Die indiskrete Frau (1927)

Although Mrs. Marschall has been married to her husband, a somewhat stiff banker, for only five months, she is already beginning to get bored. So she tries to counteract this by constantly finding reasons to be jealous. Since her husband supposedly spends an hour every day in a pastry shop in the suburbs, she immediately suspects her unsuspecting husband of using it as a cover for a rendezvous. Her husband’s quiet business partner is quite pleased by Mrs. Marschall’s paranoid suspicions: he is interested in the pretty young woman himself, and so he fans her baseless doubts. To find out for sure, Mrs. Marschall hires a detective to watch her supposedly unfaithful husband at every turn. But the banker’s jealous wife makes a mistake with serious consequences: instead of a detective, she hires an out-of-work actor who pretends to be one in order to make money. The fact that the penniless man suddenly has money now puts his own wife on the scene, and she, too, hires a detective of her own out of jealousy—only this time it is a real one. Mr. Marschall, too, begins to wonder about his wife’s strange behavior, and what does he do? He hires a detective! And as luck would have it, it is the very same fake detective-act-turned-detective who is already in his wife’s employ … Chaos ensues.