Mészáros’s first color film begins in the flames of a factory furnace, with the pounding of heavy machinery, immediately immersing viewers into a punishing working-class environment with little room for sentimentality or affection. A newly arrived worker bee (Lili Monori) barely has time to clock in before the foreman (Jan Nowicki) asks her out, beginning a relationship both confined and defined by the factory walls. “I was pressing bricks in my dreams last night,” our heroine shares. “Do you dream?” Mészáros marveled of her star, “Lili Monori represented a completely different style of acting. . . . She existed differently to other actresses.”