At the close of World War I, returned soldiers often became drifters, having lost their homes or heritage, or simply their will, to the war. In Lilies of the Field, our heroes are just such vagabonds, trying to find a life for themselves in a Slovakian village, where old-time beggars mix with the new breed, and the ragged farmers resent the lot of them. The film is a textured portrait of this rag-tag village whose antagonisms seem primitive when compared with those in All My Good Countrymen, yet carry the seeds of all that is to come. Mathew is an itinerant musician, his friend Krujbel an ex-divinity student in despair. When Mathew's clarinet is stolen, a farmer mutters, "A beggar was robbed; it's going to be a bad year." Mathew's affair with a comely farm widow is beautifully rendered in hues of pink and nighttime blue-the film is color-tinted throughout-but it is the more romantic for being illicit. He will always exist on the margins of the margins, and Lilies is a plea for his right to exist, among the wanton priests, the old ladies hawking used prayer books, and the bald-headed farmboys who pass for normal in his world.