Blutiger Freitag

A criminal manages to escape custody during his trial in Munich. He joins up with an Italian buddy, the latter’s fiancée, and her brother, who is AWOL from the German army, to plan a spectacular bank robbery. The three men rob a US military transport and score machine guns and grenades. But the actual robbery quickly goes south. After a cashier sounds the alarm and police surround the bank, the robbers take everyone inside hostage. When they discover that one of them is the daughter of a department store mogul, they demand four million marks in ransom … Modelled on actual crimes in Munich and Cologne in 1971, this German-Italian entry in the giallo genre celebrates bloody violence. But at the same time, with its revolutionary and xenophobic maxims, and a seemingly documentary discussion of capital punishment, while touching on the early activities of the Red Army Faction (RAF), it put an unvarnished depiction of the era’s mindset on screen. That was matched by consciously crude staging, whose excesses are astonishing to this day.