The Love Keys

I missed this fairly typical German import when it played the drive-in circuit in America (loaded with Schoolgirl Report features at the time) in the ’70s, but Something Weird Video came through with a reissue for completeness sake.Its director Rolf Thiele is justly famous for his classics in the softcore porn genre, notably the big hit “Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Adults” but was actually a talented mainstream director capable of high- brow drama (with A-list casts) like his adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kroger”. “The Love Keys” is hardly noteworthy at either extreme of the entertainment continuum, merely a time-killer of the sort that the mavericks of the New German Cinema (RWF, Herzog, Wenders, Kluge, etc.) rebelled against. Its star Horst Tappert is a performer I would often see in dubbed-in-English B-movies like the Edgar Wallace mysteries of the ’60s.Simple but effective story has cute blonde Rosy presented with a gift of her own door keys on her 17th birthday, but stuck with a 10pm curfew. The gimmick, which plants this movie firmly in the softcore porn genre of its day, is that she rents her key to dirty old men, just like a whore. Perhaps auteur Thiele was going after, in a smutty way, the territory memorably plowed by Billy Wilder in his trenchant classic “The Apartment”, though I doubt it.The resulting farce in which Rosie and her gal pal Inge (Jutta Speidel) bamboozle a series of guys raging up to a government minister climaxes in a funny slapstick ending with everyone carted off to jail.This falls into the “naughty but nice” bucket, an enduring form of cinema I associate all the way back to Fernandel comedies but which in recent decades has unfortunately been replaced for mass audiences by the various forms of gross-out films (“Porky’s”, “American Pie”, Farrelly Bros., Apatow, etc.).