The Sweet Sins of Sexy Susan


The Sweet Sins of Sexy Susan is a 1967 Austrian costume drama-sex comedy film directed by Franz Antel.

Background

Kurt Nachmann and Franz Antel created the lead character Susanne Delberg, a courtesan-actress, later madame and eventual social climber during and after the Napoleonic Wars, with inspiration from Wirtinnenvers, a well-known profane commercium song about the exploits of an innkeeper woman from the Lahn.

Plot

In the Kingdom of Westphalia, a drunken innkeeper woman, just before her death, bequeaths her inn to Susanne Delberg. As a result, her rival Goppelmann, who would have been first in line to inherit the inn, gets nothing. Goppelmann recruits the local Studentenverbindung to discredit Susanne's establishment. The tide turns when Susanne manages to seduce the student leader Anselmo but through him, she finds herself in a conspiracy against the governor Dulce and the marching Grande Armée also involving her friend Ferdinand.

Cast

''Frau Wirtin'' series

Although the heroine ostensibly dies at the end of the film, the commercial success of The Sweet Sins of Sexy Susan triggered the Frau Wirtin series of five films on later adventures of Susanne Delberg, all of them featuring Teri Tordai in the title role.
The first two films and House of Pleasure ) narrate Susanne's adventures involving Napoleon Bonaparte. The following two films and The Hostess Exceeds All Bounds ) are about Susanne's exploits in Hungary where she settles after Napoleon is deposed in 1814. The last film, produced three years after the previous one was conceived as a closing chapter of Susanne's life and diverts from the earlier films of the series in several aspects, also incorporating a great deal of archive footage from earlier films.
Kurt Nachmann, the screenwriter for the series wrote and directed a film with a similar theme in 1970: Josefine Mutzenbacher based on the novel Josephine Mutzenbacher – The Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself.