"Wie heiratet man einen König", which means vaguely "How to Marry a King", is an East German movie from 1969, so this one has its 50th anniversary this year already. The film is in color and was written and directed by Rainer Simon, who was quite young back then when he made this and is still alive today, but also probably nowhere near as famous as his co-writer Günter Kaltofen, who worked on many of these fairytale films from the GDR. So now you know what genre to expect here and this means of course that it is a DEFA film and at approximately 75 minutes not a long one, but it is not unusual. Some of these fairytale films are rather short. Like not really short, but under 90 minutes I mean with that. As for the cast, there are two familiar names that are still alive today, even if they only play minor supporting characters. You can recognize them by the fact that they have a photo in their profile. I am talking about Gudrun Ritter and Winfried Glatzeder. Aside from them, nothing clicks. Lead actress Cox Habbema sadly is not alive anymore either, which also has to do with the fact that she was not as young as other leads in DEFA fairytale movies, but in her mid-20s already, even if this is obviously also still young. What surprises me even more is that she is Dutch, so I have no idea how a Dutch actress ended up in this East German movie. Most likely, there is an interesting background story to that.
Anyway, as for the film itself, it has ups and downs. I thought it started pretty nicely until basically the donkey cabin riddle and afterwards it did get a bit boring at times and also had lengths, perhaps because they included too many characters or so. I am not sure, but the flow wasn't that much there anymore then. And it needed a pretty long time until it returned from my subjective perspective. Nonetheless I think it is a good watch because this film is never on failure territory and pretty entertaining at times for sure. And costumes and sets are of course always top-notch in DEFA fairytale films. This shall not be ignored here either. They add some nice tradition and charme for sure. The performances weren't too bad either and kinda funny in how they turned out to be over the top here and there. And the music of course was pretty good. So I forgive them for some of the lengths here. Like many other Brothers Grimm adaptations, this one here (based on "Die kluge Bauerntochter", which was also the working title) succeeds for the most part. It is not one of their most known works and I have not read it (or it's been far too long to remember), so I cannot go into detail about differences between the film and tale (except the title), but rating the film as a standalone creative achievement, I give it a thumbs-up and positive recommendation. Certainly worth checking out.
Anyway, as for the film itself, it has ups and downs. I thought it started pretty nicely until basically the donkey cabin riddle and afterwards it did get a bit boring at times and also had lengths, perhaps because they included too many characters or so. I am not sure, but the flow wasn't that much there anymore then. And it needed a pretty long time until it returned from my subjective perspective. Nonetheless I think it is a good watch because this film is never on failure territory and pretty entertaining at times for sure. And costumes and sets are of course always top-notch in DEFA fairytale films. This shall not be ignored here either. They add some nice tradition and charme for sure. The performances weren't too bad either and kinda funny in how they turned out to be over the top here and there. And the music of course was pretty good. So I forgive them for some of the lengths here. Like many other Brothers Grimm adaptations, this one here (based on "Die kluge Bauerntochter", which was also the working title) succeeds for the most part. It is not one of their most known works and I have not read it (or it's been far too long to remember), so I cannot go into detail about differences between the film and tale (except the title), but rating the film as a standalone creative achievement, I give it a thumbs-up and positive recommendation. Certainly worth checking out.
