The best Helmut Griem’s movies

In the early days of Nazi Germany, a powerful noble family must adjust to life under the new dictatorship regime.

A luxury liner carries Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany in a desperate fight for survival.

Historical evocation of Ludwig, king of Bavaria, from his crowning in 1864 until his death in 1886, as a romantic hero. Fan of Richard Wagner, betrayed by him, in love with his cousin Elisabeth of Austria, abandonned by her, tormented by his homosexuality, he will little by little slip towards madness. Filmed in English, later dubbed in Italian and German

Inside the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin, starry-eyed singer Sally Bowles and an impish emcee sound the clarion call to decadent fun, while outside a certain political party grows into a brutal force.

Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo is assigned to the old Bastiani border fortress where he expects an imminent attack by nomadic fearsome Tartars.

During an interview, Max Baumstein (Piccoli), respected chairman of a humanitarian organisation, shoots the Paraguayan ambassador dead, in cold blood. Tried for first-degree murder, he explains himself: the ambassador was a former Nazi official, responsible for the extermination of his family.

Starting in late May 1944, during the German retreat on the Eastern Front, Captain Stransky (Helmut Griem) orders Sergeant Steiner (Richard Burton) to blow up a railway tunnel to prevent Russian forces from using it. Steiner's platoon fails in its mission by coming up against a Russian tank. Steiner then takes a furlough to Paris just as the Allies launch their invasion of Normandy.

The young, sickly girl Bernadette comes from a poverty-stricken family. When the Virgin Mary appears to her in a cavern near Lourdes, no one takes the girl seriously, even when she digs up a wellspring at the Virgin's instructions The local authorities even try to hush up the entire incident. In vain, however, because when Empress Eugénie requests water from the spring for her sickly son, they are forced to acquiesce. And even the local priest is finally convinced. While taking his tuberculosis-stricken fiancé Claire to a sanatorium, the young doctor Henri Guillaumet meets Bernadette. The water from Lourdes' spring heals Claire's disease overnight, but the scientist in Henri doubts the miracle and wants to expose Bernadette as a liar. It is not until Henri again meets Bernadette, who has in the meantime become a nun and works as a nurse, that he finds a way to balance belief and modern science. And his love for Claire is strengthened as well.

Anna is a film director whose job takes her all over western Europe. In each place she either already has some intimate connection, or readily makes one. People seem drawn to her, but inevitably insist on sharing their inmost secrets and discontents with her, despite her obvious and profound lack of interest in these revelations. This does not deter Anna from continuing to meet people, and she genuinely connects with them occasionally, as when she sees her mother briefly in Brussels.

When a plague breaks out in Hamburg, several people break out of quarantine and make their way out of the city... only to find that the plague is more widespread.

A German U-Boat commander and 600 prisoners plan a daring escape from a PoW camp in Scotland.

Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.

Berlin Alexanderplatz, originally broadcast in 1980, is a 14-part television film adapted and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder from the Alfred Döblin novel of the same name, and stars Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Elisabeth Trissenaar and Gottfried John.

A drama set on Faroe Islands by Frank Wisbar based on the novel by Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen.

Based on the best-selling novel by Nobel-laureate Heinrich Böll, this drama is a passionate indictment of Catholicism. Hans Schnier (Helmut Griem) has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother's fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.