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His story of Rosemarie Nitribitt was snapped up by Moviemaker Rolf Thiele. Even before shooting began, protests poured in. Soon it seemed as if every capitalist and manager in Germany took the film as an intended insult, collectively and individually. Associations of theater owners in the Rhineland and Bavaria pledged they would not show the picture. The Daimler-Benz Co. refused to lend any of its cars to Thiele; Opel turned him down when he asked permission to shoot a sequence on an assembly line. A gasoline company indignantly demanded the withdrawal of still pictures showing Rosemarie (played by Actress Nadja Tiller) leaning against one of their gas pumps. The equally indignant owner of the Frankfurter Hof, some of whose guests had been Rosie's clients, forced the filmmakers to use another name on their cinema hotel. When the Venice Film Festival asked to show the picture last month, the German Foreign Ministry protested that Das Mädchen Rosemarie did not correctly reflect conditions in West Germany, and should be banned. In Venice the film was awarded the "Italian Critics' Prize."
Growl & Belch. Fewer than ten people went to the funeral of the real Rosie Nitribitt last year. But last week Nitribitt had become a part of the national vocabulary, and Das Mädchen Rosemarie was playing to capacity in 100 theaters —a postwar record. Hundreds of puns have grown up about her name, helped by the fact that in German it rhymes with "dynamite."
Film critics divided on political and chauvinistic lines. Some bemoan the movie as giving a one-sided and unfair picture of today's Germany; others hail it as a stinging satire in the direct line of George Grosz's savage post-World War I cartoons and Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera. Director Rolf Thiele has only one minor reservation. Says he: "If The Threepenny Opera was the growl of an empty stomach, this film is the belch of a full one."