Supermarket (1974)

• Year: 1974
• Released: 25 Dec 1976
• Country: West Germany
• Adwords: 2 wins
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070755/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/supermarket
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: German, English
• MPA Rating: N/A
• Genre: Action, Crime, Drama
• Runtime: 84 min
• Writer: Georg Althammer, Jane Seitz, Roland Klick
• Director: Roland Klick
• Cast: Charly Wierczejewski, Eva Mattes, Michael Degen
• Keywords: prostitute, robbery, juvenile delinquent, hamburg, germany, gay theme,

6.8/10

Supermarket Storyline

18-year old Willi is living on the street – there are no goals in his life. There, he meets several people, helping but also cheating him. When he finally meets Monica, he realizes that there are people out there whose lives are even more desperate than his. So he’s trying to help her (and him) by planning a great robbery on a supermarket’s money transporter.—Krazykool_Kat

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Supermarket Movie Reviews

A hard and realistic German street drama.

It was the seventies in West Germany, when the national film industry was nearly completely down. Cinema releases were nearly all produced by a handful of arty-farty 1968-intellectuals who produced and directed boring, unrealistic and completely useless movies (except for some really dull commercial soft sex flicks like the successful “Schulmaedchenreport” series and its slick rip-offs).

In reaction to this situation, some young directors started making films that became famous as the “kleine dreckige Filme” (“small dirty movies”) – mainly realistic crime movies and street dramas with topics on terrorism, growing-up, violence, becoming criminal, social criticism and drug abuse, but with a more thrilling edge.

Next to Wolfgang Petersen (who later became a big director with “The Boat”, “Outbreak” and “Airforce One”) and Hark Bohm, Roland Klick was one of the most promising German directors to make films like that. “Supermarket” (1973) is a very good example – it shows us the story of a young Hamburg criminal who can’t bear social security and an all-day working life and tries to escape by robbing a mall together with an alcohol-addicted gangster.

The whole movie is thrilling, but also very depressing – the settings are dirty and mainly show us empty houses, ruins, dark back streets and the illuminated city nights of the Hamburg Reeperbahn. The main actors look really ugly, and the whole atmosphere is very nihilistic – there hardly seems to be a possible way out of this cycle of crime and violence.

The theme song is about suicide and sounds a bit like Robbie Williams’ “Angel”, and the incidental music was written by “Deutschrockstar” Udo Lindenberg. If you want to take a look at German society in the seventies, check out this dirty little diamond!

Bleak portrayal of a maybe egotistic world.

Right away, the basic plot line, aimless young man Charly becoming increasingly trapped in criminality up to the point of killing people and thus throwing away his life, isn’t really what makes this film so unique to me. The accomplishment, in my view, rather his how he seems to mirror the perhaps most frustrating aspects of modern society in an authentically feeling way.

Because the film portrays a world where everybody uses everybody else. The guy hunting for more kids to supply his foster home with at the police station. The journalist there too, hunting for a story he can shine with. The low life trying to find somebody aiding him in his petty thefts. And the obscenely rich gay guy of course trying to please himself with young men he picks up in “nature”, which is what Hamburg Hauptbahnhof represents to him. Where, in fact. Charly himself is no better, except he has no purpose.

And that’s really what this film brings to a point: what our behavior might amount to when stripped off its purpose, which is commonly understood to justify pretty much everything. Charly literally has none, except to keep going to the next point, where his horizon pretty much ends with the next day at best. Which is why, for the most time, all he can do is is running away, literally. And to respond to any attempts at using him with own abuse. That’s also why he’s no junkie or alcoholic, looking for the next kick or trying to numb himself down. He’s after nothing except trying to survive the moment.

This seemingly changes when he meets that hooker he appears to take an interest in. But does it really? Because if she really provided him with an aim he would feel compelled to change his ways, wouldn’t he. And in the end, when he performs that heist to get some money for him and the girl to get away with, it’s by no means clear if it’s about the girl or just about the getting away, because at that point he’s wanted for homicide already. So it’s indeed high time to run away again, with or without anybody.

In fact, it’s merely the girl who insists that Charly actually cared about her and her boy. While giving him away to the police just the same, to protect her own interest.

So that’s a bleak world indeed, from every which angle you look at it. But not the real stunner. The real one is that the film never takes sides in any way. It never moralizes. Never glorifies or merely justifies. Never condemns. Never makes fun of anything. And never takes a cynical stance. Nothing. It comes along as if somebody merely observed our world and condensed it. Without doing anything else. In contrast to so many German films of that era which quite often project an air of contrivance.

So while one might rightfully compare this film to Pasolini’s Accattone, I dare say it takes things still a bit further. There is no fascination with or longing back to a particular milieu or time anymore. The film comes along like an innocent child was looking at our world and merely reflecting back to us what it sees. That’s the feel it gives, and I’ve got to say I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

By the way, from seeing this, I would expect the guy that made this film, Klick, to have a very big heart. Very.

Grim film with an amazing theme song

This film follows German street kid Willi (Charly Wierczejewski) as he aimlessly bounces around the city of Hamburg. He seems to subsist on stealing tip jars in restaurants and restrooms, but comes under the wing Theo (Walter Kohut), whose main gig is stealing from men picking up boys at the train station. Theo has bigger plans though, robbing the armored car picking up cash at a big supermarket. The only person who takes an positive interest in Willi is journalist Frank (Michael Degen), but even his generous ways can’t keep Willi on the straight-and-narrow and even end up hurting his relationship with his girlfriend. I’m familiar with German director Roland Klick but this is actually the first film of his I’ve seen. It is a decidedly downbeat affair and Klick succeeds in making Hamburg look like a completely hopeless hell on Earth. The perfect film for a depressing German double feature alongside CHRISTIANE F. (1981). Make sure to check out the theme song “Celebration” by Marius West that appears several times in the film.