Lieschen Müller is the epitome of FRG ordinariness: She lives in small, nondescript Dingskirchen, is an orphan and single, employed by a bank, a regular at lunch in the same diner… you get the drift. One day, a dr. Schmidt appears and makes the charming young lady an offer: he invites her to travel the world with him, on business. Lieschen demurely declines, but when she falls asleep in the office, tired from doing overtime… the film turns from black and white to colour, and early FRG cinema god Helmut Käutner lets it rip – all singing, all dancing, in extravagant sets made for a tall tale turning taller and taller by the sprocket hole. Big money! The whole wide world! Wirtschaftswunderland sky high on Martini and Toast Hawaii!
Being Käutner, the master has his cake and gets to eat it too, as The Dream of Lieschen Mueller is as much a satire of the dreams and delusions of the FRG in the 50s as it is a nec plus ultra of the era’s cinema in all its feel-good splendour. In contrast to many a critic, Käutner believed that you can delight an audience while telling it a lot of not-so-flattering, even disturbing things. In that sense, The Dream of Lieschen Mueller is aesthetically speaking still ahead of its time…
Olaf Möller