Feine Gesellschaft, Beschraenkte Haftung (1982)

Run Time - 100 min.  |   Countries - Germany  |  
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Synopsis by Eleanor Mannikka

The action in this comedy is set within a 24-hour period, as unusual events unfold in the lives of two elderly sisters, Else (Elisabeth Bergner) and Hilde (Lilli Palmer). The sisters were living together in the family mansion in Hamburg when Else got tired of that life and hit the streets to make a go of it as a bag lady, collecting enough each week to send a regular five marks to an orphanage in India. Her older sister stayed in the mansion and made sure that Else always had enough to live on, without letting her know about it. One day -- at the beginning of the fateful 24-hour period -- Else gets evicted from her squatter's apartment in West Berlin and after she leaves with her cart and belongings, she makes a stop at the bank to send the weekly money to the orphanage. Fate has it that two thieves complete a bank robbery just as Else is leaving, throwing their loot into a flower truck by mistake -- much to their dismay and to the total ignorance of the truck driver. Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Hilde is right in the middle of a conversation with Harms (Hardy Kruger), her favorite man of the moment, when she is visited by banking representatives that tell her she has lost it all. Her money manager made some bad financial moves and ran her fortune to the ground, killing himself because of it. Else reads about his suicide in the newspaper, and decides she had better go console her sister -- but not alone. She unwittingly takes the two bank robbers with her, along with a street wino, and when she arrives, the bank robbers drop their facade and threaten to blow everything up if they do not get some cash soon. Meanwhile, Hilde's friend Harms is on the way to join them with the original loot from the bumbled morning robbery in his car (it had fallen out of the flower truck and into his vehicle). Soon everyone and the cash are going to be in one place -- a situation rife with possibilities

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Keywords

bag-lady, bank, elderly, embezzlement, eviction, finances, loot, orphan, robbery, sister, suicide