User Reviews

After catching the wonderful rough and ready German crime flick Battle of the Godfathers (1973) (which I've reviewed) a few years ago,a fellow IMDber told me about another German crime flick he had recently seen and enjoyed. Trying to find the title for a number of years,I was pleased to learn that a DVD seller had tracked it down,which led to me at last seeing the red sun set.

View on the film:

Holding back from the free-wheeling shoot-outs which made the Italian Crime genre so lively, (with a clever use of muffled sound effects for newspaper being used as a silencer) director Rudolf Thome & cinematographer Bernd Fiedler take aim with a off-beat, casual hippie atmosphere, with the ladies sorting out the next supply not in a seedy den, but a "happening" house. Swinging very much to the sounds of the 60's,Thome keeps the flick refreshingly playful by breaking the Crime tunes with splashes of kitsch "free love" and from out of left-field brightly coloured partying. Keeping to the beat of Thome's style, the screenplay by Max Zihlmann wraps Thomas (played by a fittingly meek Marquard Bohm) and his relationships with the sexy women in a peculiar hazy mood, which subtly works as the women reveal to Thomas why they all stay somewhat disconnected in their romantic encounters, as they load up when the red sun sets.

Thomas (Marquard Bohm) gets a ride to Munich where he finds his ex-girlfriend Peggy (counterculture icon and model Uschi Obermaier) who takes him in. In her flat he finds Peggy and her roommates have a commune-like lifestyle where they take a male lover and murder them within five days so that they never fall in love. Does Thomas realize that in time?

Directed by Rudolf Thome and written by Max Zihlmann, the girls all seem rather nice, you know, other than the fact that they murder men. They all seem to genuinely like Thomas, but when you have a manifesto, you have to follow it or it's not a manifesto.

This is definitely more style than substance but that's not a complaint. Plus. The soundtrack has the Small Faces and The Nice on it, as well as "Adagio in G Minor" by Remo Giazotto, which also shows up in Rollerball and Space: 1999.

Obermaier is a dream and has a presence that you wish showed up in more than just that handful of movies that she was in. Her flatmates are played by Diana Körner, who was memorable in a small role in Barry Lyndon, Sylvia Kekulé and Gaby Go.

I really have no idea what category this is, but whatever it is, I want more.

"Rote Sonne" or "Red Sun" is a West German German-language film from 1970. It runs for slightly under 90 minutes and was directed by Rudolf Thome and written by Max Zihlmann. For both, it is probably among their more known career achievements. The cast really does not include many known names at all, but German film buffs may have heard of Uschi Obermaier, Marquard Bohm and Hark Bohm already. With Obermaier in it, you also know immediately the direction the film is heading I am sure, namely a story that relies a lot on sex appeal rather than quality acting or writing. And this not only refers to her, but also to Sylvia Kekulé who I personally found much more appealing (hot redhead!) than the baby-faced Obermaier, even if she was obviously the female protagonist in here and it's probably Obermaier's most known work as an actress.

This is the story of a radical group of women who hate men and kill them quickly after being with them for a couple days in order to prevent themselves from falling in love with them. Oh yeah, that's the story? Sounds bad? It is. Really only the looks of the actresses and the performance by Marquard Bohm make it somewhat bearable to watch and keep it from being a total failure. But the story never makes any sense at all. First of all, the women commit horrible crimes, not just to men who cheat on them, but also to some men who are possibly really nice. How could you like them or cheer for them? It's impossible really. I wanted to cheer for the police catching them, but there is no police at all in this film. The women kill in broad daylight with everybody seeing them, but nothing in terms of police or legal consequences ever happens to them. Extremely unrealistic film. They obviously tried to make an emotional statement with the final shooting scene, especially if you look at who dies and the moral resulting from it, but this also went wrong. it felt extremely hammy how the two were shooting at each other and it almost made me forget about the occasionally decent stuff from Bohm on some earlier occasions in the film. At the very end, Obermaier dragged him down to her level and lets be honest. I would call her pretty attractive and a starlet, but I would not call her an actress, and especially not an actress good enough to carry this film as a lead performer. Watch something else instead. The sun went down really quickly for this one.

This German movie was made in 1969 Munich, and it does not pretend to be anywhere or anytime else. Yet it offers a kind of feminist "science-fiction" which still appears unreal some 38 years later: women are fully self-conscious, they may deal with men, but shoot them about five days later.

Thomas (Marquard Bohm) arrives at a women four-some, knowing Peggy (Uschi Obermaier) from earlier in Hamburg, and moves in to their place. Slowly getting to know the women and finding out about the ongoings, he ends in a grand shoot-out together with Peggy.

Uschi Obermaier was a major sex symbol and "super-groupie" of the German 1968 generation. In her movie contract it was stipulated that her friend Rainer Langhans (one of the prime movers of Kommune 1 in Berlin) be present at the set at all times, a four-day working week, and paid flights Munich - Berlin and back every week for the two.

When you watch this film, try to empathize the times back then, which were very different from now. Also consider that this film totally omits the police/state/government aspect: several shootings occur, and are reported in the tabloid news, but no investigation happens. This "thriller" is mostly about female-male relationships and conflicts in those times, and it sure gave me food for thought. The tragic ending cuts the story a bit too short, in my opinion. But the imagery, of Starnberg Lake and its surroundings, made a very strong impact on me.

And there's so much flair of the times - fashions, haircuts, music, the cars... A Volkswagen Beetle plays an almost major role (very different from Love Bug though), and black Mercedes taxis also have two memorable scenes (especially when three meet). I admit that this movie was, and today still is odd (i.e. unconventional), but it fascinated me. I'll watch it again. And for history: the long-haired student who claims that "weather may be changed if needed" (what's happening now, BTW?) was Hark Bohm (Marquard Bohm's brother) in his first role, who later grew to much greater fame in German cinema.