Lovers of a cool, well-planned heist, and a cool well-planned heist movie could do a lot worse than looking up Die Katze (The Cat), a big hit in Germany in 1988 which failed to ripple much elsewhere. More fool elsewhere.
It’s stylish too, and slightly offbeat, starting with opening credits featuring a man and woman indulging in languid lovemaking to Eric Burdon singing the film’s theme song – Good Times (“When I think of all the good times that I’ve wasted having good times”). Titles over and ejaculation achieved, the man immediately moves to pick up his shirt. His female partner is obviously unfulfilled. We’ve met our antihero – a guy who hasn’t the decency to give his girl an orgasm – and though we don’t yet know how either fits in, two key players.
He is Probek (Götz George), a criminal eminence masterminding a heist from this very hotel room, which overlooks a bank. The heist looks to all intents and purposes like it’s going to be a quick in-and-out job. Wave the guns about, get frightened tellers to stuff bags with banknotes and away. But that’s not the job at all, as one of the two heisters on the ground already knows but the other one doesn’t. Probek’s not really after the money in the bank. His intention is to use the tellers as hostages and extract a huge ransom for their release.
Down below in the bank are Junghein (Heinz Hoenig) and Britz (Ralf Richter), Junghein the one who knows something like this is about to play out and Britz the one who doesn’t. Neither is particularly bright, though Junghein fancies himself as being much smarter than Britz, a hothead likely to blow his stack at any provocation, which he’s about to get.
Once the police have arrived, set up their command centre and opened lines of communication to the bank, these will be our players. Probek hovering in a nearby hotel, watching and running everything according to a meticulously worked-out timetable. Jutta (Gudrun Landgrebe), his lover, who turns out to be the bank manager’s wife – the inside woman. Junghein and Britz in the bank. Nearby, cop Voss (Joachim Kemmer), a seasoned negotiator trying to work out why the robbers seem to be a step ahead of him the whole time.
Probek is running not only a heist designed to fail but stacking a bigger scheme on top of it. On top of that he’s manipulating the cops (he phones them to tell them a bank job is underway, for instance). Here is a man who’s spinning a lot of plates, more than even a seasoned criminal mastermind would be able to manage, surely. But, tick tock, director Dominik Graf leans into a metronome rhythm for the film’s first third – probably its best third – where cool moves are choreographed by a fallible human, who has left no room for blind chance in his calculations.
As any seasoned movie fan will know, a film that starts with a heist is most likely going to be about that heist going wrong. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.
And that’s how it goes, a Dog Day Afternoon-style storm of bad luck and, it turns out, bad decision-making, with the smartly dressed and impeccably groomed Probek forced into increasingly fraught positions in an attempt to keep his show on the road… without ruffling his hair or dirtying his clothes.
Graf’s direction is similarly cool and on point, unfussy and considered and he imbues everything with an atmosphere thick with the sort of German paranoia of a slightly earlier period, when the likes of the Red Army Faction and the Baader Meinhof gang were making headlines worldwide.
I’m not going to go into how things play out. Probek’s hubris, his overreach, is the driver of this plot. His plans rely far too much on good fortune. When Probek does eventually run into trouble, Graf is ready with a whole load of 1980s action standbys – slo-mo shooting, a car chase and some period-friendly action heroics.
Slick, cool, all a bit improbable and with a few good twists. Just what you want, really, if you like this sort of thing.
Die Katze aka The Cat – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
