Außer Rand und Band am Wolfgangsee (1972) Online

If you look for a capsule of the exact period in time when fun-loving and clean-cut girls had the "choice" of wearing either ultra-short miniskirts or tight hot pants, this is it. The negligible plot of this movie exposes a clique of simple-minded beauties who decide to run a lakeside hotel in a postcard-like part of Austria. With looks and charm and cleverness they succeed in achieving just this. As most of the German B movies of the 70es the imagery contrasts an assortment of trashy looking older people with fashionable younger ones who could easily be enlarged from molded plastic Barbie&Ken-figurines. There is some Schlager style singing of the period to punctuate the plot. And well, some of the actors like Jutta Speidel later turned to more serious work.

The title can not be aimed at the content nor the viewer: it is either a completely wild comedy nor will the the viewer be beside himself from laughing. The standard format of "let's start a hotel in the summer holiday season" may be slightly better (in the meaning of: clever) executed in this film than in the average German "summer holiday comedy" of the 70's, yet it is as tedious and hardly funny: not one fresh idea. Here we have in the lead two bimbos playing two bimbos, but the male cast is not any better: Schlager-singer Michael Schanze is a poor man's Roy Black (and thàt is very poor) and sly dog Ernst Schultz lets the colours of the film dwindle with his tooth-paste-smile-dentures.

Later in the 70's director Franz Antel, a man with no artistic aspirations what-so-ever, would make a number of so-called soft-sex comedies; in this film there are a couple of shots of girls (when Günther Phillip has his guest appearance) which can be seen as a first try in the genre.