films and TV-series from the
1960's to the 2000's, of pretty much every genre popular in the German
movie industry, yet his oeuvre simply lacks any highlights or even
significant and entertaining lows. He couldn't even be described as anything
that remotely resembles an auteur, since his film simply lack any kind of
personal note, just like his career lacked any distinctive direction, he
was the born genre-hopping craftsman ... which is exactly why he was so
popular with his producers, he didn't feel himself to be an artist and
considered his whole function being to entertain as big a crowd as
possible with whatever he did - and as a result Gottlieb could be assigned
to pretty much everything, and while his films almost always left (large)
room to improvement, he rarely failed to deliver a totally marketable
picture, a picture without any bumps - be it political messages, artistic
experiments or whatnot - that could alienate the average target audience. But
don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that Gottlieb was totally
unremarkable for the German film industry (and later for television),
quite the contrary, he made films with some of the biggest names of the
German entertainment industry, including Gunther Philipp, Lex Barker [Lex
Barker bio - click here], Joachim Fuchsberger, Eddi Arent,
O.W. Fischer, Peter Weck, Rex Gildo, Cornelia Froboess, Rudi Carrell, Ilja Richter,
Hansi Kraus, Thomas Gottschalk, Helmut Fischer, Roy Black, Maximillian
Schell and of course
the omnipresent Herbert Fux, and filmed for pretty much all of the bigger
studios, including CCC
Filmkunst, Rialto and
Lisa Film [Lisa
Film history - click here] ... and while I wouldn't exactly
claim he was the backbone of the German film industry, he was certainly
one of those unsung workmanlike directors who put meat on the bones ...
Early Life, Early Career
Franz Josef Gottlieb's early career, just like many of his films,
couldn't be more undistinguishable from what is considered norm, with no
bumps one way or another: He was born 1930 in Semmering, Lower Austria,
Austria, and after graduating from high school studied at the Akademie
für Musik und darstellende Kunst (= academy for music and
performing arts) in Vienna. He worked as an actor at the Akademietheater
while studying and graduated in 1953 with a degree in directing. Degree in
hand, he started working as assistant director on a bunch of
Austrian-produced films like Die Wirtin zur Goldenen Krone (1955,
Theo Lingen), Wo die Lerche singt/Where the Lark Sings
(1956, Hans Wolff), Im Prater blüh'n wieder die Bäume/Trees
are Blooming in Vienna (1958, Hans Wolff), Gitarren klingen leise
duchr die Nacht (1959, Hans Deppe), and Wenn das mein grosser
Bruder wüsste (1959, Erik Ode). Mostly, these films were Heimat-films
(= rural dramas or comedies), operettas, romances or musicals, in other
words exactly those genres that were popular in the 1950's and were easy
enough to produce in a country as small as Austria and marketable
throughout the
German language countries. Of course, none of these films has since become a classic or
is even well-remembered nowadays even in Gottlieb's native Austria - and
in some way, that rings even true for many of Gottlieb's films as a
director as well ...
Starting out as Director For
Mikosch
im Geheimdienst (1959, Franz Marischka), a light comedy set in
Imperial Austria-Hungary starring Guther Philipp, a favourite with
contemporary audiences, Franz Josef Gottlieb was promoted from assistant
director to co-director - though it's not quite clear what's the
difference between assistant director and co-director as opposed to
director as such (a credit that goes to Marischka alone). Gottlieb
came into his own as a director the following year though, filming Meine
Nichte tut das nicht/My Niece doesn't do That (1960), where he
had sole directing responsibilities and was no assistant or co to anyone.
