User Reviews

I saw this movie back in the late 60's and had fond memories of it. I just finished the book and thought a re-watching of the movie was in order. Made in 1964 in Berlin by Disney, the movie bares little resemblance to the 1929 novel by Erich Kastner, other than some of the names and most basic of plot elements. Updated to modern day Berlin of 1964 the film, while still fun, is missing the charming affection between Emil and his widowed mother. The opening chapters of the book are devoted to Emil and his mother and their life. In the book Emil travels by train from Neustadt to Berlin to see his grandmother. He's carrying money, to his grandmother, from his mother. When he falls asleep in the compartment, his pocket is picked by Mr. Grundeis, a fellow passenger. Emil wakes up and discovers his money gone. Out of the window of the train he spots Grundeis and gives chase. Broke, Emil takes a tram ticket from a generous passenger, and follows Grundeis from the train to a café on Kaiser Avenue. It's here while watching Grundeis that Emil meets up with Gustav, the local neighborhood head-boy, the boy the other kids look up to and willingly accept as their leader. It's Gustav who calls the neighborhood boys together to help get the money back. The brains of the neighborhood, the Professor, organizes the boys into a fairly well organized team, each person is given an assignment and the detecting begins. Communication, tactics, and food are arranged. The teams follow and eventually hassle Mr. Grundeis right into jail. It's doesn't even take 24 hours to catch him. It's told in a delightful style, with a nice bunch of characters. There's a sweetness to the book, but it's never saccharine. All through the book Emil's thought's are on his mother and her struggle to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, the loss of the small amount of money stolen is devastating to their poor family and it's a heavy burden to Emil. He's a good boy, in every traditional sense, and he fights back for what is rightfully his. And he is rewarded for it in many ways.

The movie version omits the sentimentality of the novel, skipping the mother son relationship. Emil get's his pocket picked on a bus, after Mr. Grundeis hypnotizes him. Emil wakes and gives chase, literally running into Gustav, knocking him and his packages down. Gustav confronts Emil, who is now spying on Grundeis, and eventually learns Emil's story. And this is where the movie starts to build it's more exciting version of the story. Rather than have the boys organically become detectives, Gustav is already a detective, he has a badge, he rescued a cat recently. He calls together his team and they go to work. The movie moves the off screen bank robbery of the book on screen, and involves Emil in it, creating a higher level of jeopardy that doesn't exist in the book. Mr. Grundeis is involved in the big robbery, he's a regular mole, digging the tunnel into the bank. Walter Slezak plays The Baron, the robber gangs leader. There's also Muller, the grumpy guy, he yells a lot. There's lot of running around, more yelling, and much tomfoolery with girls. Pony, Emil's cousin, is much brasher in the movie and more of a presence. In the book the boys are much more in awe of her, everyone's much more polite, in the movie they're not. "Get rid of her," says Gustav. But Pony is not to be deterred, the plucky school newspaper columnist sticks to it and together with the gang of detectives, and the confused and belatedly involved police they rescue Emil and the mole from a watery death. The Baron and grumpy are captured soon after, and all is well. Emil's mother shows up briefly at the beginning and end of the movie.

I enjoyed both versions of this story. They both had a nice take on the story. Both can be enjoyed for different reasons, especially by different people.

"Emil and the Detectives" follows a young boy called, appropriately enough, Emil Tischbein, who's on his way to Berlin to see his grandmother with 400 marks in his pocket. However, on the bus to Berlin, Emil's money is stolen from a pick pocketer and Emil is determined to catch the crook with the help of some young detectives. But the group come across something that's bigger than just 400 marks. This movie is not a masterpiece by any means, nor would I call it a great film, but with the state that the Disney company is in right now, it's way more entertaining than I thought it was gonna be. The main characters (mostly being children) are surprisingly very talented, especially Emil himself and the leader of the detectives, Gustav. They're never too annoying and feel like real kids. Also, while the villains are your typical bank robber types, they are still better than the forceful, sympathetic Disney villains we get these days. The music is also surprisingly very memorable in this film, from going from kid-friendly fun sounding to mysterious sounding, if that makes any sense. Overall, the film isn't great but I definitely think it's worth checking out.

Puzzled at the negative reviews, I thought I'd put my two cents in after viewing this old favorite again this evening.

The plot begins with a 10-year old boy named Emil taking a bus by himself from his home in a small city in West Germany to Berlin to visit his grandmother and cousins. His mother is also trusting him with 400 German marks, which I read would have been about $100 in the mid-60s when this film was made.

Well, Emil's mom made one blunder. She made a point of giving Emil the envelope with money to him just before he got on the bus. Neither of them knew a notorious pickpocket was about to board the same bus and would seize the opportunity to steal that money. Had she only pinned it inside his coat at the house...the whole film would not have been made.

Helped by the pickpocket's actions, Emil soon falls asleep during the bus ride and the pickpocket, a colorfully dressed man named Grundeis, lifts the money and immediately tells the driver to let him off at the next corner. It seems the bus has reached Berlin but Grundeis gets off before it gets to the depot. Emil wakes up when the bus stops-a totally likely thing as any motor travelers know. He discovers the money is gone and quickly gets off where the thief did and follows him.

He tracks him to a restaurant where the man is seen ordering through the window. He tries to enlist the help of a traffic cop, acting as a human traffic signal from a little platform in the middle of the intersection. But the cop does nothing more helpful than telling him where a police station is.

