Madness Rules
1947 film by Leopold Lindtberg
Madness Rules (German: Matto regiert) is a 1946 Swiss crime film directed by Leopold Lindtberg and based on a novel by Friedrich Glauser. It is one of Lindtberg’s Wachtmeister Studer films and was later screened at the Zurich Film Festival.
Background
Madness Rules is based on Friedrich Glauser’s novel Matto regiert. Heinrich Gretler plays Wachtmeister Hermann Studer. He had previously played the character in Leopold Lindtberg’s 1939 film Constable Studer, which was adapted from a novel by Glauser.
Glauser drew on his own experience of psychiatric institutions, and the film presents both a crime story and a conflict between modern and outdated psychiatric methods.
Synopsis
Wachtmeister Studer investigates a disappearance at a psychiatric clinic after a dance for the patients. The young patient Herbert Caplaun had wanted to attend, but the clinic director Ulrich Borstli refused permission, and by the next morning Borstli has vanished.
Cast
The cast includes:
Heinrich Gretler as Wachtmeister Hermann Studer
Heinz Woester as Dr. med.
“Madness Rules” enters the record as 1947 film by Leopold Lindtberg. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Madness, Rules and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3307609. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Madness Rules” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.