The film however can hardly be described as creative outburst of someone
who has spent his time in the shadow of others for way too long, quite the
contrary, it's a light musical comedy starring Schlager stars Conny
Froboess, Fred Bertelmann and Rex Gildo (Schlager = German language
popsongs from the cheesy end of the spectrum) plus actor Peter Weck (who
will pop up in Gottlieb's films every now and again over the years) that's
pretty much indistinguishable from the films Gottlieb worked on as an
assistant. At the beginning of his career as a director,
Gottlieb would remain loyal to the Schlager-formula, filling light
entertainment with a few songs and a handful of popular musicians (a
formula Gottlieb would return to tíme and again during his long career by
the way). Musik ist Trumpf (1961) for example is the sort-of
bio-pic of popular bandleader Hazy Osterwald (playing himself), and the
film also stars singers Rex Gildo and Bill Ramsey, while Saison in
Salzburg/Season in Salzburg (1961) stars Schlager-superstar
Peter Alexander (who in the 1950's and 60's also had a remarkable movie
career in the German language market), and Die Försterchristel
(1962) was based on an actual operetta from 1907. The film was once again
set in the Austro-Hungarian empire and has Peter Weck playing Austrian
emperor Franz Joseph.
Edgar Wallace
 Flix.com
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In 1963, Franz Josef Gottlieb finally
broke away from the Schlager-film mold when he was assigned to make
a film based on a book by Edgar Wallace, Der
Fluch der gelben Schlange/Curse
of the Yellow Snake. Since the late 1950's, Edgar
Wallace-adaptations were extremely popular in the German
language market, and while this was basically an accomplishment of
production company Rialto,
which started the trend with Der
Frosch mit der Maske/Fellowship
of the Frog (1959, Harald Reinl [Harald
Reinl bio click here]), it was never below producer
Artur Brauner of
CCC Filmkunst
to jump onto a successful bandwagon and try to copy the
style of someone else's series to the t - he even hired two of Rialto's
most popular Edgar Wallace-actors, Joachim Fuchsberger and Eddi Arent, to
remain in tone with the competitors' successful series (to which Rialto
eventually reacted by forcing exclusive contracts onto Fuchsberger and
Arent concerning the
Edgar Wallace-series).
As a director, Brauner needed someone who
could easily duplicate the style of the Rialto-series
established by series director Harald Reinl and to a lesser extent his
successor Alfred Vohrer [Alfred
Vohrer bio - click here] without trying too hard to be
original - a job description that fitted Franz Josef Gottlieb almost
perfectly, so much so that he was also entrusted with co-writing the
screenplay. And unfortunately, the screenplay is Curse
of the Yellow Snake's main fault: While on a visual and
atmospheric level the film closely resembles
Rialto's Edgar Wallace series,
it tries just too hard on a story level
to include all pulp mainstays associated with the
Edgar Wallace series
and cook them up to a fittingly convoluted
murder mystery that it ultimately to loses itself in its world of far
fetched plot devices and narrative improbabilities. Still,
the film was a success in 1963, and apparently, someone at Rialto
must have liked it for what it was (a carbon copy of their successful
formula), since in the very same year, the studio hired Franz Josef
Gottlieb to shoot another Edgar Wallace adaptation - but this time for
them and not some competing studio.
(CCC Filmkunst
by the way didn't produce another Edgar
Wallace-adaptation until Der
Teufel kam aus Akasava/The Devil Came from Akasava [Jess Franco] in
1970.)
The first Edgar Wallace-feature Franz Josef Gottlieb made for Rialto
was Der Schwarze Abt/The Black Abbott (1963), a film that
pretty much fulfilled all the expectations of Rialto
- as in being a film in tune with their successful series that did not
veer off the beaten track one way or the other - and became expectedly
successful ...- and thus it shouldn't come as a big surprise that in 1964,
Gottlieb was asked back by Rialto
to direct yet another entry into the series, Die Gruft mit dem
Rätselschloss/Curse of the Hidden Vault. As Curse
of the Yellow Snake and The Black Abbott
before it, Curse
of the Hidden Vault was devoid of artistic ambitions or the like, but
a solid if somewhat uninspired entry into the series, fitting it perfectly
in style and clichés.
