EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz was on the CBS Late Movie on March 8, 1977; January 30 and November 9, 1978.

Director George E. Marshall’s career saw him make movies with Laurel and Hardy, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, W. C. Fields, Jackie Gleason and Will Rogers. Before that, he was a combat cinematographer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in France during World War I. He also acted in several films and TV shows. Working from a script by Albert E. Lewin (the director of the 1945 The Picture of Dorian Gray), Nat Perrin (head writer of The Addams Family) and Burt Styler (a TV veteran who wrote the “Edith’s Problem” episode of All In the Family) — based on a story by Ken Englund — this was made on a summer hiatus for Hogan’s Heroes and stars three cast members: Bob Crane (Col. Robert E. Hogan), Werner Klemperer (Col. Wilhelm Klink and a U.S. Army veteran), John Banner (Sergeant Hans Georg Schultz; a Jewish Austrian, he defended being on the show by saying, “Schultz is not a Nazi. I see Schultz as the representative of some kind of goodness in any generation.”) and Leon Askin (who was General Burkhalter and whose parents died in an actual German concentration camp).

Paula Schultz (Elke Sommer, Baron Blood, Lisa and the Devil) has been training for the Olympics as part of the East German team. The truth is that she has been learning the pole vault so she can go over the Berlin Wall where she’s taken by con man Bill Mason (Crane) to his friend in the CIA, Herb Sweeney (Joey Forman).

Bill isn’t into the West vs. East Cold War. Instead, he loves money. He’s willing to take money from either side for Paula and she loves him. Crushed, she goes back to her home, only for him to realize that he had Elke Sommer and then he goes back to her homeland dressed as a woman to win her back.

This has even deeper Hogan’s Heroes connections as several of the actors in it played guest roles on the show. Theodore Marcuse had three roles, General Freidrich von Heiner, Pierre and Ludwig Strasser, as did Larry D. Mann, who was Illyich Igor Zagoskin, SS General Brenner and Doctor Vanetti. Overachiever John Myhers was in four different  episodes as Colonel Schneider, Dr. Hermann Felzer, General Wittkamper and Field Marshal von Heinke. Barbara Morrison was in just one as Mrs. Gretchen Schultz.

Not many would remember this movie today if it wasn’t for Quentin Tarantino. Chapter 7 (“The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz”) in Kill Bill Vol. 2. comes from this movie, as does the name of Dr. King Schultz’s (Christoph Waltz) wife in Django Unchained.