Out of Rosenheim
West Germany,
1987, 108 min
Shown in 1988
CREDITS
- dir
-
Percy Adlon
- prod
-
Percy Adlon
- scr
-
Percy Adlon
- cam
-
Bernd Heinl
- cast
-
Marianne Sagebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance
- source
-
Island Pictures
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Marianne Sagebrecht, CCH Pounder and Percy Adlon in person.
OTHER
West German filmmaker Percy Adlon was introduced to American audiences with the Festival's 1981 screening of Celeste and all his subsequent work have graced our events: Five Last Days (1983), The Swing (1984) Sugarbaby (1985) and Herschel and the Music of the Stars (1986). We are very happy to close the 1988 Festival with the American premiere of Bagdad Cafe, Adlon's first American production, a comic fable in which old Bavaria comes to the new West. Marianne Sagebrecht (Sugarbaby) plays a German businesswoman abandoned in Bagdad, California, a bedraggled one-gas-station desert town—among its amenities is a shabby coffee shop run by a beleaguered black woman (CCH Pounder) with an exasperating family to support. How the new arrival endears herself to a community that is far from awed by her presence and attracts the attentions of a dashing painter (played in a surprising turn by Jack Palance) is handled by Adlon with humor and grace. The overall affect is unexpectedly lyrical.
—Walter V. Addiego
FACTOID #25
The San Francisco International showed Lina Wertm’ller’s first film, The Lizards, in 1963. A favorite of Bay Area audiences, her features All Screwed Up and The Seduction of Mimi had their U.S. premieres at the SFIFF in 1972 and 1974.
