Lehrmädchen-Report (1972)

User Rating:

3.0/10   

Director:

Ernst Hofbauer

Writer:

Werner P. Zibaso (writer)

Genre:

Drama | Comedy

Plot Keywords:

Softcore | Sex | Episodic | Female Apprentice

Cast

Marina Blümel	...	Marianne Haupt
Astrid Boner	...	Sozialfürsorgerin
Hilde Brandt
Johannes Buzalski	...	Freier
Günter Clemens	...	Herr Wilms
Ines De Luca
Angie Dormann
Gaby Dorn
Jürgen Feindt	...	Herr Beck, Frisör
Walter Feuchtenberg	...	Scherzwarenhändler
Felix Franchy	...	Ärztlicher Betreuer des Gesundheitsamtes
Josef Fröhlich	...	Bauarbeiter
Karin Götz	...	Jutta Klenk
Eva Gross	...	Mariannes Kollegin
Sascha Hehn	...	Tim
Renate Heuer	...	Annemarie
Carmen Jäckel	...	Franziska Köck
Christa Jaeger
Wolfgang Jansen	...	Dieter
Hans Kern
Ingeborg Moosholzer
Josef Moosholzer	...	Meister Kruttke
Frank Nossack	...	Herr Weber
Karl-Heinz Otto	...	Lonis Vater
Karl Heinz Puetz
Birgit Tetzlaff
Claus Tinney	...	Zuhälter
Elisabeth Volkmann	...	Fräulein Schmidtke
Tonio von der Meden	...	Jugendsprecher
Renate Waigram
Edgar Wenzel	...	Druckermeister

Country:

West Germany

Language:

German

Color:

Color

Certification:

Germany:BPjM Restricted

Company:

TV13 Filmproduktion

Sex film with some social politics thrown in

Superficially, this is just one of the many German "report" sexploitation films from the early 1970s, with the only distinction that it focuses on female apprentices instead of schoolgirls. Well, there is another distinction: the film was also "indiziert", i.e. put on the index of films that are supposedly depraving the youth. As a consequence, the film could not be advertised for or shown in normal high street cinemas - and it is easy to forget that in those years sex films were still showing in normal cinemas.

Why, one may wonder, was the film put on that index? It is undoubtedly exploitative, going so far as showing some teenage girls being sexually exploited, raped, coerced into prostitution, and driven to suicide (note: the film is not as bleak as this list suggests - there are also comedy sequences, bordering on Benny Hill's type of humour). However, it hardly goes any further than the other report films typically go. So, why had this one been singled out as a nasty?

I cannot help but suspect that it may have something to do with the film's biting criticism of weaknesses of the German apprenticeship system. German politicians like to believe that it is just about perfect, and anybody undermining that belief is likely to be either ignored or attacked.

Make no mistake: this is a sex film, first and foremost, and a political debate does not take place. Still, European sex films in the 1970s had a noticeable anti-establishment flavour, presumably because of their obvious connections to the anti-censorship movement. Here it is particularly strong: the viewer is confronted with an amazingly long list of criticisms of the apprenticeship system, e.g. the (German version of the) DTI taking the side of the employers by default, apprentices being misused for apprenticeship-unrelated tasks, the vocational colleges as an educational dead-end, etc. The critique is fairly one-sided and some of the messages remain subliminal, but the critique is not bogus, it is real.