User Reviews

Before there was the Edgar Wallace series there was "Stahlnetz" - the German adaption of "Dragnet". Except for the music it was very German, very "early sixties" but surprisingly, also very exciting and even funny. Or maybe not surprising, since the team of Wolfgang Menge (writer) and Jurgen Roland (director) guarantee quality. "In jeder Stadt..." the title of this episode is the only thing that rings untrue, because the story told could not happen "in jeder Stadt" (every city) but only in a city very much like Hamburg. Young, innocent and naive girls were promise careers in the film business. In reality the evil men have only one thing in there mind! (Would you believe it?) One of the girls ends up being a corpse floating in the Elbe river. Tough luck. In the end the murderer is caught, and like in Dragnet, we learn how much time he will have to spent in the "Zuchthaus". But we see in the end how the other go hunting for the young, innocent... again. It is great to see the old Hamburg. Lots of famous actors even in the smallest roles. As a rule, if a character has more than three lines to say, we know the actor. The most amazing thing is that the "morale" is always accompanied by humor, a trademark of Menge. The police inspector sends someone away to get something. Then the assistant says that by coincidence he got it. The inspector says "This way you do not make friends." and the assistant replies: "Who wants to have friends at the police anyway?" When the murderer is caught at the end he tries to lit a cigarette nonchalantly. The inspector just snaps it away silently. Nice touch.

We are back again in Hamburg, but this time the story tells of naive girls and shameless men pretending to connect these girls to film folks but instead luring them to fake screen tests or parties that turn into orgies. Our stalwart Kommissar is once again Heinz Engelmann and his sidekick Gerdesmann is an experienced No. 2 investigator as well. The main goal of the story is a warning to young people not to be so gulliable. (Although one wonders if so much stupidity as shown in the beginning of the film is really possible and if yes, nobody could help them.)

The team of two investigators gets a helping hand in form of a female police officer because of the sensible subject. Actors who already appeared in earlier episodes can be seen here again. What is new is that the crime gets solved but not all involved land in jail, a very straightforward appeal to get this changed be changing laws.