Coming to the rescue is an older boy, apparently about 14, named Gustav, who seems to have a wealth of business cards for whatever occupation he can claim, including being head of a detective agency. When Grundeis leaves the restaurant, Gustav directs Emil to change some of the money that was his, not stolen, for the bill Grundeis gave the waitress. He is figuring the pinholes in the bill will help prove it was part of Emil's stolen money. Gustav tracks Grundeis and smartly picks up little pieces of paper he is discarding in the street. They were a note from two men in the restaurant, including a man known as "The Baron" (Walter Slezak, a long time movie bad guy) telling Grundeis where to meet them that evening.

Gustav is able to get all the pieces but one that went down a gutter-the one with the name of the hotel meeting place. He meets up with Emil and then rides him around on his bicycle as Gustav is rounding up his team of detectives-four boys including twins who have a neat entrance. They go on a hike to "headquarters"-the home of a fifth boy working for Gustav, Diesnstag, who has a broken foot in a cast, to make their plans.

By staking out the nearby hotels, they are able to find Emil's thief, who is seen going into a war-bombed ruin of a building and disappearing. What they couldn't hear at that hotel meeting was the plan of the three "skrinks"-as the crooks were called. Grundeis is known as "The Mole" for his tunneling ability. He has been hired by The Baron to tunnel from the ruins to the underground vault of a nearby bank they plan to rob.

The boys are soon joined by Emil's cousin, a girl about Gustav's age, named Pony, who gets involved because she tracked the "detective" who brought her a note from Emil for their grandmother telling her not to worry about him because he wasn't on the bus to be picked up as planned.

In case I haven't made it clear, there are many humorous scenes throughout this comedy-drama, including a couple involving Dienstag and Emil tricking Diesntag's older sister away from her endless telephone conversations, so they can free up the phone so the detectives can communicate with "headquarters." Grundeis himself is quite animated, moving about with energetic spurts that bring to mind the antics of Stan Laurel.

All the detectives save Gustav at one point are at the police station going through photos of crooks, trying to convince them about the crooks they've been following. This was after they got one policeman to go to the ruins but when he couldn't find the entrance to the underground area where Grundeis was tunneling, he accused them of playing games with him.

I'll leave the bulk of the rest for you to enjoy, involving the bank burglary and escape attempts.

There is a scene just before the end that totally reflects what the main thrust was of the book on which this movie is based, written in 1929. That amusing finish was about the only thing in the book that was much good. People, I put it to you that this movie is about the best example I can provide to argue that sometimes the movie is BETTER than the book.

Basically, in the book, very little happens. There are no clandestine meetings in hotels with detectives spying, no bank robbery at all. It tells a real simple story about Emil encountering a thief and getting some boys to help foil the thief. I thought it quite dull on its own merit, and especially compared to this movie.

What it really did to make me love it like I do was give me a young boy to follow who I could easily imagine what I would do were I in his shoes. We got all sorts of scenery as it was filmed in Germany, and that was cool. I thought it funny as a kid to see a German police car being a VW Beetle. Must be good for following suspects on a bicycle, thought I, but anyone in a normal car could zip away from the cops easily.

The boy detectives didn't do anything extraordinary to make it hard to believe they were that young. It was said that one of their biggest previous cases was finding and retrieving a lost cat. This was a positive to me-that they WERE boys, not agents using techniques like the FBI or something.

Seeing it in the theater as an 8-year-old, I thought it captivating to think of a boy close to my age traveling a long distance by himself, and then getting caught up in a theft and then a bank burglary complete with some real danger. I love the line an IMDB reviewer used about how this film "echoes my idea of the limitless adventure of childhood at its best." That reflects a big part of why this was a great movie, fun for adults bug particularly wonderful for kids.

It has always stood as one of my all-time favorite Disney movies and I give it a 10.

Or even English children, if they wanted, surely.

Targeting an American audience, putting English children in the movie would have seemed just as foreign.

Without a doubt the biggest loss then would have been Roger Mobley as Gustav. I can't help but think surely a German equivalent for him could have been found, but obviously this wasn't to be.

Having watched endless English movies about children (as well as the more mainstream established set from around this same time as Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to name but a few) and then the CBS Children's Film Festival with movies, whether dubbed and/or originally recorded in American English or British English (whew!), I don't think Emil and the Detectives would have been any worse with actual German children speaking with a similar accent as Slezak here.

Surely Emil could have at best been British so the American youth could relate.

Nevertheless, it stands as a loss. An obvious loss, not so much a head-scratcher as Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (anyone wanting to know about the confusion there was over miscasting, just check out Van Dyke in Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins, tho I've talked online to many English people who say they enjoy his awkward accent now).

Perhaps this will be the fate of Emil and the Detectives someday.

If nothing else, we have lovely shots of German scenery and a truly delightful story of adventure and suspense (tho I liked Moonspinners, I think Emil and the Detectives was slightly better).

I would first see EatD (enough already) on the New Mickey Mouse club with Lisa Welchel, sliced up into mini-segments and shown over quite a period of time. Of course I didn't watch it all straight thru, but I always remembered Mobley and that silly hat.

I tracked down a copy off of Ebay, as well as an accompanying comic book.

If nothing else, I guess it helps to try to imagine the movie was dubbed into American English (not again).