Düsseldorf, 5.30am, 16 June 1987. As the opening titles of the film unfold to the strains of Good Times by Eric Burdon and the Animals, a man and woman make energetic and sweaty love in a room at the Hotel Nikko, while elsewhere in the city another man sits in his living room weeping with his head in his hands. The couple conclude their sexual activity, and as they dress the man looks out of the window at the concourse below and says, a tad ominously, “In two hours, there’s going to be a war down there.” He then adds revealingly, “Your husband’s going to feel like he’s in a trench.” In this single short sentence he confirms not only that he and the woman are having an affair, but also that he has something planned for that day that will involve the woman’s husband and create pandemonium, and that the woman is fully aware of his intentions and likely also in on the deal. The man’s name is Probek (Götz George), the woman is Jutta (Gudrun Landgrebe), and the man seen crying during the opening titles is her husband, Ehser (Ulrich Gebauer).

Good Times then hops across the diegetic barrier as it plays on the radio of a car being driven by Junghein (Heinz Hoenig) and Britz (Ralf Richter), who are boisterously singing along and cheerfully arguing about the specifics of the English lyrics. Could they be two of the potential targets of whatever Probek has planned? That’s certainly what’s inferred when we cut back to Probek, who has relocated to a second hotel room that he plans to use as a base of operations, and we watch him set up a tripod telescope and activate what quickly becomes clear is a police radio frequency scanner. We then catch up with Jutta as she arrives home in time to catch Ehser on the phone to his sister, who assures him that Jutta would have been a prostitute if she had not married him. The subsequent exchange of words between Ehser and Jutta is brief and just a little terse, then the unhappy Ehser heads off to work. We then return to Probek in time to see him cooly and expertly load and ready a folding sniper rifle, which he trains over the buildings opposite before lowering the telescopic sight to the main entrance of a bank located in the building directly opposite the hotel.

The cross-cutting between characters continues as we discover what part Junghein and Britz are to play in the unfolding drama when they observe a small group of cheerful employees walking towards the bank, and Britz jumps out of their car, crosses the road, and hides just out of sight with a stocking over his head and a handgun drawn. When the employees enter the building, Britz jumps out, forces his way inside the bank with them, and keeps them hostage while Junghein, who is in radio contact with Probek, awaits the arrival of the branch manager. It would appear that he is uncharacteristically late and that his presence is crucial to their plan, so much so that Probek is ready to call the whole thing off if he doesn’t show in next five minutes. If you hadn’t already twigged by now that the manager in question is Ehser, it’s confirmed when Probek calls Jutta at home to ask where her husband is. She doesn’t know (he just missed his train), and a note of intrigue is struck when Probek tells Jutta that he intends to call the operation off if Ehser doesn’t arrive soon, and as he puts the receiver on the table Jutta mutters to herself, “You can’t do this to me.” A few minutes later, Ehser does indeed show, and as he approaches the bank, Junghein jumps out of his car to more clumsily replicate his friend’s mode of illegal entry, then teams up with Britz, who loudly demands that the vault be opened. Then, having been informed that his comrades are inside the bank and have the staff under control, Probek picks up the phone and calls the police to anonymously inform them that the establishment is being robbed…

By this point, the likelihood that this going to be no ordinary robbery has been thrice indicated, firstly by Probek’s early claim that “there’s going to be a war down there,” secondly by the mere presence of him as an armed outside third member of the team, and thirdly when Junghein admits to Probek that Britz is under the impression that they’re going to be in and out in 10 minutes and Probek responds by asking if he’ll be able to hold out for 24 hours. The bank certainly doesn’t contain enough money to make the risks associated with such a robbery worthwhile, so what exactly is it that these three have planned? We soon discover when the police arrive in force and make telephone contact with Junghein, who demands a large car and three million in cash for the safe release of the hostages.* When police negotiator Rucker claims he doesn’t have the authority to authorise this, Probek instructs Junghein to “fire him up a little,” which prompts Junghein to gleefully shoot off a few rounds and send the police outside into a panic, which has the intended effect of seeing Rucker quickly replaced by his superior officer. Unfortunately for the robbers, the individual in question is Chief Inspector Voss (Joachim Kemmer), the man who caught Junghein the last time he was imprisoned for a crime. To sidestep spoiler territory, I won’t go into more detail on this, but the reaction of both Junghein and Probek to this news plays very differently on a second viewing.