Artur Brauner and
CCC Filmkunst
in the meantime might have given up on genuine Edgar
Wallace adaptations after Curse
of the Yellow Snake, but even before that film (with Das
Geheimnis der Schwarzen Koffer/Secret of the Black Trunk
[Werner Klingler] in 1962 to be precise) he has come up with another ploy to cash
in on the success of the
Edgar Wallace-films
- simply by adapting novels by Edgar Wallace's
son Bryan Edgar Wallace, whom he needed of course mainly for his famous
name, and while the novels of the younger Wallace were more in the
spies-and-intrigue genre, Brauner had no problems with changing the plots
of his books around so that they had the feel of the novels of Wallace'
senior father to them. And of course, Brauner occasionally hired an Edgar
Wallace-wise director for one of his Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptation, be it
Harald Reinl [Harald
Reinl bio click here], Franz Josef Gottlieb or much
later Jess Franco. Gottlieb's contributions to
Brauner/CCC Filmkunst's
Bryan Edgar Wallace-series were Das Phantom von
Soho/The Phantom of Soho and Das Siebente Opfer/The
Racetrack Murders (both 1964), which, much to the satisfaction of his
employer, were almost indistinguishable in style from the Edgar Wallace
films of the time. Apart from making Edgar Wallace- and
pseudo-Edgar Wallace-movies for both Rialto
and CCC Filmkunst,
Franz Josef Gottlieb was also at the whelm of Das Geheimnis der
Schwarzen Witwe/La Arana Negra/The Secret of the Black Widow
(1963), a crime drama co-produced by German International Germania
and Spanish Procusa.
Basically the film was a vehicle for O.W. Fischer, one of the most popular
actors in German language countries of his time - but if you take a second
look at the cast, you might stumble upon quite a few Edgar
Wallace-regulars like Karin Dor [Karin
Dor bio - click here], Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent ... Franz
Josef Gottlieb did not stray too far from the flock after all.
A Little Bit of
Everything in the Mid to Late 1960's In 1965, it was upon
Franz Josef Gottlieb to prove his versatility when he was hired by Artur Brauner
of CCC Filmkunst
to film a two-part adventure story in Spain (standing in for the Orient).
By that time, Brauner had made various attempts to jump onto another
bandwagon started by Rialto,
which just had phenomenal successes with their Winnetou-movies
based on the books by popular German novelist Karl May. Brauner had
already made an actual Winnetou-film,
Old Shatterhand (1964, Hugo Fregonese), starring the series' leads
Lex Barker [Lex
Barker bio - click here] and Pierre Brice [Pierre
Brice bio - click here] well established by the Rialto-films.
When Rialto
put both of them under exclusive contract regarding the series as a
consequence and Brauner figured the audience would not accept other actors
playing the lead roles, he mined the other books by Karl May instead,
coming up with May-characters Kara
Ben Nemsi and Karl
Sternau as protagonists for two new series. To not stray too far
away from the Winnetou-formula,
he hired Lex Barker and Ralf Wolter to play hero and sidekick respectively
in both series (just like they did in the Winnetou-movies),
and for the first Kara
Ben Nemsi - Der Schut/The
Shoot (1964) - and both Karl
Sternaus - Der
Schatz der Azteken/Treasure
of the Aztecs and Die
Pyramide des Sonnengottes/Pyramid
of the Sun God (both 1965) - he got himself Hollywood veteran Robert
Siodmak as director.
