A Call Girl Named Rosemarie
(Das Mädchen Rosemarie)
Free Admission
With Nadja Tiller, Peter van Eyck, Carl Raddatz.
West Germany, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 100 min.
German with English subtitles.
In 1957, a Frankfurt call girl named Rosemarie Nitribitt was murdered. It soon emerged that her services had been highly regarded in some of West Germany’s most prominent industrial circles. Not surprisingly, the case was never solved, and when a film based on the incident was invited to represent West Germany at the Venice Film Festival, the German Foreign Ministry vigorously protested. Director Rolf Thiele retained and even intensified the political dimensions of the story, alleging that the call girl’s career had been actively promoted by one of the leading figures connected with the German "economic miracle" of the 1950s; another story line follows the efforts of a French industrial spy who tries to use the call girl to get information. In 1958, A Call Girl Named Rosemarie won the Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language film.