The Cat (1988) An Impressive Heist Thriller From 80s Germany (Review)

Coming to Blu-ray this week is Die Katze aka The Cat, an extremely impressive, tense heist thriller from 1988 starring Götz George as a criminal mastermind who, from a hotel room across the street, not only orchestrates a bank robbery conducted by two colleagues but also monitors the police’s investigation, anticipating and stymieing their every move.

Directed by Dominik Graf and adapted by Christoph Fromm from the novel Das Leben Einer Katze (The Life of a Cat) by Uwe Erichsen, the film sparked a brief bit of international attention upon its release but has subsided from memory. This makes it another timely and welcome release from Radiance, which continues to prove its commitment to unearthing many under-seen Euro movies.

The Cat opens with the song Good Times, a late ’60s hit from The Animals, intercut (because hey, it is a German film of a certain vintage) with a gratuitous sex scene between George and the film’s leading lady, Gudren Landgrebe. On-screen captions denote the time, date, and place (the film takes place over the course of one day in Düsseldorf, 1987) before we are introduced to two young men, Junghein (Heinz Hoenig) and Britz (Ralf Richter), driving in their car, arguing over the lyrics to Good Times.

Britz, an enthusiastic singer, is carelessly belting out “Good Lines” and “Good Minds” instead of Good Times, which irritates his older companion, Junghein. It’s a nice character moment that preempts the kind of stuff Tarantino would go on to do – which is a polite way of saying that Tarantino obviously saw this movie and decided to pass this kind of scene off as his own.

We quickly realize that both men are up to no good as they burst into a bank and proceed to hold it up. Finding the vault empty initially seems like a disaster, and it’s certainly Britz’s take on events, but Junghein knows more than he has initially let on. He begins communicating with George’s character, Probek, via walkie-talkie – a line of communication that will be imperative for what lies ahead.

Taking the bank manager Filialleiter (Ulrich Gebauer) and his staff hostage, the plan is now in motion as Junghein demands a ransom of three million marks. As the crime unit, headed up by the mono-browed, middle-aged Voss (Joachim Kemmer), descends upon the scene, Probek’s crucial role in the audacious heist becomes clear.

From his position in the high-rise hotel opposite, he can see and predict every move that Voss’ unsuspecting officers make, tipping Junghein off to their intentions at each turn. As the audience settles in for this thrillingly taut game of cat and mouse, it is gradually revealed that Landgrebe’s character, Jutta, is the wife of the bank manager. Like all the best femme fatales, she has her own reasons for wanting Probek’s intricately plotted scheme to pay off.

The key players behind The Cat – director Dominik Graf, producer George Feil, and writer Christoph Fromm – had cut their teeth on the long-running German TV policier Der Fahnder (1984-2005). It’s easy to see this muscular and methodical production as an extension of that formative work.

Many reviews, perhaps inevitably, draw comparisons to Dog Day Afternoon, but I was occasionally reminded of Die Hard. Not just because of Götz’s assured, ice-cold, and ice-cool, sharp-suited Moriarty of crime – who feels like a cousin of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber – but also because, like that Hollywood movie, The Cat captures something of the late ’80s yuppie zeitgeist, albeit from a uniquely Germanic perspective.

Despite its outlaw protagonists having an appreciable “f*ck the police” attitude and the police holding a similarly hard-bitten opinion of them, The Cat isn’t necessarily a socio-political film. However, it remains unmistakably steeped in Germany’s then-recent criminal history. The film’s narrative is informed by the various generations of the Baader-Meinhof group and the Gladbeck hostage crisis of August 1988, which saw bank robbers evade the police for a staggering fifty-four hours—most of which was captured on television. Volker Heise revisited this event in Gladbeck: The Hostage Crisis (2022).

Graf, widely regarded as Germany’s best-known and most recognized director of television drama, delivers a profusely gritty, tight, and lean thriller that grips audiences from the start. While characterisation takes a backseat to the momentum and detail of the plot, the actors succeed on their own unique charisma – George as a driven automaton and Hoenig surprisingly sympathetic – as the story unfolds.

It ultimately becomes one of those thrillers where the heist seems so perfect that you find yourself willing the criminals to succeed and outwit the police. An explosively action-packed procedural, slickly shot and edited by Christel Suckow and Martin Schäfer, The Cat propels toward its dénouement with relentless energy and clockwork precision. It all culminates in an absolutely stone-cold classic, deliciously ironic final scene.

You’ll have Good Times as an earworm for some time after, let me tell you. You’ll also have a good time watching it too – I recommend this one heartily.

As ever, Radiance has really treated us with the extras. There’s a sixty-minute interview with Graf, two thirty-minute interviews with Feil and Fromm, and a select-scene commentary from Graf. The film is presented in a new HD transfer graded by Radiance and overseen by Graf himself, with a new English subtitle translation track.

Mark’s Archive – The Cat (1988)