Käpt'n Rauhbein aus St. Pauli (1971)

Hamburg, 1961. Captain Markus Jolly, an old sea dog known as “Captain Roughneck,” returns to port ahead of schedule aboard his freighter and can hardly wait to surprise his wife by coming home. “Married for four years,” he tells his boatswain, Oliver Kniehase, “and only five months at home.” As soon as Jolly enters the apartment, he finds his wife in bed, in the arms of another man. Markus gathers his things and prepares to leave. His unfaithful wife hurries after him. They have a brief argument, during which Jolly pushes her away. She loses her footing, falls through the stair railing and down to the bottom, where she lies dead. Since he cannot be held responsible, the captain is acquitted at the trial that follows. Jolly comes to realize that he wants to get far away from those terrible events, back out on the open sea. In a dissolve, we see Jolly eight years later, a weathered skipper making deliveries in a small coastal freighter. This time, he and his crew are to transport medicine and alcohol to Puerto Negro, a banana republic somewhere in the Caribbean. The place is in a state of chaotic disorder: corrupt port officials have sticky fingers, and brutal gangsters rule the tropical land. Almost as soon as they arrive, the cargo is stolen by crooks, and the police arrest the crew on false suspicion. To keep at least the alcohol out of the hands of the authorities, Jolly has dumped some of it overboard and given some of it to the local population. Jolly’s longtime boatswain, Kniehase, was supposed to deliver the medicine to its recipient in a truck, but it was secretly stolen from him en route, so he arrived at his destination with nothing but empty wooden crates. Now Kniehase and Jolly are regarded as swindlers and thieves. Kniehase gets into a fistfight and is taken to Puerto Negro’s prison injured. There, Dr. Karin Andersen, a physician with the German Red Cross, tends to him. Later, while Jolly and his pal Kniehase, who has also been arrested, manage to free themselves, Dr. Andersen and five of her colleagues fall into the hands of the sinister gang leader Rodrigo. Jolly and Kniehase can no longer return to their confiscated ship, so their only remaining lifeline is Nico, the tavern owner and an old friend of Captain Roughneck from earlier days. Jolly and Kniehase try to figure out how to get out of their predicament. Then Captain Roughneck has an idea: he disguises himself as a steward and gets hired aboard a luxury yacht, while boatswain Kniehase has himself packed into a fruit crate, enabling him to escape the police as cargo. He will meet up with Jolly again later. It soon becomes clear that Captain Roughneck has earned his nickname: aboard the luxury yacht, he behaves like an ill-mannered lout. To the refined passengers, including the elderly Lady Scarlett and the snobbish Armin von Prossnitz, the boorish behavior of their attendant is, of course, utterly “shocking,” since the new “steward” neither knows how to serve the right cocktails nor how to present a lobster properly. But when Jolly removes a large black spider from the belly of a woman frozen in shock and, carrying it gently on his arm, consigns it to the ocean waves, the uncouth lout wins the passengers’ favor. They grant his request to drop anchor at a certain spot along the coast. From there, the captain and his boatswain plan to rescue Dr. Andersen and her colleagues from the criminals and kidnappers. Captain Markus Jolly is greatly surprised when his old friend Nico turns out to be the mastermind behind the gang. A showdown follows, with several fatalities. In the end, Captain Roughneck also gets his ship and its cargo back. The rescued women watch him go, waving wistfully.