The Karl
Sternau-movies bombed at the box office, but The
Shoot did well enough to spawn a sequel, a sequel in two parts
actually - Durchs Wilde Kurdistan/The
Wild Men of Kurdistan and Im Reiche des
Silbernen Löwen/Attack of the Kurds
(both 1965) -, as Brauner figured it was cheaper to make two films in one
go than to make them seperately, and he even tried to pay his actors
(including Lex Barker) just for one movie instead of the two they actually
shot - a practice for which Barker took Brauner to court. For the two
Kara
Ben Nemsi-movies, Brauner tried to cut corners in other
places as well - like his director. Brauner must have figured without a doubt that
for a series movie, he didn't need a director with such a big name (and
undoubtedly a pricetag) as Robert Siodmak when a copycat director like
Franz Josef Gottlieb with no artistic ambitions and more modest monetary
demands would do just as well. Filming conditions in Spain though were
less than perfect however, as massive rainfall, extras going on strike, and
certain financial difficulties plagued the film - to such an extent
actually that Gottlieb and Brauner had a fall-out and ultimately, Brauner
fired Gottlieb - a unique event in Gottlieb's career - and Gottlieb sued
Brauner for outstanding wages, a matter that was ultimately settled out of
court. The two-part-film by the way was later finished by Werner Klingler
and Roy Rowland, though neither of them received an on-screen credit for
it. The films themselves weren't too bad though, your typical naive
adventure cinema, high on action if thin on plot, very much in style of The
Shoot and the Winnetou-series
if lacking any personal note. In other words, Gottlieb once again
delivered exactly what the producer wanted. Nevertheless, due to their
financial dispute he wouldn't work for Artur Brauner again for more than 20
years.
Artur Brauner might have been one of the biggest
producers in Germany, but his fall-out with Franz Josef Gottlieb didn't
mean Gottlieb was in any way out of work, in fact after the German/Austrian/Hungarian co-production Ferien mit Piroschka
(1965), an a little clueless romantic comedy, he even filmed with Lex
Barker again. The film Mister Dynamit - Morgen küsst Euch der Tod/Spy
Today, Die Tomorrow (1966), based on a German pulp magazine series,
was an effort to establish Barker as a sort of German James
Bond - unsuccessfully though because the film came already
late in the game of James
Bond-rip offs and did not have the budget or original ideas to
live up to the British superspy series. Still, as a piece of
espionage-camp from yesteryear, the film might be fun to watch. While
with his previous films, Franz Josef Gottlieb waas always forced to jump
onto one bandwagon or another, trying to cash in on any which trend there
was, he found himself literally riding the crest of the wave with his next
film, Das Wunder der Liebe/The Miracle of Love (1968). With
The Miracle of Love, based on a book by popular German author and
journalist Oswalt Kolle, the genre of the German sex education film was
born. German sex education films were actually just sex films, but to
attain a certain degree of respectability and evade censorship at the same
time, they were presented as documentaries or docu-dramas often based on
books and/or presented by scientists or wannabe scientists. Oswalt Kolle,
who not only wrote the source novel and screenplay for The Miracle of Love
but also produced it, was definitely merely a wannabe scientist,
but the scandal his book had caused and the success it enjoyed had already made him Germany's number
one sex educator . And just like the book,
the film became a sensational success ... Watching the film from today's
point of view though, one can't but find its (pseudo-)scientific approach,
its almost conservative attitude towards its subject matter and its dead
seriousness rather amusing, however back in the day, it totally met with
audience tastes (not at least because of the unprecedented amount of
nudity), and a new style - that of the pseudo-scientific skinflick - was born, a style German sex cinema only
eventually got over ... why, even the initial entries into the
Schoolgirl Report-series
featured (fake) documentary scenes and interviews
with experts to come across as more serious, scientific and fact-based as
they actually were. Franz Josef Gottlieb apparently seemed
unfazed from his descent into sex cinema, as he did his job on The Miracle of Love
as competent (and as workmanllike) as he had done his
previous movies without naked bodies in them, but it is exactly his
certain degree of indifference and proffesionalism that made him perfect
for the genre, and thus it wasn't long before former employer Rialto
(the
Edgar Wallace-series) knocked on his door and offered two more
sex education films in their employ, Die Vollkommene Ehe/Ideal
Marriage/The Secret Desires of Women (1968) and Das Leben zu
zweit - Sexualität in der Ehe/Every Night of the Week (1969),
both somehow based on books by Dutch gynecologist Theodor H.Van de Velde,
again pseudo documentaries that are ridiculous in their pretended
seriousness from today's point of view but found their audiences back in
the days. In between his two Van de Velde-sexfilms, Gottlieb,
again for Rialto,
made Klassenkeile/Spanking at School (1969), a perfectly
family-friendly highschool comedy starring the ultimate wholesome
German girl of her time Uschi Glas - as for a few years in the late
1960's/early 70's, great business could be made from highschool comedies for the entire family in Germany. And while in their days,
Gottlieb's sex education films were considered almost pornography by some,
Spanking at School (despite its misleading English title) was free
of all naughtiness, raunichiness or even sexual innuendo ... Gottlieb's
last film of the 1960's, Ehepaar sucht Gleichgesinntes (1969) is
interesting inasmuch as it blends the innocent humour of Spanking at
School and the naughtiness of his sex education films (though the film
didn't go nearly as far) into a (completely pointless) romantic comedy.
