Brigitte Helm is the bored wife of always-working Gustav Diessl. He's bored too, but he orders her not to go out with her friends. Driven to distraction, she visits poor artist Jack Trevor, and agrees to go to Vienna with him. But her husband has trailed her, and confronts Trevor. Then he's off to the club, so she goes out night-clubbing.
Fraulein Helm is 90% of this movie, but beautiful as she is, what I noted were director G. W. Pabst's compositions and editing, so that this 96-minute movie seems to contain no more than a score of titles. The story is told with such ability -- and a hand-held camera under the supervision of Theodor Sparkuhl -- that little is needed to bring forth the anomie that suffuses this stale marriage.
I think the ending is a bit of a cop-out; apparently when they weren't being gloomy and Teutonic, German audiences enjoyed a happy ending just as much as American audiences. However, is it really an ending, or just the beginning of another cycle?
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