It all makes for a tight, economical, and – if you’ll pardon the accidental pun – arresting setup for a film that doesn’t have a superfluous moment or a single scene that doesn’t further the story and the characters. Director Dominik Graf has acknowledged the influence of that grand master of bank heist films, Sidney Lumet’s 1975 Dog Day Afternoon, and that’s visible in the documentary realism of the street scenes during the siege, the verbal interaction between the robbers and the police outside, and the actions of the police Special Forces personnel, who I gather were played by actual officers. The notion of two men breaking into a bank and holding the staff hostage for a far larger sum while a third man with whom they are in constant communication observes the police and monitors their communications from outside is a damned good one, and Graf and screenplay writers Uwe Erichsen (adapting his own 1984 source novel Das Leben einer Katze) and Christoph Fromm make seriously good on its promise. Without wishing to reveal the specifics of how the story subsequently unfolds, know that intrigue, deception, blind luck, and borderline foolhardy risk-taking all play their part, but credibility is never pushed even close to breaking point, with one move made against the robbers in particular foiled by the desperate action of one character in a scene that genuinely had me grinding my behind into my seat in tension. It’s become something of a cliché for the best laid criminal plans to be inadvertently toppled by that one weak or fatally flawed gang member that no true professional would knowingly ever hire. Yet here the conflict that all too quickly breaks out between Britz and Jungheim – triggered when the former discovers that the plan never was to steal the money from the bank and quickly scarper as he believed – is quickly resolved, and each time Britz’s frustration comes close to exploding, Jungheim finds a way to either calm him down or redirect his energy.

Bank heist movies do tend to be told from the viewpoint of robbers with whom we become naturally aligned, in part because of the buzz of satisfaction we tend to experience when watching boldly reckless individuals sticking it to the man, particularly if that means undermining an aspect of the capitalist establishment to which so many of us are financially tied. In The Cat, the audience’s relationship with the protagonists is nicely complicated by Probek’s emotional coldness, Britz’s sudden hot-headed outbursts, the fact that the bank employees are shown to be genuinely frightened, and that we are aware that the manager’s wife is having an affair and colluding with Probek against him. The energetic Jungheim is certainly the most initially likeable of the trio, but even he shaves off a few sympathy points when he humiliates and injures a terrified hostage to spur Voss into action, and later when he psychologically tortures Ehser, having taken a strong dislike to him for trying to convince one of his colleagues to somehow smuggle a note to the police. This conflict of loyalties intensifies with the arrival of Voss and his colleagues, who quickly establish a command centre and come across as seasoned professionals who really know their job and are just trying to secure a safe passage for the unfortunate employees. As a result, I found myself quietly egging them on whilst simultaneously urging a sometimes unaware Probek to suss what they are up to and foil their plans.

The film also brings an air of realism to the favourite heist movie notion that there’s always one aspect of an otherwise smooth operation that won’t go to plan by showing that even the most carefully calculated criminal enterprise cannot predict every aspect of human behaviour. This results in Probek’s failure to foresee that Voss might take charge of the police operation, that Jungheim might be baited into making a reckless move by his irritation at his former foe, that Jutta’s attraction to him might result in her ignoring one of his explicit instructions, and that she might want more from him than money and sex. All of this and more throws tension-raising spanners into the works to – as Graf states in the special features – move the film from one climax to the next, but without these peaks feeing artificially manufactured to be just that, with each being earned and believable within the context of the characters and the drama.