Other than that, the film is also important for Gottlieb's career as it
marked his first film in the employ of Lisa Film [Lisa
Film history - click here], his main employer during the next
decade ...
Sex and Slapstick in the
70's With the turn of the decade from 1960's to 70's,
German cinema went into decline, as audience tastes changed, the country's
most successful series like the Winnetou-
and the
Edgar Wallace-series were breathing or had already breathed
their last, growing competition from a recovering American film industry
took its dent in the film market, and a young breed of filmmakers, first
and foremost Rainer Werner Fassbinder, took German cinema into a new, less
commercial direction. With the German cinema as such in decline, the
careers of many successful (genre-)directors from previous decades went on
the decline as well, first and foremost probably that of Harald
Reinl [Harald
Reinl bio click here]. In
contrast, Franz Josef Gottlieb was not only left unfazed by the changes in
the German film industry, as a matter of fact, for him the 1970's turned out to be
an incredibly productive decade.
Why Franz Josef Gottlieb kept
in high demand all through the 1970's is pretty obvious, now more than
ever, producers needed a director that could produce on a (rushed) schedule
and on (limited) budget, a director that had experience on one hand but
did not shy away from sex and nudity on the other (if needed), and a director
who could handle whatever stuff was thrown at him ... and a director of
Gottlieb's adaptability and lack of artistic ambitions seemed to be
nothing short of a godsend.
It's interesting to note in this context
that in the 70's, Gottlieb did not just direct sexmovies but also quite a
totally family friendly fare like the romance Wenn Du bei mir bist (1970) - which
is notable mainly for being Lex Barker's [Lex
Barker bio - click here] last feature film (in a supporting
role) -, the Schlager-comedy Das
haut den stärksten Zwilling um (1971) starring Peter Weck and a
host of then popular pop stars, another highschool comedy with Betragen
Ungenügend (1972), the last part of the rather bad Lümmel von
der ersten Bank-series, and three more wholesome films with German
wholesome girl Uschi Glas, Wir hau'n den Hauswirt in die Pfanne and
Hilfe die Verwandten kommen (both 1971), and Trubel um Trixie
(1972).
More notorious than all of those films were probably Gottlieb's
efforts in the slapstick genre though, first and foremost the Tolle
Tanten-films - Wenn die Tollen Tanten kommen/When the
Mad Aunts are Coming (1970), Tante Trude aus Buxtehude (1971)
and Die Tollen Tanten schlagen zu (1971) -, rather lame
cross-dressing comedies starring Ilja Richter - then a semi regular in
Gottlieb's films - and Dutch comedian Rudi Carrell, who was by the time
these films were made finding fame and fortune in Germany, and whom
Gottlieb also directed in Rudi, benimm Dich (1971) and Crazy -
Total verrückt (1973) as well as helping out as director in
Carrell's popular gameshow Am laufenden Band. In
all, Gottlieb's comedies were anything but great, their lack of budget,
rushed schedules, sloppy comic timing and incompetence in properly handling
slapstick sequences are all to obvious for the discriminating viewer. However, these
films seemed to nevertheless give audiences what they wanted, they
featured many popular stars of their time, more often than not a few
musical interludes - all popular tunes to make sure -, and a broad humour
that was sure to catch on with less discriminating viewers.
