While many of Willi Forst’s most fa­mous films look back at an idealised past of the pre-1918 Habsburg monarchy, Allotria is set in the present day. Which, in a Forst film, does not equal social re­alism. Instead, the modern setting argu­ably leads to an even more complete em­brace of artifice for artifice’s sake.
Allotria is one of Forst’s purest come­dies. He takes his inspirations from the American screwball farces of his time, the films of directors such as Gregory La Cava and George Cukor. The plot circles around the repeated making and un­making of two couples: Philipp, a rich fool (Adolf Wohlbrück) and Viola (Re­nate Müller), a mysterious stranger he meets on a boat as well as David, a play­boy racecar driver (Heinz Rühmann) and his adventurous wife Gaby (Jenny Jugo). The plot is set in motion by yet another character though: the lascivious Aimée (Hilde Hildebrand) who has af­fairs with both Philipp and David.
Exuding an air of hedonistic freedom and decadence completely at odds with the mainstream of German filmmaking of the time, Allotria presents Forst as a master craftsman of light entertainment. The film features some of the most outra­geous stylistic flourishes in his work – one particularly bizarre scene, for example, plays with stop tricks and slow-motion, and shrinks Heinz Rühmann to min­iature size. A car race, meanwhile, is transformed into a montage sequence evoking the avant-garde films of the 1920s. Indeed, Forst counted among his personal cinematic heroes not only Ernst Lubitsch and René Clair, but also Sergei Eisenstein.

Lukas Foerster