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One evening schoolgirl Kirsten (Helga Anders) is shot dead right outside an arcade she has visited on an almost daily basis. Soon enough, inspector Keller (Erik Ode) and his team (Günther Schramm, Reinhard Glemnitz, Fritz Wepper) are called in to investigate, and they start at Kirsten's school, where they soon learn she was a good student in terms of grades, but also a trouble maker, and especially with class teacher Gebhardt (Heinz Bennent) she constantly locked heads, so much so that he constantly complained about her to his fellow teachers, the principal (Wolfgang Preiss) and even his wife (Ella Büchi). But while everybody tells Keller how much Kirsten bullied Keller, even drove him to tears, he weirdly enough defends the girl, almost as if he wanted to downplay their conflict to divert suspicion - which of course only makes him look all the more guilty. However, Keller isn't convinced the man had it in him to shoot someone, so he concentrates his investigations on the goings-on in classroom of the day Kirsten died, when after another argument between her and Gebhardt, he admitted defeat and stormed out of class. Keller interviews Kirsten's best friend Andrea (Simone Rethel) and finds out that after Gebhardt left class, she and Kirsten went after him and found him in the bathroom in tears - which somehow touched Kirsten. It turns out that that evening, just before she went to the arcade, Kirsten went to Gebhardt's home to ask him "Why didn't you help me?", upon which Gebhardt understood that she isn't the bad guy of their conflict, just a teenager who got lost growing up and who was looking for help, and thus he has failed her as her teacher - and that changed his perception of her 100%. And that, also, makes him much less likely a suspect. His wife however didn't know anything about this turn of events and was so angry at the girl that she went to the arcade - to shoot her dead ...

Now as a murder mystery, this only works half as well as it could as both the turn of events and the culprit announce themselves way sooner than intended, while storywise the thing seems a little bit too simplistic, not helped of course by writer Herbert Reinecker's often blunt and trademark stilted dialogue, nor his tendency to make characters not react naturally. Also at least from today's point of view it's slightly odd to see how 17 year old girls are sexualized by both the camera and some of the characters (though for the sake of completeness it needs to be added here that Helga Anders and Simone Rethel, while both looking their parts, were 23 and 24 respectively when this was shot). The result of all of this is not great crime TV, but fun to watch at least from a nostalgic point of view, and funny if for all the wrong reasons.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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