Engelchen (3½ Stars)

This film is a curiosity. It's a German film, made in 1968, about sexual themes, but it was made before the German film industry became sexually open. If anything, it's comparable with the American teen comedies of the 1970's and later: lots of allusions to sex, but only occasional glimpses of nudity.

The film's name means "Little angel", which is an appropriate title for a good girl from the strict Catholic town of Bamberg. Katja, the little angel, is 19 and still a virgin, so she goes on holiday to Munich for three weeks to lose her virginity. After all, if you can't lose your virginity in Munich, where can you? She moves into a dodgy commune, in which the landlord admits that the apartment doesn't belong to him. She lives with a sport reporter, a man who earns a living painting protest signs and an inventor of highly impractical devices. She throws herself at all sorts of men, but backs away in fear whenever sex is imminent.

This is an interesting snapshot of Germany in the 1960's. It gives a more accurate picture than the sex comedies which followed it in the 1970's.