According to Ron Holloway, in Variety, Do Not Lean Out the Window “introduced a new talent, Janos Zsombolyai, who makes an auspicious debut with this tale of a railroad station as a microcosm of humanity. It's like a brief short story, a vignette, which holds the attention from beginning to end in compressed brevity... Do Not Lean Out the Window is a neat allegory in a Hitchcock-like story....
“The station master gets reluctantly stuck with a young student who is thrown off a passing train because he hasn't a ticket and not enough identification papers to erase suspicions. He is kept under house arrest, so to speak, for the night and observes what is going on in this lonely, isolated neck of the woods: the station master is thriving on illegal trade, abetted by two cronies who maintain the station with him. A girl who cooks and sells tickets flirts with passing Lotharios, the student included, who might be the man of her dreams to take her away from nowhere. As for the student, he asks too many questions to be allowed to stay on for long, and besides he's in a hurry to get to Budapest.”