Re: the movie: worth watching, with the awareness thath this was an early, early sound movie, and you can tell. The dvd edition tried to clear up the sound, but it’s still tough for non-Germans to understand (and occasionally for Germans). Secondly, you can also tell this was an early sound movie by the way it’s constructed; very much still using the conventions of silent cinema (the opening sequence, for example, is entirely free of spoken words or human noises, it’s all music), and while it was fast paced then, it comes across as leisurely paced now. All this being said, I find it adorable. Director Gerhard Lamprecht had to work mainly with a bunch of kids without any acting experience, and he got good performances out of them, and historically speaking, it’s fascinating to see actual footage of Weimar Republic era Berlin, before both Nazis and bombs. And while later adaptions struggle to translate why the 140 Marks that get stolen from Emil are a big deal, or why his mother doesn’t send them via mail, it’s entirely understandable in depression era Germany. On a more sober note, most of the children you see in this film later died in WW II as Hitler’s cannon fodder. Käthe Haak, who plays Emil’s mother, went on to become a UFA star and survived. The movie was a hit and was still (re)running in German cinemas as late as 1937, when Billy Wilder had saved his life by emigrating to Hollywood and Erich Kästner had watched his novels burn and was forbidden to work (officially, see also: Münchhausen).

There's also a touching and eventually heartbreaking rl story connected to his first film version (re: one of the child actors), which was recently filmed, and here is my review.