"Herrliche Zeiten im Spessart" or "Glorious Times in the Spessart" is a German 100-minute movie from 1967, so this one has its 50th anniversary this year. This is the third film from the Spessart trilogy by Hoffmann and Neumann starring Lilo Pulver. It has almost been a decade since the first film and there was also a pretty big break between the second and third. Maybe they just wanted to cash in a bit again with this one here as it was the third and final installment to the series. Most people consider this the worst, but I personally would say it isn't worse or better than the previous two. I think this series was really weak from the very beginning unfortunately and there should not have been a single sequel in my opinion. Anyway, the first film is still really realistic, but the second has ghosts already and this one here is basically all about time travel, thus the description in my title. As for the cast here, the success of this duology/trilogy obviously lured many big names to participate in this project. German film buffs today will still recognize the names of Pulver, Leipnitz, Elsner, Bach, maybe even Castell and Schwarzkopf, so the cast definitely wasn't the problem. I think one of the problems may be that they somehow forgot to tell a good story here in all their attempts to include one funny scene/quote/comment after the next and this hurts every movie a lot really. It also makes it come off as try hard at times. This is a bit of a shame as the film looked really fine visually, the costumes, sets and makeup were all fairly decent and the movie looked much more modern than 1960s, maybe 5-10 years at least. So there was for sure a possibility to turn this one into a success, but eventually they came short unfortunately. I give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended and it is appropriate they did not make a forth film anymore.
Herrliche Zeiten im Spessart
(1967)
Gets more fantastic again, but only in terms of fantasy
20 February 2017
Warning: Spoilers