Reisebekanntschaft (1943)

The film begins in Spital am Semmering. At first, the setting is the Niedermeyer Inn in Spital am Semmering, and the time is a fictional peacetime present. Among the holidaymakers is Fridolin Specht, a private detective from Vienna who practices his profession with the greatest passion, but apparently without any talent for it. The audience later learns that Specht works for a detective agency called “Helios.” While he is still on holiday, he receives word that he has won 10,000 marks in the lottery. So that he will not have to interrupt his vacation to collect his winnings, Elli Werner, a young secretary at the Vienna lottery office, is tasked with personally bringing him the money in Spital. As Elli leaves the office in a hurry, with 10,000 marks in her handbag, she accidentally bumps into a passerby on the pavement, Walter Falke, whose identity will only be revealed to her much later in the story. For Walter, it is love at first sight; he seems not even to notice that banknotes are spilling out of the young woman’s handbag in bundles. A second chance encounter takes place shortly afterward in the station concourse, where Elli and Walter arrive at the ticket counter at the same time to buy tickets. On the train, Elli finds a seat in a compartment where another passenger, Mr. Dalmatiner, is already sitting. He sleeps throughout the entire journey. The audience later learns that he is a traveling salesman for insect powder. The third person to enter the compartment is an excitable woman with a black poodle. She causes quite a commotion and nearly swaps her suitcase for Elli’s, but then leaves the compartment. After being delayed at the ticket counter, Walter searches the entire train for Elli and finally finds her. He only takes a seat beside her when the compartment goes completely dark as the train passes through a tunnel, making it look to Elli as though he has magically appeared. She reacts with mixed feelings to his verbal and physical advances—during the next passage through a tunnel, he even embraces and kisses her—because she finds Walter both cheeky and attractive. At Semmering, where he gets off the train—Elli is traveling one stop farther—Walter gives her a business card and asks her to contact him as soon as possible. It only becomes clear later that he accidentally gave her not his own card, but that of a client, Eugen Gillberg. When Elli tries to hand Specht the 10,000 marks, they discover that the suitcases have been switched. Only toward the end of the film does the audience learn that Walter was the one who mistook Elli’s suitcase for his own. Specht, whose comic shortcomings include professional tunnel vision, has no doubt that a crime has been committed and wants to take the “case” himself. Although he leaves an unpaid bill at the hotel—intending to pay later, once the 10,000 marks have been found—he returns to Vienna with Elli, who wants to help him with his inquiries. Using newspaper advertisements, Specht tracks down the three “suspects”—Eugen Gillberg, the woman with the poodle, and the insect-powder salesman—and establishes that none of them was responsible for the suitcase mix-up. Gillberg, who runs a seedy nightclub called “Treffpunkt,” also turns out to be a client of the “Helios” detective agency. Specht’s decision to summon Gillberg to the office and question him as a suspect gets him into trouble with the agency’s boss. At this point, the audience learns—but Elli will not find out for a long time—that the boss is none other than Walter Falke. Since the man on the train was clearly not Gillberg, Specht believes the only person who could have switched the suitcases was the man who had “pretended” to be Gillberg in front of Elli: an impostor. When Walter steps onto the balcony of his own office, Elli sees him from the street and recognizes him as the “impostor” from the train. This misunderstanding leads to a chain of farcical complications: Elli phones Specht to tell him what she has seen, prompting Walter to climb down the building’s façade in order to catch the “impostor.” Elli, in turn, thinks she is watching the “impostor” make his escape. Specht then arrests a completely uninvolved man, a cook, who easily clears himself in the subsequent interrogation. A little later, Elli sees Walter again as he leaves his office. She decides to follow him and trails him to Gillberg’s bar, which Walter—though Elli naturally does not know this—has gone to in order to apologize to his client in person for Specht’s behavior. Once again, Elli calls Specht for help. But because of his blunder, Specht is reluctant to show his face at Gillberg’s again, so he tells Elli to take the “impostor” to her apartment. Walter is delighted to see Elli again at last. She decides to pretend to be a bar hostess, concealing that she has been following him, while also dampening his enthusiasm: the Elli he fell in love with is an innocent young woman, not the brazen woman of the world she now pretends to be. The aggressive sexuality with which she bullies him into going to her apartment is, in a way, a response to his own forwardness in the train compartment, and Walter, despite being in love, is indeed rather disillusioned. More comedy arises from the fact that Walter thinks Elli is a courtesan, while Elli, for her part, thinks Walter is a criminal meeting the nightclub owner to conduct illegal business. Once Elli is alone with Walter in her apartment, she calls Specht for the third time, but he is again unable to help: he has been arrested because of the unpaid bill in Spital! Unable to manage Walter on her own, she locks him in the apartment (her landlady will soon let him out) and decides to involve the police. Before doing so, she retrieves from the detective agency the suitcase she believes to be the one involved in the exchange. In fact, it is her own suitcase, containing the 10,000 marks: Walter had brought it to the office believing it was his. At the police station, Elli candidly recounts everything that has happened so far—something she should have done long ago. Unlike Specht, the investigator (the same one who had questioned Specht earlier) is a professional and sees through the mix-up at once. He tells Elli to open the suitcase: the money is back! At the same time, Walter has a clarifying conversation with Specht, during which he understands the whole situation, including the fact that Elli is not a bar hostess but a secretary at the lottery office. Walter gets some flowers and hurries to Elli to reveal that he was the “culprit” who switched the suitcases in the train compartment.