Der Arzt von St Pauli/Females for Hire (1968) came out the year after Nacht. (In English the title translates as “The Doctor from St. Pauli”.)
Those yearly releases would become the norm for Olsen’s St Pauli movies though he occasionally also managed to shoot some comedies in between.
This is the first of those films starring Curd Jürgens.
The ployglot jet-setter was one of Germany’s only genuine international stars.
The German press widely reported that during the filming of Et Dieu… créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), Brigitte Bardot had described him as “der normannische Kleiderschrank” (“armoire normande”), the Norman wardrobe. It’s a nickname that stuck and even made it into his autobiography even though I have yet to find an interview with BB in which she used that expression.
Apocryphal or not, it is a succinct description that acknowledges the ironic contrast between his bulk (1.92m with massive bulk and shoulders) and his cultivated, cosmopolitan demeanour.
Privately, his life was marked by excess and restlessness: multiple marriages, heavy drinking, health crises, and a reputation for living as grandly and recklessly as many of his screen characters.
At the time of the St Pauli films, he was still nearly a decade away from his late career highlight as Bond-villain Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and stood at a career crossroads.
Still massively popular in Germany, he had visibly aged (though he was never really young looking) and grown somewhat heavier, a fact that the St Pauli films acknowledge as they invariably cast him as a kind of compromised patriarch, a paternal but often ambiguous figure that stands between order and chaos.
In Arzt Curd Jürgens plays an ex-convict/sailor turned doctor in St. Pauli in Hamburg.
He has an estranged brother (Horst Naumann), also a doctor, though more successful and involved in some shady dealings: He performs illegal abortions and helps to organise sex parties for his influential friends.
When one of the female party guests threatens to expose those by publishing photos secretly taken there, the situation escalates when Hamburg’s High Society does not shy away from murder in order to mask their hidden perversions.
The film contains: Sex parties, prostitution, botched abortions, nudity, “arty” dance performances, gynaecological exhibitions, blackmail, murder, fights, stag films, rape and date rape drugs, biker gangs, shootouts und torture scenes… and old bourgeois guys with young girls. (Did I forget anything?)
This is a film that is very much of its time - and only of its time! - and hard to imagine nowadays; at once somewhat sleazy and trashy, while also upholding traditional family values.
It’s a Cain and Abel drama masking behind a Krimi framework.
When a sailor (Fritz Wepper) asks Jürgens’ doctor for help locating his missing girl who had gone astray (Christina Rücker), he of course also gets some additional emotional support from a sympathetic priest (played by Dieter Borsche who genuinely is one of German Cult Cinema’s crown princes).
Heinz Reincke for the first time plays Curd Jürgens’ down to Earth buddy, a part he would continue to play in subsequent films of this series.
Al Adamson saw enough commercial value in this production that he released the film in the States ten years later in 1978 under the title Bedroom Stewardesses, recut and with some additional new footage to fit more in line with his other Stewardess films.
To be continued…
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