As mentioned above, Franz Josef Gottlieb didn't shy
away from making sexfilms alongside his family friendly comedies all
through the 1970's, movies like the naughty fairytale Hänsel und
Gretel verliefen sich im Wald/The Naked Wytche (1970), the
Schoolgirl Report-rip-off
Liebesspiele
junger Mädchen/After
School Girls (1972), or the Heimatfilm-spoof Auf der Alm, da
gibt's koa Sünd'/Bottoms Up/Bouncing Boobs (1974). It's
interesting to note in this context that the humour of Gottlieb's sexfilms
only differed very gradually from that of his family films, and - also
thanks to his most frequent employer Lisa Film [Lisa
Film history - click here] - even parts of cast and crew were
the same.
In the latter part of the 1970's though, the family
friendly comedies that Gottlieb was so prolific in making had definitely
run their course, and - apart from a thriller based on a book by popular
German writer H.G.Konsalik, Der Geheimnisträger (1975), featuring
Sybil Danning on her way to international fame [Sybil
Danning bio - click here], and the lame horror comedy Lady
Dracula (1978) starring and co-scripted by Brad Harris [Brad
Harris bio - click here] - Gottlieb saw himself forced to
focus on erotic features almost entirely ... not that he seemed to mind
all that much, his sex movies are about as competently made and about as
artistically insignificant as his other movies.
It is interesting in this context though that on films like Sylvia im Reich
der Wollust/The Joy of Flying/Sex at 7,000 Feet (1977), Hurra
- Die Schwedinnen sind da and Popcorn und Himbeereis/Popcorn
and Ice Cream (both 1978), Sunnyboy und Sugarbaby/She's 19
and Ready (1979) and Zärtlich, aber frech wie Oskar/Der Gendarm vom Wörthersee/Gentle,
but Sassy like Oskar (1980), Gottlieb was able to work with some of
the top erotic talent available in Germany at the time, women like Olivia
Pascal, Bea Fiedler, Ursula Buchfellner, Gina Janssen, Dolly Dollar and
Ajita Wilson - which is ironic since over the years, Gottlieb has also
worked with most of Germany's mainstream box office draws.
Popcorn und Himbeereis/Popcorn and Ice Cream
deserves a special mention here inasmuch as it was a clever cash-in on the
Israeli box office smashhit Eskimo Limon/Lemon Popsicle
(1978, Boaz Davidson) that even featured that film's most memorable actor
(Zachi Noy) and had a title that closely resembled Lemon Popsicle's
German title Eis am Stiel. Not that this says anything about Popcorn
and Ice Cream inherent quality, but it's at least worth a mention ...
Television As
quickly as the erotic feature had conquered the German screens in the late
1960's and early 70's, as quckly it disappeared at the beginning of the
1980's, due mainly to two factors: hardcore porn and home video - if you
wanted to see dirty movies from now on, you needn't go to a movie theatre
anymore, you could do it at home, and what's more, these films were much
more explicit than anything you could see in a regular movietheatre (and I
don't mean x-rated moviehouses here) ... And while Franz Josef Gottlieb
was not a direcor of all that much professional pride, he had no interest
in seeing his career descend into hardcore pornography neither - and I
very much doubt he was ever offered such a job, as the porn industry could
do very well without a director of his mainstream experience - especially
with the pricetag attached to it.
Anyways, while for many other
directors, the death of the erotic feature meant the end of their careers,
Franz Josef Gottlieb had no problems adapting to the changes in the
filmworld, and he started directing for television, of all things with Manni
der Libero (1982), a soccer-themed miniseries aimed at young boys -
quite a giant leap from the sexfilms he had made only a few months
earlier.
