Ach Egon (1961, West Germany)

Dr Weber is a respectable, and rather stuffy, paediatrician. As a student he married an older woman out of sentimentality, and adopted her illegitimate son. The woman soon died and he hasn't seen the son since; but a lawyer friend now tells him that the son is working in a strip club in Hamburg, on the Reeperbahn. The son is anxious to meet his father, and plans to come to the house to do so. But Weber has remarried, and hasn't told his second wife about the first marriage; and his father-in-law is extremely old-fashioned about moral matters, and would disown him if this embarrassing history was disclosed.

So what is to be done? The lawyer friend suggests an immediate visit to Hamburg, to see the son and dissuade him from coming. But Weber will need an excuse to go to such a notorious city. The lawyer suggests the justification might be to attend a reception in honour of a former college friend; and as a novel is lying nearby, the friend shall be the author, Erik Helgers.

The visit is made, and the son, Egon Kummer, played by Heinz Erhardt, turns out to be a third rate circus performer. However, Weber's wife knows the real writer, a woman who uses a male pseudonym when she is writing, and suspecting infidelity, she only discloses part of what she knows.

When it emerges that "Erik Helgers" is really a woman, Egon is persuaded to pretend to be her, but inevitably this only worsens an already difficult situation.

HF October 2005

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