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Synopsis: The football goalkeeper Josef Bloch is sent off the field for insulting the referee. Alone, he wanders aimlessly through the city of Vienna, books into a cheap hotel and, in the morning, for no apparent reason, he strangles to death the cinema cashier Gloria, after having spent the night with her. He takes the bus to Burgenland, has an argument with some farm lads in a public house, tries in vain to start a new relationship with his former lover, who has leased an inn there, and follows the reports of the police search for him in the newspaper. In the end, when the police are hard on his heels, he watches a village football match. The goalkeeper saves a penalty and Bloch laughs.
Critique: The film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Peter Handke, which was highly praised by the literary critics when it was first published. The adaptation for the cinema is independent of the novel. Wenders characterizes the film as his first work. He had in fact already made several short films and the full-length film Summer in the City, but it was Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty) which made him known to a wider public. Handke, a good friend of Wenders, worked with him on the dialogues and his wife had a role in the film. This was Wenders first film in colour and the first time he used a fixed script. The film was supported financially by the Austrian Telefilm AG, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk and the Filmverlag der Autoren. The film had...