Emil and the Detectives (1964)

Having studied German in high school and having a bunch of German relatives, I had read an edited (for the purpose of teaching language students) version of Erich Kästner's book Emil and the Detectives. I later learned that there were multiple movie adaptations of the book, and was always interested in seeing them if they showed up on TV. In the most recent installment of TCM's Treasures from the Disney Vault, they ran the 1964 version of Emil and the Detectives, so I DVRed it to watch.

Bryan Russell plays Emil Tischbein, a young boy traveling alone by bus from his home in Neustadt to visit his grandmother in Berlin. The first thing I noticed is that the movie updates the novel (written in the late 1920s so set in Weimar Germany) to the 1960s, which requires them to overlook the fact that Berlin was a divided city and the wall had gone up. But since the country is reunited it would be easy for today's kids to ignore that. Anyhow, on the bus a pickpocket named Grundeis (Heinz Schubert) sits next to Emil, and after Emil falls asleep, Grundeis robs him of DM 400 that Emil was taking to Grandma.

Emil wakes up just in time to see Grundeis getting off the bus, and gets off himself to give chase. Of course, he's unsuccessful, but during the chase he runs into (literally) Gustav (Roger Mobley). Gustav is a few years older than Emil, and is one of those kids playing at being an adult, by being a "detective", complete with business cards and a team of young boys who work for him at their "secret" headquarters, which is really the apartment of one of the co-workers. It's there that they learn the details of the case from Emil.

They set off to find they Grundeis, armed with the clue that he's to meet some other people at a hotel in the vicinity of where Grundeis picked Emil's pocket. Eventually they find the right hotel, and see but don't hear that Grundeis is talking to a "Baron" (Walter Slezak) and another criminal Müller (Peter Ehrlich). Their plan is to go to one of the bombed-out buildings that still hasn't been cleared up and rebuilt, since it's quite close to a bank. There the three can tunnel under and rob the bank's vault out of a substantial sum of money.

The detectives and Emil set off to find the guys, although there's also one other problem, which is that Emil didn't get off the bus at the main bus station where his grandmother went to pick up Emil. She went together with a granddaughter who is one of Emil's cousins, Pony (Cindy Cassell; called Pony Hütchen in the book because of the hat she wears). When one of the detectives has Emil write a cryptic note to tell Grandma he's OK, Pony intercepts it, follows the juvenile detective-courier, and finds the detectives staking out the ruined building they followed Grundeis to.

It's been ages since I read the book, so I don't remember exactly how much was changed from the plot of the book besides updating it in time; some of the IMDb reviews suggest there were a fair amount of changes. (I actually have a copy of the book in translation to Russian that I bought when I was studying in St. Petersburg ages ago, although I haven't read that in a long time either.) Whatever the changes were, they certainly work at least in the context of a Disney family movie. The movie was made in Germany with a lot of location shooting on the streets of (West) Berlin, which creates a really good atmosphere.

As for the story, this version is, I think, a pretty good entry in the genre of kids playing as adults. They're probably too precocious to be real, but having to deal with Pony (who more or less blackmails the guys by telling them she could let on what's really going on) is handled reasonably well. As I was watching, I was wondering why Grundeis would draw attention to himself by picking Emil's pocket, but even that plot hole is handled in the movie. There's danger, but also nothing that would be particularly frightening to kids. And while the criminals have to have some stupidity, certainly the Baron isn't cartoonish at all, while the other two aren't terribly bad.

Emil and the Detectives seems to be out of print on DVD, but it is currently streaming on Amazon if you can do the streaming thing. In any case, it's a movie I can certainly recommend for the family.