At the end of her life, Romy Schneider made a list of her 60 movies, saying that she never really did a great one, and only ten that were "okay". "Die Halbzarte", one of the last movies she did in her native Germany, was decidedly not one of them. Matter-of-factly, this would-be sex comedy is one of the worst motion pictures ever made in German (or Austrian) film history. Shameful enough, this was Austria's contribution to the 1958 Cannes film festival.
Director Rolf Thiele (who later apologized for this work, saying that he was under contract and thus forced to do this comedy based on a half-baked script) tells the story of the Dassau family, a family of artists: Frau Dassau (Magda Schneider) is a composer, her husband (Josef Meinrad) is a writer, and their children are equally gifted as painters, poets and musicians. But unfortunately, no one wants to invest money in their art. The family is about to starve when Nicole (Romy Schneider) comes up with a marvelous idea: She is going to write the "most scandalous book", the sex memoirs of a teenager. For this, she hides under the pseudonym of Eva. The book becomes an enormous success indeed, but Nicole's parents are decent people, and the public interest in their sluttish daughter begins to bother them. Things begin to get even more unpleasant when Nicole falls in love with an American publisher (Carlos Thompson) who'd prefer a virgin
Hypocritical, sexist, unfunny, badly written, photographed and acted it is very hard to say anything positive about "Die Halbzarte". If you don't like wasting your time with bad entertainment (in fact, this isn't even entertaining), you can surely miss out on this one.
Director Rolf Thiele (who later apologized for this work, saying that he was under contract and thus forced to do this comedy based on a half-baked script) tells the story of the Dassau family, a family of artists: Frau Dassau (Magda Schneider) is a composer, her husband (Josef Meinrad) is a writer, and their children are equally gifted as painters, poets and musicians. But unfortunately, no one wants to invest money in their art. The family is about to starve when Nicole (Romy Schneider) comes up with a marvelous idea: She is going to write the "most scandalous book", the sex memoirs of a teenager. For this, she hides under the pseudonym of Eva. The book becomes an enormous success indeed, but Nicole's parents are decent people, and the public interest in their sluttish daughter begins to bother them. Things begin to get even more unpleasant when Nicole falls in love with an American publisher (Carlos Thompson) who'd prefer a virgin
Hypocritical, sexist, unfunny, badly written, photographed and acted it is very hard to say anything positive about "Die Halbzarte". If you don't like wasting your time with bad entertainment (in fact, this isn't even entertaining), you can surely miss out on this one.