Das Wandern ist Herrn Müller's Lust (1973)

Mr. Müller, a portly, good-natured man of imposing presence and a managing director, has to serve a four-week prison sentence for a traffic offense. Accustomed to better things, he cannot stomach the prison food at all, and after a month he emerges back into freedom noticeably slimmer. His colleagues and acquaintances then keep asking him how he managed to lose so much weight. Müller is more than embarrassed by his time in prison, so he desperately needs a good explanation for shedding the pounds. The women in his circle, in particular, assume that he spent the past four weeks at a health resort and fasted there. To finally get some peace, he promptly confirms the widespread rumor that he had been at a health resort. As a result, everyone wants to know the name of this promising spa hotel and the town where it is located, so they can go there too and slim down. To keep up his story about a therapeutic fast, Mr. Müller needs the help of Micha, his daughter Dagmar’s boyfriend. Micha and his pal Pit work out how to bolster the fiction that Müller underwent a therapeutic fast. They come up with the name Hinterberg, in a remote rural Alpine setting, where this supposedly phenomenal miracle cure is said to have worked so splendidly for Mr. Müller. Micha sets the whole operation in motion, while Pit even dresses in women’s clothes and plays the part of the experienced nutritionist. In short, Müller’s “insider tip” spreads quickly, and soon city folk are swarming into the village, overwhelming the locals, who cannot understand how they came to receive this “honor.” But for Pit, a travel agent who has just been dismissed, the scheme also offers a very real chance to get back on his feet: together with his pal Micha, he starts his own travel agency, promoting the sleepy little town as its main attraction. Before long, everything descends into chaos, as the white lie turns into a full-blown tourism boom. Ordinary people and representatives of the so-called “better circles” alike hope to experience miraculous results at this new health-and-fitness hotspot, and a psychotherapist named Dr. Schön even doggedly tries to uncover the secret of the supposed “Müller diet.”