"Lausbubengeschichten" or "Tales of a Young Scamp" is a West German 100-minute movie from the year 1964. The director is the pretty successful Helmut Käutner and the two writers are Kurt Heuser and Franz Seitz. They adapted the novels by Ludwig Thoma, a writer who was already dead for over 40 years when this film came out. It is basically a collection of pranks as the title already suggests. Fittingly this film was the breakthrough for German child actor Hansi Kraus, who was 11 or 12 when he gave his first performance in the industry in here. This movie was the beginning of a series of five "Lausbuben" films and Kraus moved on a little later to his Lümmel series, a collection of films, in which he plays a student who, together with his class mates, keeps playing pranks on his teachers and other adults. But back to this one here. I would not say it was a failure, but it also is not as good as the title suggests. The pranks are just mildly interesting sadly and other genre aspects such as romance feel like filler material instead of really adding something memorable here. This film is another example of how mediocre the 1960s were in terms of German film. Not recommended.
Review of Lausbubengeschichten
