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Der Alte - Zwei Leben
episode 100
West Germany / Austria / Switzerland 1986
produced by Helmut Ringelmann, Horst-Joachim Gehrmann for Neue Münchner Fernsehproduktion/ZDF, ORF, SRG
directed by Günter Gräwert
starring Siegfried Lowitz, Michael Ande, Jan Hendriks, Agnes Fink, Christoph Waltz, Sven-Eric Bechtolf, Katja Flint, Daniel Lüönd, Friedrich von Thun, Werner Schnitzer, Christin Marquitan, Manfred Spies, Gert Burkard, Sabrina Lorenz, Birte Berg, Josef Moosholzer, Wolfgang Zerlett
written by Adolf Schröder, Günter Gräwert, created by Helmut Ringelmann, music by Eberhard Schoener, title theme by Peter Thomas
TV-series Der Alte/The Old Fox, Der Alte (Siegfried Lowitz)
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Christa (Katja Flint), a friend of Inspector Köster's (Siegfried
Lowitz) assistant Heymann (Michael Ande), is concerned about the
disappearance of her friend and flatmate Ingrid, so concerned in fact that
she turns to Heymann and thus the police for help - and through a
newspaper ad, it's found out that Ingrid wasn't actually working at a
publishing house as she claimed, but as a prostitute, something neither
Ingrid nor even her boyfriend Hans (Christoph Waltz) had the slightest
idea about. Köster and company soon manage to find the flat Ingrid did
her business at - and also her dead body. From here it's easy to track
down the man (Friedrich von Thun) who paid for the flat (and who was also
madly in love with Ingrid) and the pimp (Gerd Burkard) who offered her
protection, but really nothing would stick. But there's someone else,
Robert (Sven-Eric Bechtolf), who after a bit of pressure admits he has
known about Ingrid's profession and has told Hans. By then though, Hans
has already made a getaway, and unfortunately he has taken a gun with him.
Robert though leads the police to Hans's probably hide-out, where Köster
receives a bullet to the chest - from what turns out to be a botched up
suicide attempt - before his men can apprehend Hans. Köster brings the
case to a close on his sickbed - that ultimately turns out to be his death
bed. Somehow, one can't shake the feeling of having seen all of
this before - and indeed the basic plot of the prim and proper girl
leading a double life as a prostitute was pretty much a staple in an
earlier series by producer Herbert Ringelmann, Der
Kommissar, and weirdly enough, much of the dialogue in this
episode seems so stilted it would do that series writer Herbert Reinecker
honour, while much of the motives indeed feel more like late 60s to
mid-70s rather like mid-80s, which though might have to do with the fact
that the series as a whole has more and more lost touch with anything
resembling relevance. What grounds this episode though is once more a
truly solid performance by Siegfried Lowitz, and it sure was a bold move
to let him die in this story - even though his death is somewhat
under-climactic, and even though the series would go hundreds of episodes
without Lowitz (the last, as of this writing, transmitted in may 2020), he
would have deserved a better send-off after 100 episodes straight of
leading the series.
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review © by Mike Haberfelner
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