Both tell the story of a famous writer going undercover as a student at a small-town secondary school after his friends tell him that he missed out on the best part of growing up by being educated at home.

The film was produced and released in Germany during the last years of World War II and has been called a "masterpiece of timeless, cheerful escapism.

Eventually, he falls in love with the headmaster's daughter Eva and discloses his identity after masquerading as his teacher Crey in school.

To circumvent a ban by the censorship board, producer Heinz Rühmann presented the film to Hermann Göring at the Führerhauptquartier, where it proved to be a success.

The transformation of the accomplished writer back to a not-so-innocent schoolboy is an example of the cheerful escapism popular in German films at the end of World War II.

In 1942, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had called for the production of predominantly entertaining films in Germany to distract the population from the political and moral debacle of the war.