For Balduin, going out to beer parties with his fellow students and fighting out disputes at the tip of the sword have lost their charms. He wants to find love; but how would he, a penniless student, ever dare looking up to any woman worth of loving? Absorbed in his dreary thoughts and indifferent to the advances of Lyduschka, Balduin is unexpectedly offered a fortune by the mysterious money-lender Scapinelli – but on a strange condition…Read More »
Silvia Breuss wrote:
It is one of those hidden big-city asylums where light-shy existences meet. Many paths lead into the demimonde of Café Elektric, but only a few lead out again. Women looking for the buyers of their bodies in the glow of the street lamps find their way in, as do night owls and all kinds of sinister figures. Truth meets deception here, drive meets dreams and feelings, possession and money meet dependence. Gustav Ucicky’s atmospherically dense “film of manners”, still captivating today in its direct and unsentimental portrayal of the Viennese milieu, with the young Willi Forst and Marlene Dietrich in her first leading role, was intended to show “how easy it is in our time to stray from the right path”. The signpost for three great careers.Read More »