Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned)   CLICK HERE to buy from Box-set: Episodes 1-22 German language only   CLICK HERE to buy from V.O.D. Episodes 1-22 German language only Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!

On their train trip home from a vacation in Yugoslavia, Rolf Bär (Harald Leipnitz) and his mistress Karin (Uschi Glas) share their compartment with young Pohlmann (Werner Pochath), who gets mighty nervous at customs control at the Austrian/German border and offers Bär a lot of money if he's up for switching suitcases - and of course, Pohlmann, with Bär's suitcase, is then pulled off the train for a thorough search (that ultimately amounts to nothing), while Bär travels on with Pohlmann's suitcase that he finds to contain heroin worth more than a million Deutschmarks. Bär, much to the distress of Karin, decides to trick Pohlmann and try to sell the heroin himself - but somehow Pohlmann gets wind of this and ultimately has a face-off with Pohlmann and shoots him dead. But somehow he fails to get his hands on his suitcase which Bär was wise enough to hide in a trainstation locker. So Pohlmann poses as Bär's businesspartner and tries to get his wife Ursula (Liselotte Pulver) to help him get his hands on the suitcase. Ursula of course can't help much as she has never been involved with the whole affair (after all, Bär took his mistress to Yugoslavia and not her), but acts very forthcoming while obviously suspecting things. And then Karin is found, tortured to death ...

Inspector Köster (Siegfried Lowitz) investigates, but at first he comes up with nothing but blanks as he can't pin anything on Pohlmann despite Pohlmann acting suspicious as heck, and Bär's wife simply blocks off all his questions. So Köster - no joke - gets drunk with his assistant Heymann (Michael Ande) and then figures that Ursula must have wanted her revenge on Karin and thus used Pohlmann to kill her, making him belive she has the suitcase. Köster and Heymann question Pohlmann and Ursula and soon get a confession out of her that also implicates Pohlmann.

Now when it came to playing crooks on German crime TV, Werner Pochath was of course a known quantity, and his performances rarely disappointed - nor does the performance at hand. Likewise, Siegfried Lowitz was probably the best German TV cop of his time, adding a certain depth to the rather bland character he's playing throughout his 100 episode run of Der Alte. That all said, this is not one of the better episodes of the series, it's just too far-fetched, storywise, and at the same time a little too chock-full with genre tropes. Nostalgic fun for sure of course, but not exactly great crime TV.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

Feeling lucky? Want to search any of my partnershops yourself for more, better results? (commissions earned)

The links below will take you just there!!!

Find Der Alte - Ein Koffer at the amazons ...   amazon.com   amazon.co.uk   amazon.de Looking for imports? Find Der Alte - Ein Koffer here ...   eThaiCD.com Your shop for all things Thai

Thanks for watching !!!