The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) on Netflix
Katharina Blum, a young divorcee, falls for Ludwig Götten at a carnival party. Police suspect him of terrorism; they raid her flat, interrogate her, and a tabloid reporter hounds her.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.3/105,357 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Katharina Blum keeps house for the lawyer Hubert Blorna and his wife Trude. The people around her call her the nun because of how she lives. At a carnival party she meets Ludwig Götten and falls in love with him straight away. The police have been following Götten and believe he is a terrorist, a bank robber and an anarchist. They raid her apartment, find an expensive ring, arrest her and question her roughly, convinced she helped her lover. She will not cooperate and is let go. The police carry on looking into her friends and her money and now and then hand damaging details to newspapers. Werner Tötges, a reporter for the tabloid The Paper, prints one false story after another, and obscene anonymous calls and notes come to her home.
Cast
- Werner Eichhornas Konrad Beiters
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Composer Hans Werner Henze built the score on Wagnerian themes: the opening scene at the Rhine River led him to write music influenced by Das Rheingold, and he called it "the poisoned river" because the dirty water stood for a toxic German society.
- The film's sets were deliberately abstract, with police offices shown as vast open spaces full of empty desks, which was not how West German offices looked at the time; the design was influenced by the American painter Allen Tucker.
- Cinematographer Jost Vacano shot the film with almost no makeup, so that viewers would see Angela Winkler's skin imperfections as Katharina and feel she was a real person.
- The opening scene on the barge was shot on 16 mm film so that it would look like grainy camera footage.
- Angela Winkler was said to give her best acting on the first or second take, while Mario Adorf was best on the seventh or eighth take, the extra takes getting him further into his character.
