Sirk's period melodrama featuring Swedish singer Zarah Leander draws on the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, not only in the mixing of songs and dialogue but, as Sirk critic Jon Halliday notes, "in the assemblage of contrasts, of light, of class, of geography..." Halliday adds, "Ufern is one of the most extraordinary films ever made." Leander plays a singer who is sent to prison by a class prejudiced court in place of her weak-willed aristocratic lover. The contrast between his world and that of the Australian prison to which she is banished is effectively created by cameraman Franz Weihmayr, emphasizing the Sirkian juxtaposition of the prisons of the old world with those of the new. Sirk's construction of the narrative around musical performances contrasts with that of Schlussakkord; here, it is not Beethoven's Ninth Symphony but the songs emanating from a women's prison, a frontier saloon or a music hall that undercut the melodramatic content of the film.