Rating: C
Dir: Erwin C. Dietrich
Star: Elisabeth Felchner, Karin Heske, Renate Kasché, Carl Möhner
a.k.a. Frauleins in Uniform or The Cutthroats
Swiss producer Dietrich certainly had an interesting career, covering everything from well-respected action flick The Wild Geese through to working with Jess Franco on some of the director’s best less shitty movies, like Jack the Ripper. Even by his standards though, this is an odd one. A kinder, gentler Naziploitation film? Yet somehow, in back-pedalling and down-playing the swastika side of the equation, you could argue that the end result is more tasteless. Normally in the genre, the Nazis are unequivocally the bad guys, though there is a certain hypocrisy in both sternly disapproving of their actions, and depicting their sadism in all its lurid nastiness.
Here, though, if you squinted and removed the funny salutes, you could replace the soldiers of the Third Reich with another force. The tone, certainly, is all over the place, from tear-jerking pathos to broad, comedic farce. But, mostly, it’s about der Titten. We begin with Dr. Felix Kuhn (Möhner), who is in charge of inspecting female recruits. He decides too many are unfit for service, so the Gestapo decide to teach him a lesson by sending the good doctor to the front, along with his daughters Marga (Felchner) and Eva (Heske). Stuff then happens, eventually – and I do mean, eventually – culminating in a slew of the women running through a battlefield, stark naked, while shells explode around them. How the hell did we get there from here?
Make no mistake, the female cast here are gorgeous, and you get to see a lot of them. This definitely skews more towards sex than violence, and it’s almost all consensual. There is one rapist, but when his actions are reported, the authorities have absolutely no hesitation in immediately shipping him off to military jail, based on little more than the accusation. I did Nazi that coming. There are a lot of plots which border on the soap-opera, such as the girl dying of leukemia, who says, “I’m so full of lust for life, that I came into the army to grab it while I can.” Characters drift in and out, get forgotten about, and suddenly re-appear in order to get shot.
I will say, the production values here are better than I expected. You get costumes, trains, planes and even a number of tanks, while the battle scenes include a decent full body burn stunt. However, I am disappointed that, despite the title, the female recruits never get in on the action: regardless of what the poster promises, they are largely limited to directing telephone calls and being pliable morale boosters. As the war goes on, things get more chaotic and decadent still, leading up to Christiane Lanius’s Nazi-themed burlesque performance (top). It’s all messy, not helped by an English dub dedicated to vacuuming out any iota of “acting” from the performances. Yet unlike many of its ilk, I can honestly say I was never bored.