Crime scene: death in the chopper
| Episode of the series Tatort | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Death in the chopper |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Production company |
SWF |
| length | 82 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| classification | Episode 249 ( List ) |
| First broadcast | October 13, 1991 on Das Erste |
| Rod | |
| Director | Nico Hofmann |
| script |
Stefan Dähnert Nico Hofmann |
| production | Dietrich Mack |
| music | Nicholas Glowna |
| camera | Johannes Hollmann |
| cut | Helga Scharf |
| occupation | |
further supporting actors: | |
Tod im Häcksler is a television film from the crime series Tatort from 1991. It was directed by Nico Hofmann , who also wrote the book together with Stefan Dähnert . Ulrike Folkerts plays the Ludwigshafen commissioner Lena Odenthal for the third time . She investigates in the Palatinate province and is supported by a young village policeman, played by Ben Becker . The film from Südwestfunk caused protests from the Palatinate after its first broadcast.
action
In the Palatinate village of Zarten with 120 inhabitants, young people happened to find the clothes of the Romanian repatriate Petru Höreth , who disappeared two years ago . His wife Dana Höreth is horrified at the sight of the clothes.
After the police received an anonymous call, Chief Detective Lena Odenthal and her colleague, Detective Assistant Seidel, took over the case. Stressed out from Ludwigshafen, Odenthal drives to the countryside in an old police Beetle , Seidel investigates from the Ludwigshafen district. On site, the Commissioner receives support from the local police in the person of Police Master Stefan Tries. Odenthal asks Dana Höreth again about the circumstances of her husband's disappearance, she tells everything as it was then. The hunting warden Hunzinger has been helping her on the farm for a year because she and her 17-year-old daughter Mechthild can no longer cope with it.
Odenthal is accommodated in a guesthouse nearby. In the morning she picks up Tries from home. They meet a search party provided by the Bundeswehr who is searching the area around the village. In the area you can see the markings for a planned dam that was supposed to be built two years ago. The village would have had to be given up because it would have been in the area of the reservoir that was being created, i.e. it would have been flooded. However, the building project was not carried out.
Odenthal spends the next night directly in the small village, she is staying with the resident Sprengler. He runs an unprofitable chicken farm that also belongs to Dana Höreth. Sprengler has a relationship with their daughter Mechthild. On the weekend when Petru Höreth disappeared, Sprengler and Mechthild had taken the train to Amsterdam . During the night, the commissioner is woken up by the ringing of bells and can watch some villagers gather in the church. Through a church window, she observes how the residents discuss violently with the pastor and then pray. She is knocked down from behind. The next morning Odenthal wakes up in Sprengler's house, looked after by Tries. She wants to question the pastor about the nightly meeting, but he cites the confessional secret . He informs her that the church in the village will be closed and that he has been transferred far away. The inspector later meets Hunzinger and asks him why he was in church at night. He does not comment on this, but reports that he was Petru Höreth's best friend. But he doesn't have a good word for Sprengler. Odenthal wants to question Dana Höreth again, but is thrown out of the house by some villagers. Her car was also damaged and the phones sabotaged. The Commissioner meets Dr. Dietrich Schröder, who has a car phone . Schröder is a board member of MEWAG, the company that wanted to build the dam. He tells Odenthal that the Mainz company Alucom wanted to build a large aluminum smelter near the nearby Gundolfsheim and that MEWAG should supply the electricity. A dam with a night power plant offered itself in the area of Zarten. The project had failed because there were problems buying land.
Tries organizes that Odenthal can use the rectory as an office. The next day the commissioner began interviewing the villagers who attended the meeting in the church. Many of them are in bad shape financially, but all are silent about what happened back then. In the evening an arson attack is carried out on the police in the rectory. The clothes as evidence are lost. Tries, who was injured in the attack, is taken to the hospital in a taxi. The taxi driver tells of an interesting trip he had from Zarten to Amsterdam two years ago; his passengers were Sprengler and Mechthild. They wanted to stay for a weekend, but then drove back on the day of the outward journey because the young woman was not doing well. The next morning Lena Odenthal asks Mechthild about the trip to Amsterdam. She admits that she was only there to have an abortion performed . Her father wanted it that way, even though Sprengler wanted the child. Sprengler argued violently with him on the night when Petru Höreth disappeared.
Sprengler contradicts this and says that he too did not want the child and was in favor of an abortion because he does not love Mechthild. He only quarreled with Petru Höreth about work. After the argument, he went home and got drunk. He only woke up in the morning because the chopper was running loudly at full power. He goes on to say that Petru Höreth did not want to sell his property to MEWAG. All the villagers would have sold their land, except Höreth. Everyone in the village talked to him about it. According to him, Sprengler goes to the pub to get drunk. Many of the villagers join in and harass him. He flees, but they can catch up with him and hold him. They begin to undress him and want to throw him into the chopper, just like Höreth did in his time. Odenthal comes with the Seidel, which has meanwhile arrived. You can barely prevent the planned act. Everyone involved is arrested, including Hunzinger.
background
Director and co-author Nico Hofmann later became known primarily as a producer of “event films” such as Der Tunnel , Die Sturmflut , Dresden and Mogadischu . For screenwriter Stefan Dähnert, Tod im Häcksler was the first crime scene book. He later developed the character of the Constance crime scene inspector Klara Blum for Südwestrundfunk. Dähnert came up with the idea for the book from the Bremm pumped storage plant , which was supposed to be built just a few kilometers from his home town of Cochem , but which was ultimately rejected. An action based on this was moved from the Moselle Eifel in the direction of Ludwigshafen to the West Palatinate .
