FILM:Germans have reacted angrily to The Baader Meinhof Complex, a new film dramatising the group's violent terrorist campaign. Derek Scallyreports from Berlin

WHEN IT COMES TO selling movie tickets, a star is good, but a row is better. That bit of wisdom transformed the Hitler spectacle Downfallinto that very rare thing in modern German cinema: a worldwide hit.

Producer Bernd Eichinger knew he had a well-made film with a startling performance by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz. But Hitler films are two-a-penny and Eichinger knew he needed help.

He enrolled the big guns of German print media, Der Spiegelmagazine and the Bildtabloid, to stoke up a masterly media- moralising campaign, asking: should Germans be allowed to portray Hitler as human?

Eichinger hoped lightning would strike again with The Baader Meinhof Complex. The new film dramatises the rise and fall of the self-styled urban guerrillas who held West Germany to ransom in the 1970s with a high-profile campaign of heists, hostages and murder.

More than 30 years after the ringleaders killed themselves in prison in a suicide pact, the controversy surrounding the gang, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), is alive and well.

Surviving senior gang members were released from prison last year and the deceased founding members have enjoyed a revival among young Germans as shabby chic icons of cool, home-grown Che Guevaras.

Small wonder, then, that Eichinger hoped to tap the RAF controversy to his commercial advantage. Der Spiegeland Bildfell into line, giving free publicity with the same pseudo-moralising approach: is it moral to dramatise this episode of modern German history at the risk of glamorising the RAF?

The campaign failed and the film has flopped at home but The Baader Meinhof Complexremains a fascinating moment in modern German movie-making.

On paper, it couldn't fail. Eichinger signed up the cream of young German actors. Martina Gedeck delivers a stand-out performance as the conflicted RAF ideologue Ulrike Meinhof, while Johanna Wokalek turns in an equally gripping portrait of Gudrun Ensslin, the RAF's rabid bang bang girl.

The film's screenplay was adapted by journalist Stefan Aust, who knew Meinhof and other RAF figures, from his doorstep book of the same name.

He covers every stage of the gang's emergence from the 1968 student movement to a violent gang declaring war on what it viewed as a morally bankrupt West German state. But the overloaded screenplay is a classic case of more is less. "Now I know why they call it The Baader Meinhof Complex," said one bewildered audience member in Berlin last week.

Most damaging for the film's credibility have been vicious attacks from relatives of RAF members and victims. The elderly widow of a prominent banker shot dead by the RAF branded the film a "new level of public humiliation" and, in protest, returned her medal of honour, the highest state decoration, to the German president.

Journalist Bettina Röhl, daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, claims that Eichinger's project is morally bankrupt. "Bernd Eichinger claims that his film will destroy the RAF myth but the opposite is the case, it would be impossible to top the film's hero worship," she wrote in her blog.

Some critics have praised the film's unflinching violence for stripping bare the RAF myth, but most have sided with relatives. The film's breathless pace relegates victims to a few seconds of anonymous screen time before being dispatched, riddled with bullets, down the dumper of history once more.

Reportedly the most expensive German film ever made, the The Baader Meinhof Complexhas been nominated as Germany's entry for the best foreign film Oscar next year. Relatives of the RAF victims, who have campaigned for decades in vain for a memorial to their loved ones, are hoping Hollywood won't memorialise Bernd Eichinger's latest blockbuster.

• The Baader Meinhof Complexis released today and is reviewed in this section