Unter den Dächern von St. Pauli (1970)

Under the roofs of St. Pauli, Hamburg’s “most sinful” district, life means—at least in this film—24-hour excitement, sex for sale, murder, and mayhem. Take the young Harry, for example, who wants to avenge the violent death of his wife, Maria. He knows that the shady “businessman” Hausach, a thoroughly nasty and powerful figure in Hamburg’s red-light district, was responsible for Maria’s death, even though the trial ended with his acquittal because of a false alibi. Harry’s brother Willi, who serves as a police officer at the famous Davidwache station, does everything he can to keep Harry from making a terrible mistake. Mocked as a coward by Hausach, Harry ultimately brings about the downfall of St. Pauli’s burly gangster king. The second case concerns the elegant businessman Pasucha, who cannot come to terms with his separation from his wife, a striptease dancer on the “world’s most sinful mile,” and reaches for a gun. In a fit of jealousy, he shoots her dead. Inge, a student who had hoped to start work as Mrs. Pasucha’s cleaner, finds her body and falls into the murderer’s hands; he takes the young woman hostage. Pasucha tries to escape, but when he can see no way forward, he kills himself. Egon Mills, a down-to-earth, conventional civil servant, has travelled from quiet Flensburg to Hamburg. His 17-year-old daughter has become caught up in a swamp of “immorality” and prostitution, and her father wants to get her out of it at any cost. He finds Agnes in a red-light establishment where René Durand trains the girls on the pole as a choreographer. When Mills learns how much his daughter can earn there, he soon finds Agnes’s work not quite so objectionable after all. In the fourth case, a group of high-school graduates from Lübeck want to play a malicious trick on Dr. Himboldt, a teacher nearing retirement. Himboldt is an old-school disciplinarian who insists on propriety, decency, and morality. To the young people, his antiquated, petit-bourgeois outlook makes him seem provocatively stuffy and out of touch. By setting him up with Verena, a middle-aged prostitute, they want to put him—and his moral principles—to the test. After the old man and the blonde leave the bed, Himboldt’s pupils, led by senior student Herzberg, begin blackmailing their teacher over his “misconduct.”