Linie 1 (1988): All Aboard for a German New Wave Musical (Review)

Your attention, please. The Blu-ray now arriving on this platform is the Studio Canal Cult Classics release of Linie 1, Reinhard Hauff’s 1988 big-screen adaptation of Germany’s second-most successful musical after Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.

Linie 1 tells the story of Sunnie (Inka Victoria Goetschel), a young woman who, having learnt that she is pregnant from a one-night stand with a visiting rock star (Johannes Krisch), abandons her family and provincial hometown life for the bright lights of Berlin, where she intends to track him down. However, Sunnie soon finds herself stuck on the underground line U1 in the German capital’s notorious Zoo station where she encounters a kaleidoscope of characters, friends and foes.

With music from Birger Heymann and text by Volker Ludwig, Linie 1 made its theatrical debut on the 30th of April 1986. Billed as “a show, a drama, a musical about living and surviving in a large city, hope and adaptation, courage and self-deceit, to laugh and to cry at, to dream and to think about oneself”, it quickly became the greatest commercial and critical success of GRIPS-Theatre and the ensemble was invited onto national TV to showcase several of the numbers. Indeed so great was its success that when Ludwig expressed concern that, even with the prodigious ticket sales, they weren’t covering the significant staging costs and may have to close, the German government stepped in with increased subsidies to ensure the musical’s future. To this day, Linie 1 has been performed in over 150 German-language theatres and adapted by theatres in 15 countries, from Finland to Canada and Namibia to Seoul. With such a hit on their hands, it was inevitable that cinema would want to preserve it for posterity, and that is what happened in 1988, just two years into its stage life when director Reinhard Hauff adapted the musical for the big screen.

Many have suggested that Hauff was an interesting choice to helm the production. His previous film was 1986’s Stammheim, Golden Bear award-winning sobering drama based on the trial in the court of the titular prison of the Baader-Meinhof Group. Other films in his career included 1974’s Die Verrohung des Franz Blum (The Brutalization of Franz Blum), which afforded future Das Boot star Jurgen Prochnow an early lead role as a young, well-to-do man who inexplicably becomes a bank robber and recounts in ruthless detail his incarceration and torture at the hands of brutal gaolors, 1977’s Messer im Kopf (Knife in the Head) which starred Bruno Ganz as a bio-geneticist who suffers a significant brain injury after being shot in the head during a violent protest at a youth club and is accused by corrupt police of stabbing one of their officers during the disturbance, and Der Hauptdarsteller (The Leading Man) from the same year, a film about a 15-year-old whose primitive and brutal existence with his abusive pig farming father is changed when he is selected by a visiting film crew to play the lead in their movie. I mean yeah, none of these screams the perfect choice for a vibrant, colourful musical extravaganza do they? But these films do showcase a commitment to social and political commentary from Hauff and Linie 1 is a film that explores the pace of life in a Berlin that was still trembling in the shadow of the Wall, even though the cracks are starting to sow in its foundations, and it does this with amusing playfulness yes, but never at the cost of its socio-critical perspective.

It’s telling that, when watching Linie 1, I was often reminded of another ‘urban musical’, one from these shores; Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire. This 1985 movie almost defies explanation in that it takes the rivalry of real-life snooker players Ray Reardon and Jimmy White and embellishes it with bizarre stereotypes of Dracula (Reardon’s nickname was indeed Dracula, on account of his Widow’s Peak and sharp-toothed grin) and the notorious Wild West outlaw, the Kid (White was the unruly young pretender to the crown). Starring Alun Armstrong and Phil Daniels, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire was directed by another socially conscious filmmaker whose name you’d be hard-pressed to offer up as most likely to helm, Alan Clarke of Scum, Made in Britain and Rita, Sue and Bob Too fame. Just as Hauff does here, Clarke (some four years earlier) shoots his musical noticeably in a studio, a Brechtian suggestion of a city’s seamy underworld of confined ceilings, high walls and floors. Hauff’s recreation of Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten railway station (previously granted infamy thanks to the 1978 novel Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Zoo Station) and its 1981 film adaptation from Uli Edel, Christiane F. which depicted the station as a meeting point for rent boys, runaways and drug addicts) is unmistakeably a studio, but it’s equally unmistakeably a convincing, stylised recreation of the city’s literal underground of bohemia and wastrels (often played by the same actors) and it’s fitting that a German filmmaker employs something so in keeping with the epic theatre of his fellow countryman, Bertolt Brecht, whose Threepenny Opera is the only German musical Linie 1 comes second to.

Another British musical film that Linie 1 kept reminding me of was Julian Temple’s Absolute Beginners, an infamous 1986 movie that earned the praise of Martin Scorsese but was scapegoated as the reason that the Goldcrest and, to an extent, the British film industry itself, collapsed in the Thatcherite decade of cash over culture. It wasn’t Temple’s fault, it was actually Goldcrest’s even bigger flop, Revolution, that was to blame but as that was a historical epic about the American War of Independence starring Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland and (checks notes) Ricky from EastEnders, directed the recently deceased Hugh Hudson, the man responsible for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, it was inevitable that the young pop music-celebrating upstart would take the fall from sniffy establishment critics and industry insiders. Though Temple’s film is set in 50s London, it nonetheless shares DNA with Linie 1 in terms of its similar kinetic, vibrant and hyper-stylised tone. Besides which, Absolute Beginners employed several titans of the 80s music industry (Paul Weller, David Bowie, Sade) to provide a score which, whilst invoking the coffee bars of post-war Soho, was nonetheless a product of its time. Likewise, Linie 1‘s score is rooted in Euro punk and new wave, with funny, pointed lyrics and catchy tunes.

Linie 1 also seems to have been influenced by Luc Besson’s 1985 movie Subway and the whole cinema du look movement of the French film industry in that period. Like that, Linie 1 concerns itself with slick visuals and youthful, alienated and colourful characters building an alternative society in the subways of the city, a society that is sceptical of police and authority figures and recounts tales of doomed love affairs. There was clearly a growing disenchantment among European youth in the 1980s and it is surprising though nonetheless welcome that musicals – or films that at least place significant emphasis on music – managed to provide a platform to express that sentiment.

Released as part of Studio Canal’s Cult Classics collection, Linie 1 is a must for anyone interested in 80s cinema and musicals, or simply those who might not necessarily think traditional musicals are their cup of tea. Extras include the usual trailers and new interviews with Hauff and producer Eberhard Junkersdorf and actors Petra Zieser (who plays the roles of Lumpi, Bisi and Sie in the movie) and Rainer Strecker (Kleister), along with an exclusive set of art cards.

Mark’s Archive – Linie 1 (1988)