Having been criminally unaware of The Cat [Die Katze] before it was announced as part of Radiance’s February 2025 release slate, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I popped the disc into the player and was genuinely blindsided by what unfolded and would risk sounding hyperbolic if I start specifying just how great this film is on every score. The story is gripping and satisfyingly twisty, the characters are distinctively and engagingly drawn, the performances across the board are impeccable, and the tension is ramped up to a nail-chewing level, and whole sequences are as exciting as anything I’ve watched all year. It helps no end that it feels so grounded in reality, very much in the manner of those 70s American thrillers that Graf so admires, a task in which he is aided by Win Wenders regular Martin Schafer’s sometimes almost reportage-like cinematography and expressive use of light and shadow, Milan Bor’s multilayered sound mixing, and a canny use of real-world locations.** It’s an absolute belter of a crime thriller, one that I have little doubt would be regularly appearing on those “best of” list of 70s genre films had it been shot in the English language and set in an American city. Genre fans should consider this an essential purchase, while one unexpected side effect of watching several times is that I now have that catchy Eric Burdon song stuck firmly in my ear for the foreseeable future. “When I think of all the good times that I’ve wasted…”

Featuring a high-definition digital transfer, newly graded by Radiance Films and overseen by director Dominik Graf, the picture quality on this new Blu-ray is once again top-notch. The image is crisp, the detail is clearly rendered, and the contrast, though sometimes punchy in darker shots, is otherwise nicely pitched, and while there is a slightly earthy hue to the colour in some of the interior shots, this is consistent with how interiors are often lit and graded, and the daytime exterior shots are consistently naturalistic. The picture sits rigidly with in the frame, any former dust and damage has been cleaned up, and a fine film grain is visible throughout. The transfer is framed in the film's original aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

Two audio options are on offer, both in the original German, in the shape of DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround. Well, it has to be surround, right? Woah, hold your horses. After watching the film twice in quick succession, each time with a different track enabled, I was left convinced that the original mix was the stereo one and that the surround track was generated from that. Either way, both are clear with a decent tonal range and are free of obvious signs of wear or damage, but the stereo mix feels livelier from the off, and I picked up very little from the rear speakers on the surround track. The difference between the two really hits home in a second half explosion, which while appropriately loud on the stereo track, is curiously muted on the surround track, as if levels were cranked down too far in a wildly over-cautious attempt to avoid distortion. There’s a tad more treble to the stereo mix, and while there is a more subtle feel to the surround track, that feels less appropriate for a film such as this. Go with the stereo every time.

Optional English subtitles kick in by default.

The first three special features here were all produced by Fiction Factory and directed by Robert Fischer, and all contain spoilers, including discussion about the film’s climactic scene and even the ending, so definitely save these until after the film itself.

Dominik Graf (65:05)
This hour-long interview with The Cat director Dominik Graf is a treasure trove of first-hand information about his early career, the events that led to the making of this film, and the process of shooting what was a hugely ambitious project for what he amusingly describes as “a director in his foetal stage.” He reveals that he wasn’t very proud of his first film, Das zweite Gesicht (1982), and details how his film school ambitions changed direction when he was exposed to the films of Robert Aldrich (“His films said the world is fucked up but we have to nevertheless try to make the best out of it”), how directing episodes of the on-the-streets TV crime series Der Fahnder (1984-2005) pushed him to look for cool locations and rediscover the city of Munich, and how he honed his filmmaking language on the TV movie Treffer, which was the film school graduation project for The Cat co-screenwriter Christoph Fromm. He recalls being offered Uwe Erichsen’s original screenplay for The Cat and being hit like an electric shock by one moment (which I can’t reveal here), first discovering the Nikko Hotel on a trip to Düsseldorf and instantly knowing that this should be the main location, actor Götz George’s choreographic approach to action scenes and stunts, unhappily disagreeing with producer Georg Feil about the casting of Gudrun Landgrebe only to later realise that he was right all along, and so much more. Seriously, this is just a small sample from the extensive notes I made whilst watching this consistently fascinating interview, one that includes technical and anecdotal details about the shoot itself.

