Mein Gott Willi! (1980)

Willi Gimmel has worked as an actor at the Municipal Theater for nearly ten years. Once hailed by the theater director, von Söllow, as a promising talent and eventually taken on under contract, he has since been demoted to prompter—a situation that causes great distress to the trained actor. In other respects, too, life is far from easy for Gimmel, now a mature man. He still lives with his strict mother, from whom he simply cannot break away and who still sees him as the little boy in need of her care. As the theater makes less and less use of his services, Gimmel applies for a job at a department store. They are looking for a man to appear in various disguises in every department and deal with complaints from angry customers. This is, however, just for show: the store’s management really needs a man to act as a kind of lightning rod. Fortunately, Gimmel gets the job, because shortly afterward he is summarily dismissed from the theater. The star actor, Melchior, had once again complained about his work and pressured the theater director into firing him. Unable to confess this personal defeat to his domineering mother, Gimmel decides to keep quiet. Every evening, instead of going to rehearsals, he now goes to theater performances. Equipped with his promptbook, he becomes quite the actor in the audience, enthusiastically following every play and unwittingly disturbing the other spectators. At last, von Söllow bans him from the theater. Now Willi Gimmel wanders around the city for three hours every evening so his mother will continue to believe he is going to work. Meanwhile, the department-store management is very pleased with Gimmel and decides to hire more staff for its “Special Complaints and Customer Claims Department,” with Willi Gimmel to be put in charge. But new problems soon emerge: from the very first moment, Gimmel and his new colleague Baumbauer are at loggerheads. Baumbauer bullies his department head whenever he can, and particularly enjoys embarrassing him in front of customers. Through this, Gimmel meets barmaid Rosi Binder, with whom he falls in love, much to his jealous mother’s displeasure. Then a confrontation with his former acting colleague Melchior has serious consequences, after Baumbauer once again puts Gimmel in an awkward situation. Enraged, Gimmel goes after Melchior and foolishly lets slip in his anger that customers as stupid as Melchior fall for the department store’s ruse of pretending to take their complaints seriously. Melchior reacts immediately and informs the radio and the press. The department-store management also gets wind of it and fires Gimmel at once, since he was bound to absolute discretion. That is the end of the game. His mother also discovers that her son has been lying to her. Willi Gimmel decides to go to his new girlfriend, Rosi, to get away from all the turmoil. The next day brings another disaster: an article about “wannabe actor” Willi Gimmel appears in the local newspaper, including an interview with von Söllow, who has nothing good to say about his former actor. Without hesitation, Gimmel rushes to the theater, bursts without warning into a rehearsal, verbally confronts von Söllow, and, to everyone’s surprise, after this convincing performance is hired by the director and the theater director for the latest play.