The Million Game (1970)

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Blistering performances.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It s running man (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) as a realistic pseudo doku, 17 years before running man .A TV show offers 1 million if you survive 1 week and make it to the studio checkpoint, while being hunted by 3 killers.It s basically a mix of a roman gladiator game and the seek of fame an wealth of TV shows.Often copied but never been made as good as the original.It s made like a TV show of that time, being so realistic for some pll. watching it phoned the broadcaster for joining the next show or "i hate it" calls. (greetings from "war of the worlds" radio broadcast.fun comment: one of the killers is a German comedian, who played the role of a killer really well if you see his other acting.

"Das Millionenspiel" ("Million-Game") is a fictional reality-TV show of a fictional private TV-station named "TE-TV".In the show, Contestant Bernard Lotz is hunted through (western-) Germany for a week by a group of hired killers and has, he and the killers being constantly monitored by 24 camera teams, to reach a series of checkpoints in order to win 1 million German mark (an enormous amount of money - consider the inflation).In an - for Europe and Germany, where privately owned television stations were not very usual until the 1980's - almost prophetic manner the film draws a picture of a future full of private TV stations and reality-TV-shows competing for market-share.The film is starring a series of famous German TV moderators and actors and features some bizarre fake-advertisements.Worth watching.

"Das Millionenspiel" was locked away for 30 years due to copyright difficulties. It was made into a French film, Le Prix du Danger in 1983, based on the same short story by the great Robert Sheckley. But "made for television" was surely more appropriate than for the big screen. It was so visionary and presented in such a way that spectators took it for real and applied at the TV station to take part as the hunted person (I personally read some of the letters). The letters were handed out to the University of Cologne to conduct a psychological survey back in 1972.

The fiction seems to be perfect: Millions of TV-watchers experience the hunting of Bernhard Lotz, who as a candidate for a TV-Show is hunted seven days by a professional team of killers. Lotz is running to save his life - if he manages to survive the seven days he'll get one million DeutschMarks. What sounds like one of those cheap SciFi - Productions is produced in very realistic style. The airplay was 1970 - and some people could not decide whether it's fiction or reality. Some called the TV-Stations and complained about it, some asked to be the next candidate and some even asked if they could join the team of killers. The Author of this tv-drama has seen the future in a very realistic way: The breaks for tasteless advertising in the show, the boss of the private television station who does everything to boost the ratings, the talking about very intimate things with people on air etc. Nowadays people do the craziest things in those so called "reality shows" to get some money even do without their personal freedom and numerous human rights. Everything in this film which was fiction that time has become quite common today except of killing people - this makes the movie much more than one of those Hollywood stories, it's a document of time...