The village of Zarten is fictional and is said to be north of Kaiserslautern . The Gundolfsheim, named as the next largest municipality, is also fictional. Zarten is entered between the real locations of Reipoltskirchen and Nussbach on a topographic map visible in the film . Rudolphskirchen , a district of Rathskirchen , municipality of Rockenhausen in the Donnersbergkreis, just under two kilometers south-east of Nussbach, served as the actual filming location for Zartener village scenes . Other locations are in the vicinity of the Baden-Baden Südwestfunk location . So the used on the way to the Palatinate ferry is actually that of Mittelbaden into Alsace leading Rheinfähre Plittersdorf - Seltz . In the film there is a Catholic church and a parish office . The church in Rudolphskirchen, however, is a Protestant church and one of five cultural monuments of the place . The film used in the motor vehicle registration in addition to the real distinguishing marks northwest of Neustadt on the Wine Route and MZ for Mainz also the fictional distinguishing sign WBG. At least the marks with the latter are therefore fictitious marks for film productions .
Death in the Chopper aired on First Sunday, October 13, 1991 . On November 18, 2010, the film was released on DVD in the crime scene box The 1990s , along with the episodes The Chinese Method (Leitmayr / Batic) and Welcome to Cologne (Ballauf / Schenk). On January 26, 2012, it also appeared as part of a crime scene: Odenthal-Box together with the cases Sleepless Nights and The Happy Death .
reception
Reviews
TV Spielfilm said it was an "abysmal crime drama " and summarized: "A gripping story, excellently played." The TV magazine Prisma called the film a "dark provincial play" and praised Ben Becker's "convincing [it]" game. Lena Odenthal should "finally show feelings".
“And the case, the crime thriller? He bogged down in this grotesque exaggeration of provincial retardation. According to the tried and tested model, suspects were set up and discarded again as such, and a surely nasty industrial company was brought into play, but when, thanks to "Inspector Chance", almost the entire village was finally convicted of the collective murder of that Romanian emigrant, it was long since completely irrelevant who it actually was. "
controversy
The portrayal of the Palatinate as backward led to protests from the region after the broadcast and was the subject of a debate in the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament because of the discriminatory portrayal of the region as a “caricature of a 'Palatinate Siberia'”. The then Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of Economics, Rainer Brüderle , who had previously spoken of "denigrating" the Palatinate people, invited the actress Ulrike Folkerts to go on a hike, during which he tried to convince her of the advantages of the Palatinate, its residents and its cuisine.
The controversy surrounding the film was presented by SWR in a documentary by Sigrid Faltin in 2019 .
continuation
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Lena Odenthal's service, SWR produced a sequel (again with Ben Becker) entitled The Palatinate from Above , which was shown on November 17, 2019 at prime time on Sunday evening.
literature
- Rüdiger Dingemann: tatort - The Lexicon. Munich, 2010, ISBN 978-3-426-78419-8 , p. 162.
Web links
- Death in the chopper at the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Summary of the plot of death in the shredder on the ARD website
- Death in the chopper at the crime scene fund
- Death in the shredder at Tatort-Fans.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for crime scene: Death in the shredder . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , June 2010 (PDF; test number: 123 389 V).
- ↑ The story of the chopper. Program information with a link to the 30-minute documentary Sigrid Faltins in the ARD media library , there from 2:36 min. (as well as from 29:24). 2019, accessed November 3, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Rathskirchen. A portrait of the town by Bernd Schwab. In: SWR Landesschau Rheinland-Pfalz - Hierzuland. Südwestrundfunk, 2015, archived from the original on December 13, 2015 ; accessed on November 16, 2019 .
- ↑ Death in the chopper - availability at Filmportal.de. Retrieved January 4, 2013.
- ↑ Crime scene: Death in the shredder on TV Spielfilm.de. Retrieved January 4, 2013.
- ↑ Crime scene: Death in a chopper at prisma.de. Retrieved January 4, 2013.
- ↑ Reinhard Lüke: Retort Province. In: TV shows. TAZ, October 15, 1991, accessed on November 16, 2019 : "So if on Monday the Südwestfunk received an armored letter of protest from the Chancellery, one could blame Dr. Kohl did not express the outrage over an unprecedented denigration of the Palatinate and its nature. "
- ↑ Stefan Scherer, Claudia Stockinger: Tatorte - A typology of the realism of space in the ARD series Tatort and its implementation using Munich as an example. In: IASLonline (February 19, 2010), ISSN 1612-0442 , Paragraph No. 70, accessed January 3, 2013.
- ↑ An online search in January 2013 in the parliamentary documentation of the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament yielded the withdrawn minor question no. 350 by FDP member Birger Ehrenberg of November 8, 1991, subject: "Distorted representation of RPF on television", process : 80350, 12th legislative term.
- ^ Rainer Brüderle . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1992 ( online - May 18, 1992 ). Quote: "The FDP politician was annoyed about the portrayal of the country and its people in the television" Tatort "thriller" Death in the Chopper ", distorted images were drawn, the Palatinate" downright vilified "."
- ↑ The story of the chopper - a crime scene and its consequences. Retrieved November 3, 2019 .
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