General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Men (1985 film)

Men... (German: Männer) is a 1985 West German comedy directed and written by Doris Dörrie, in which a wealthy advertising executive, discovering that his wife has a lover, secretly moves into the lover's apartment under a false identity to find out what makes the rival appealing.¹ Made cheaply for what was planned as German television, it became a theatrical hit, one of the most successful German comedies of the 1980s, and the film that established Dörrie's international career.²^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	Männer (Men...), West Germany, 1985¹
Director and writer	Doris Dörrie¹
Lead cast	Heiner Lauterbach (Julius Armbrust), Uwe Ochsenknecht (Stefan Lachner), Ulrike Kriener (Paula Armbrust)³
Runtime and format	99 minutes; shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, aspect ratio 1.66:1¹
Production	Olga Film and ZDF; shot in Munich from 19 June to 23 July 1985¹
Premiere	October 1985, Internationale Filmtage Hof; German age rating FSK ab 12 on 13 November 1985¹
Major awards	Deutscher Filmpreis 1986: Filmband in Gold for Best Screenplay and for the acting ensemble, Filmband in Silver; Gilde-Filmpreis in Gold 1987¹
Audience rating	6.6/10 on IMDb from about 1,400 votes³

Spoilers

Plot

Julius Armbrust, a Munich advertising executive in his mid-thirties, has money, success, a family, and affairs of his own. On his twelfth wedding anniversary he learns from his wife Paula that she has a lover: Stefan, a man of the same age, an out-of-work graphic artist whom Julius sees as a hippie.¹ The discovery is staged at an anniversary party, where Julius, who has been sleeping with his own secretary, is nonetheless shaken by Paula's confession.⁴

Julius pretends to leave town but stays in Munich and follows the couple. When Stefan's old girlfriend moves out and a room in his shared flat opens up, Julius applies for it under the name Daniel and is taken in by the unsuspecting Stefan.¹^•⁵ His plan is to learn Stefan's weak points and remake him into a careerist so that Paula will lose interest and return. When Stefan admits, drunk, that he would not really object to money, career, or power, Julius sets to work, even coaching him for a job interview, without knowing at first that the job in question is inside Julius's own company.¹^•⁶

The scheme works too well. Stefan turns into what Julius himself had been, Paula loses interest in the new Stefan, and Julius returns home the winner, though the film leaves open how much he has actually gained.¹ Along the way the two rivals develop a genuine friendship, one predicated on deception, and the comedy keeps both men's motives under examination.²^•⁷ Time Out's review notes the double standard at the story's center: Julius expects fidelity he has never practiced, and the film turns the tables so that each man gets his deserts.⁷

Production

Doris Dörrie, born 1955 in Hannover, studied theater, psychology, and semiotics in the United States and then at the University of Television and Film Munich; Männer was her third feature.⁸ The film was shot in Munich over 26 days, from 19 June to 23 July 1985, on 16mm film blown up to 35mm, with a production cost of under one million marks.¹ Claus Bantzer wrote the music, Helge Weindler was the cinematographer, and the producers were Denyse Noever, Helmut Rasp, and Elvira Senft for Olga Film with the television channel ZDF.⁸^•³

The soundtrack includes "When I Was Young" performed by Eric Burdon with The Animals, uncredited.³ In the closing credits the crew members pass by on elevators as their names appear.³

Release and reception

The film premiered in October 1985 at the Internationale Filmtage in Hof and passed German censorship on 13 November 1985 with an age rating of 12 and up.¹ It reached German-speaking Swiss cinemas on 21 March 1986 and the United States on 30 July 1986.⁵^•³ Its first German television broadcast was on ZDF on 1 January 1988.¹

Commercially it earned about 6 million dollars in Germany, a large return on its small budget, and it is counted among the most successful German comedies of the 1980s.⁹^•¹ At the 1986 Deutscher Filmpreis it won three awards: the Filmband in Gold for Best Screenplay, a Filmband in Gold for the acting ensemble of Heiner Lauterbach and Uwe Ochsenknecht, and the Filmband in Silver in the category of further program-filling films; it also received the Goldene Leinwand from German cinema owners and the Gilde-Filmpreis in Gold in 1987.¹ Abroad it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film by the New York Film Critics Circle, named among the National Board of Review's Top Foreign Films of 1986, and nominated for the Independent Spirit Awards' Special Distinction Award.⁶

Critics responded to its tone as much as its plot. The New York Times's Walter Goodman credited its 31-year-old director and writer, who had studied filmmaking in America, with "a witty and winning way with a line and a camera";¹⁰ Film Comment later called it a German screwball comedy, "fast-paced silliness, full of witty dialogue and engaging performances," while noting that it was hard to find in the U.S. outside a poorly transferred, dubbed DVD.¹¹ A Harvard Crimson review found the film "pretty clever, but not really great," judging the developing relationship between the two men its strongest element.¹²

Significance for Dörrie

Männer was Dörrie's breakthrough: her third feature brought her the German Film Awards and offers from Hollywood.¹ She went on to a long career in features and documentaries, including How to Cook Your Life (2006) and Cherry Blossoms (2008), and became a professor at the HFF Munich.⁸ The film itself has remained available on DVD and Blu-ray and in archive prints held by German film archives.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026