Christoph Fromm (32:01)
Screenwriter Christoph Fromm opens with the intriguing claim that when pitching a new project, producers regularly respond, “I hope it’s not a film like The Cat,” a work he regards as “a monolith in the history of German cinema,” and a film that no other German film since World War II compares to. He recalls attending the Munich Film School in the late 1970s and watching many films during what still feels like a golden age of cinema, basing the characters for his screenplay for Treffer on people he knew well, and taking the unusual step of making this screenplay his film school graduation project. He reveals that lecturer and Bavaria Studios producer Michael Hild convinced him that the script was good enough to be made into a feature, which eventually led to the selection of Dominik Graf as its director, a choice Fromm was initially uncertain about, but admitting that one of Graf’s strengths was his ability to empathise with characters he would never meet in real life. He fondly recalls the creative freedom and “factory of talents” on the crew of Der Fahnder, being asked by Graf to help rewrite the screenplay of The Cat and flesh out the character of Jungheim – whom he admits was favourite character to write for – and bringing an element of realistic humour to the sort of small-time crooks that he knew in his youth. There is much more here of considerable interest, which again includes discussion of story beats and character arcs that should not be known in advance of a first viewing of the film.

Georg Feil (32:23)
Producer Georg Feil ups the ante from Christoph Fromm’s assessment of The Cat with his opening statement that, “I think the film is perfect,” and suggests that producing such a project in Germany today would be unthinkable. He recalls joining Bavaria Studios and quickly being promoted to the role of producer because there weren’t any producers on the market at that time, and notes that it was a profession that couldn’t be taught and that you had to learn for yourself. In that role, his search for new material led to him approaching authors to adapt their books for TV, which resulted in the creation of Der Fahnder and the recruiting new talent such as Dominik Graf and Christoph Fromm. He has a lot to say about the making of The Cat, much of it revealing, including some hoped-for info on the use of the real Nikko Hotel and the problems this created, which included the production being shut down for two days when the hotel manager became fed up with the disruption it was causing, with filming only resuming when he went on vacation and was temporarily replaced with a more sympathetic head office representative. There are many more stories of interest about the shoot, the reshaping of the screenplay, the invaluable assistance given by the Düsseldorf police, the difficulties encountered and how they were overcome, and much more. He also admits that after years teaching at film school he left because he was bored and couldn’t find anyone who would argue like him and be prepared to put his job at risk.

Select-scene audio commentaries by Dominik Graf (12:36)
Director Dominik Graf provides a commentary for three short sequences from the film. Initially, I was convinced that these were extracted from a full-length commentary from an older German disc that Radiance perhaps could not licence in its entirety, but the menu text confirms that this was recorded specifically for this release. While I could mourn the absence of a full-length commentary, the interview with Graf above is so thorough that I’m not sure how much more it would have added. Certainly his comments on the three scenes here (which occur in the film’s second half and whose content I cannot reveal without dropping spoilers) is a little light on information that has not already been established elsewhere, although I did learn a couple of new things about the shoot and, in one case, how life sometimes grimly imitates art. The scenes can be watched individually or together with a Play All option and are the following length: Scene 1 (3:34); Scene 2 (6:16); Scene 3 (2:48).

Trailer (1:52)
A workmanlike trailer that unsurprisingly gets into spoiler territory, and justifies accusations of past industry sexism with the clips used to name the male and female leads, with Götz George shown loading and aiming a sniper rifle and Gudrun Landgrebe pictured taking off her blouse.

Also included is a Limited Edition Booklet featuring new writing by Brandon Streussnig, but this was not available for review.

An absolutely terrific heist thriller that I have no doubt would be far more widely seen and discussed if it were not European in origin, but there’s a German sensibility to the characters and filmmaking that I’m convinced would not translate as well to the American remake that thankfully never happened. It really is a knockout work, and an absolute gem of a release from Radiance – the transfer is strong, and the film is backed by well over two hours of information-crammed special features. As ever, it’s also a Limited Edition release, so get your hands on it while you can. Very highly recommended.

* Given the year of production and in which the story is set, we can presume he’s talking deutschmarks, but by not specifying this he could easily be talking about euros instead, gifting the film a neat slice of possibly unplanned longevity.