The Alley Cat

Rather coarse, pre-War comedy about a Markgraf -- Heinrich XXVI -- who bathes in the springs of the Ammendorf to strengthen his potency. The town and its springs are especially well known for the many couples with lots of children, who, for tax reasons, live there unmarried. The town smithy and bully provides his vitality to ensure the countess has an heir for the throne.

Country Dr. Robert Koch is desperate: a tuberculosis epidemic is decimating the children in his district and no one is able to do anything about it. Every fourth child is already sick and the parents must helplessly watch as their young ones die. Now Koch is undertaking to find the cause of the tuberculosis --- something he has already been working on for years --- which has been causing this plague of illness. His work is made more difficult by envy; for example, that of his teacher, who was wounded defending his honor. But his greatest obstacle is the famous Berliner scientist and Reichstag deputy, Privy Councilor Rudolf Virchow: He is extraordinarily skeptical of Koch's theory, that the cause for tuberculosis is a bacteria.

Paris, 1830: Jean-Gaspard Debureau performs on the stage and delights his audience with song, wit and charm. He is, however, very unpopular with King Charles X, who is the target of much of Debureau's scornful jests. That would be a somewhat tolerable situation if it weren't for the fact that Debureau has fallen for a countess, who happens to be the King's mistress.

The unemployed secretary Käte applies a job by mistake in the piano factory of the entrepreneur Helmut Hofert. He does not really have any need for an additional secretary at the moment, but Käte is very attractive.

A aristocratic lieutenant is forced to resign his commission and give up his career in the cavalry after having defended himself against deliberate provocations by a superior officer who is competing with him for the love of the daughter of a respected privy councillor. His family bans him to New York, where he falls on hard times until a former circus performer helps him to become a world-renowned trapeze and aerial artiste.

The Viennese seamstress Gabi Berghofer wants to marry an innkeeper. But he marries someone else. Gabi then becomes a model for a painter, who falls in love with her. She spends some wonderful time with him, but he, too, leaves Gabi to return to his family. Desperate and deserted, Gabi stands before the gravestone of the young artist Gabriele Dambrone, who took her life due to heartache. Then she decides to once more take her life in her own hands and to make her old dream of becoming an actress come true.