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MovieMail's Review
Katharina Blum is an ordinary young woman who meets a charismatic youth at a party and takes him home for the night (the man in question is played by a young Jürgen Prochnow, making her actions completely understandable). Unfortunately for her, he is a terror suspect, and when the police break down her door to find him gone, she becomes the focus of the investigation, and a three-ring media circus.
This 1975 film is based on the 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll, himself the victim of a hysterical witch-hunt after he wrote an article criticising the media's handling of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Written and directed by husband and wife team Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, The Lost Honour Of Katharina Blum turns Böll's sense of indignant outrage into a nuanced social satire.
Dieter Laser is fun and flamboyant as Werner Tötges, a tabloid hack who is always willing to manufacture a quote in order to "help simple people express themselves", a perfect counterpart to Mario Adorf's gruff, irascible police chief, Kommissar Beizmenne.
Ultimately, Blum finds herself the victim of men who, unable to comprehend a young woman's dignity and self-respect, mistake her reticence for dissent. However, the film's feminism is naturalistic rather than polemical, and is expressed through a sensitive performance from Agnela Winkler which fully engages the sympathies of the audience, even to the story's final twist.
Böll has plenty to say about the way the state treats terror suspects, but the film saves its vitriol for the media: "Should the description of certain journalistic practices bear any resemblance to the practices of [German tabloid] the Bild-Zeitung, this is neither intentional, nor accidental, but unavoidable", runs the epilogue.
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is as relevant now as it was in 1975, and thanks to Blu-ray, it still looks the part. The high-definition transfer captures every detail of Jost Vacano's cinematography, and retains the grain and texture of the original negative.
Memories with Volker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta and producer Eberhard Junkersdorf (51mins, NEW)
Antigone: Episode from Germany in Autumn, directed by Volker Schlondorff based on a story by Heinrich Boll
Original Trailer (HD)
Photo Gallery
BD-Live (DynamicHD)
Booklet with introduction by German journalist Willi Winkler.
Film Description
Based on the novel by Heinrich Boll - which was itself based on the treatment he received from a German tabloid, after he wrote an article about the urban terrorists operative in Germany in the early Seventies and their brutal treatment at the hands of the government.
Katharina Blum meets a young man at a party and spends one night with him, only to awake, find him gone and herself in the middle of a nightmare. It transpires that the man was an alleged terrorist under surveillance and Katharina is herself arrested and subjected to an hysterical smear campaign by the tabloid press. Co-written and co-directed by Schlondorff's wife, herself a successful film director, this powerful statement on modern terrorism and police methods is widely regarded as one of Schlondorff's most superior films...