Manni der Libero was scripted by Justus Pfaue, a man
who in the late 1970's and early to mid-1980's became known for (and quite
successful in) writing mini-series for a primarily teen market, and
obviously, Franz Josef Gottlieb was quite competent in bringing his script
to
the screen, as he was called back in 1983 to direct another Justus
Pfaue-opus, the teen-orientedmystery-series Mandara.
Even apart from
Justus Pfaue-adaptaitons though, Gottlieb had found his new home in
television, directing countless televison movies - like several starring
Inge Meysel as Paul Gallico's crime-solving cleaning lady Mrs 'Arris - and
episodes of TV-series - including the ever-popular rural medical drama Der
Landarzt. Franz Josef Gottlieb would return to the big screen only
twice during the later years of his career, for the adventure flick Der
Stein des Todes (1987), which co-starred Brad Harris [Brad Harris bio
- click here], Tony Kendall, Heather Thomas and Elke Sommer - and which was
Gottlieb's first film for CCC Filmkunst
in more than 20 years - and the Lisa Film-production [Lisa
Film history - click here] Zärtliche Chaoten/Loveable
Zanies/Three Crazy Jerks (1987), a lame comedy starring Thomas
Gottschalk (who also wrote the film), Helmut Fischer and Michael Winslow,
with a guest appearance by Pierre Brice [Pierre
Brice bio - click here]. And while the former of these films
didn't cause too much excitement at the box office anywhere in the world,
the latter was at least successful enough to spawn a sequel, Zärtliche
Chaoten 2 (1989), directed by Holm Dressler.
In 1990, Lisa Film,
one of Gottlieb's most frequent employers, took a gamble in producing a
series that deliberately used their own kitsch-films (rural
comedies, romances, Schlager-films and the like) as blueprints, even
re-employing many of their former stars - first and foremost hasbeen
Schlager singer Roy Black - in key roles. And since Franz Josef Gottlieb
was one of the few directors from that era still working, it was no big
surprise that he was hired for several episodes. The resulting seires, Ein
Schloss am Wörthersee (1990 - 93), was pretty much slaughtered by
the critics - but became an incredible success for the then still
struggling private TV station RTL. Of course, from their point of
view, the critics had every right in disliking the series that was
intentionally reminiscent of movies they didn't like in the first place -
but at the same time, like all those movies back then, the film was loved
by the general public ... something that of course can also be said about
many of Gottlieb's movies as such.
The rest of Franz Josef
Gottlieb's active life was spent on TV-series, and by the mid-1990's, he
seemed to have found a new home in the series Unser Charly,
a series of which he directed no less than 45 episodes between 1997 and
2005. The series is of some interest inasmuch as it combines elements of
soap opera and medical drama with the story of a pet chimpanzee residing
in Germany - but having said that, ultimately the series is also as naive
and pointless as it would seem to be.
Having worked almost
exclusively on Unser Charly for the last few years, Franz Josef Gottlieb made another
(made-for-television) feature film in 2005, Die Liebe eines Priesters, a melodrama about a
priest falling in love starring Erol Sander and Maximilian Schell. Of
course, Die Liebe eines Priesters was anything but a serious
examination of its subject mater - but in what it is, a piece of kitsch
pretending to explore a serious subject - it was perhaps a perfect swan
song for a man whose professional life was married to entertainment,
without any kind of artistic ambitions or intellectual hindsight ever
coming into the way of whatever he was trying to sell to his audience. About
a year after Die Liebe eines Priesters was released, in 2006, Franz
Josef Gottlieb died from a brain tumor at the age of 75, and his death caused hardly a ripple
in the German movieworld, and even less so among film journalists, who
never had too high an opinion of Gottlieb as a filmmaker in the first place
- but with all that said, he was one of those directors who put meat on
the bones of the German film industry as such, who had a long and
successful career doing what he did, and even though he might be an almost
unknown for the general audience (which is not too interested in directors
in the first place), it's amazing how many of his films from various
stages of his career are nowadays available on DVD at least in the
German language market ...
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