User Reviews

"Tadellöser & Wolff" (or in the long form "Tadellöser & Wolff - Ein bürgerlicher Film" is a West German German-language mini-series from 1975, so this one is already over 40 years old. It is one of the most known efforts by writer and director Eberhard Fechner, who was also a prolific actor. It is based on the literary work by Walter Kempowski. The entire thing consists of two episodes and each of them have a running time of over 90 minutes, so you can watch the entire thing in under 3.5 hours if you want to. I am not sure though if you should because this one has a few lengths fore sure. More than just a few, so the watch can feel way longer than it actually is. Maybe the better idea is to watch it on 2 days or even split it into 4 episodes. The cast includes a couple names that are still fairly known today such as Ernst Jacobi who you may have seen in Haneke's Oscar-nominated White Ribbon recently or the really young Martin Semmelrogge ("Das Boot"). Jesper Christensen (Bond movies) is an actor I surely did not expect in here, but it fits that he was cast in his mid-20s for a Danish character. In terms of the story, there are many references to World War II as this is when the film plays, stuff about Nazis, Jews etc, but it never really makes an impact from a historic perspective unfortunately and it is hardly better from the character study approach. Maybe one problem is that the characters were perhaps too many and did not get the proper elaboration and depth they should have to get me interested in and care about their fates. And there was something about the visual side of the film that I found pretty unappealing sadly. It's tough to point a finger at it what it was exactly, but it somehow did not fit in with the film's overall style and also the not always serious moments as the film looked way bleaker than it actually was despite the dark days and times when it was set. I kinda liked the very last sentence by a female character at the end of the film, but that is basically it. Extremely baffled by the IMDb rating here as I didn't find it a rewarding watch at all. There also were no strong performances that stood out from all the mediocrity. Maybe the second half was slightly better than the first, but neither were convincing at all. It's not a real failure, but still easily a thumbs-down and I don't recommend checking it out. Watch something else instead.