Käpt'n Rauhbein aus St. Pauli/Nurses for Sale (1971) (Rolf Olsen's St Pauli Films - Part 7)

Continued (and concluded) from Part 6 

This is Olsen’s final St Pauli film and truth be told: Only the first few scenes of this movie play in Hamburg. For the rest of its running time this film was shot in Puerto Rico. 

But, hey, it stars Curd Jürgens and has St Pauli in its German title, so might as well include this for the blog. 

When Captain Markus Jolly (Curd Jürgens) unexpectedly arrives home early from a trip, he discovers his wife in bed with another man. During the subsequent argument where he threatens to leave, he accidentally kills her and from then on sails with his crew in a dilapidated ship to less desirable parts of the world. (It also soon becomes apparent that he himself had sweethearts in every port so maybe should not have lost his cool that much about being cuckolded.) 

When an urgently needed shipment of medicine gets robbed, he and his crew get accused of being drug pushers. A group of sexy young Red Cross nurses also get kidnapped and held hostage by the same gang.

 This could have been one hell of a trash extravaganza. Jess Franco would have turned the jungle settings into one of his Women in Prison style romps. Hell, this film even features Franco muse Janine Reynaud!!!!! 

Instead, however, this is a fairly sedate affair with only a few choice moments of madness: the obligatory nude shower scene, an acid burnt face and a pathetically fake tarantula on female skin. 

We also get to see Jürgens with a moustache as well as in drag when escaping from the police and also singing a song (badly… very badly) in a sailor’s bar. Overall there is too strong an emphasis on comedy rather than drama. 

Watch out for Elisabeth Flickenschildt (Das indische Tuch/The Indian Scarf, 1963) and Sieghardt Rupp (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964). 

Oh, and Rolf Olsen himself can also be seen as the local Police President Herculano in a fairly sizeable role!

Gert Wilden’s music is another one of the few highlights of this production. He would later become known as the composer of the soundtracks for the School Girl Report films. 

Al Adamson yet again saw enough of value here to release this film Stateside as Nurses for Sale. 

And here we are… 

 Six films based in St Pauli, directed by Rolf Olsen and starring Curd Jürgens in five of them. 

From an individual point of view, Wenn es Nacht wird auf der Reeperbahn/When Night Falls on the Reeperbahn, the first film of the series sans Jürgens, is by far the best and most consistent in its narrative approach. 

The following films are all to varying degrees perfectly watchable, however, they do have a habit of mixing in too many divergent genre tropes so that they can easily come across as a bit of a mess. They are often untidy, hybrid works, freely mixing trash cinema with melodrama, crime plotting with action elements, and fleeting gestures towards social critique. 

Taken together as a whole, though, those productions form a fascinating mini-cycle in late-1960s West German genre cinema. On the surface, the films appear repetitive. Jürgens plays a doctor, a priest, a sailor, in general a patriarchal figure (though often without family of its own), each with a different profession and slightly altered narrative context. Yet the underlying character type barely changes. 

This repetition is precisely what made the films effective for contemporary audiences. Jürgens functioned as a stabilising presence, especially for viewers far removed from Hamburg or its red-light district. He reassured by familiarity. Whatever the profession, his characters promised a level of security in a world facing societal restructuring and a change of traditional mores. 

By using a regular stock company of actors Olsen helped turn them into quasi-Jungian archetypes throughout the cycle. 

To name but two: 

Jürgens represents the archetype of The Father, acting as a bridge to the external world of St Pauli and instilling a sense of discipline, protection, and wisdom, a moral guide throughout a society going through changes, yet he is never a goody two shoes and often himself an ambivalent character. 

Heinz Reincke is The Companion and loyal sidekick with a dash of The Everyman and even The Jester, steadfast and reliably standing by the primary figure through thick and thin. 

For the contemporary viewers, no doubt often middle aged and middle class men, these films thrive on their fascination with the sleazier side of life while ultimately reinforcing traditional values and hierarchies. In that sense, they are deeply conservative products reinforcing traditional values, even as they revel in the spectacle of moral decay. 

 There is a quiet irony at the heart of this. An Austrian director, working repeatedly with a Bavarian-Austrian (but also very cosmopolitan) star, became one of the most influential cinematic interpreters of North German, specifically Hamburg, “character studies.” 

And even though the cycle frequently comes across a case of “same old, same old”, there are moments in Olsen’s oeuvre where he is a trendsetter introducing elements of trashy Women in Prison tropes before Jess Franco, or psychotic gangsters on the run before Mario Bava’s Rabid Dogs. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this trawl through a fairly unknown series of West German films with strong Krimi elements and have grown to become very fond of Olsen as a director. 

It also gave me a chance to experiment a bit with the format of this blog. (Crazy how in the space of one month, I managed to post half the number of blog posts that I did in all of 2025 combined!) 

I hope you also enjoyed reading about them and if anyone has any other suggestions for a similar mini series, please let me know. 

But in the meantime, you can let the night on the Reeperbahn fade slowly away.