De Tod uf em Oepfelbaum

In the first letter to the Corinthians (15, 26-27), we read: "The last enemy who will be dis-empowered, is Death". The consequences of this apocalyptic idea are extraordinary, since there will be no longer the two-valued alternative between Life and Death, but there will a Life without Death - and hence a third possibility in order to escape one's fate. This is the basic idea behind Paul Osborn's play "Death on the Apple Tree" which has been played on stages and in film throughout the times and places since it has first appeared, in 1966, and thus in the same year in which the Swiss TV film was made, under the title "On Borrowed Time". With Heinrich Gretler, the greatest Swiss actor of all times, and Swiss film director Kurt Früh's older daughter Jessica alias "Jess" as "Flori" in the main roles, on can hardly find one more touching movie concerning the struggle to escape death and living in the borderland between the Here and the Beyond. The idea to structure this film as a Danse Macabre is a stroke of genius which goes back to Kurt Früh. (The idea was copied years later in "Der Tod Zu Basel", one of the first AIDS-movies.) The present TV movie, like at least 11 more (cf. Kurt Früh, Rückblenden. Zürich 1975, p. 192), has been made during Früh's engagement as Department Manager of the Statal Swiss TV and Professor for Dramaturgy and Directing at the University of Applied Arts in Zürich. It is sad that these movies are never shown and never have appeared on VHS or DVD, while the 12 cinema movies of Früh are at least once a year broadcast by the Statal Television and the about a dozen short movies of his early work have been released meanwhile on DVD. It is said (in Werner Wollenberger's biography of Heiri Gretler) that Gretler has watched this movie with himself in the night before he died (the night before this 80st birthday) and said to his wife: "I wasn't so bad after all, was I?"