Sexy films presented as "social testimonies" saturated the German screens of the 1920s, but this film by William Dieterle before he emigrated to Hollywood has a very different intention, as the Swiss critic Hervé Dumont wrote in a monograph on Dieterle for the San Sebastian Film Festival '94: "Dieterle's film is a valuable work that relates the sexual anguish of common prisoners with an unusual sincerity and elegance°.Even today, this film surprises us with its visual representation of the themes-its sense of framing and dramatic brevity, bold compositions, and successive superimpositions." The story and its imbedded ironies for a country made insecure by economic decline seem right out of Fassbinder: An unemployed engineer, Franz (played by Dieterle), is reduced to being a vendor, while his wife Elena (Mary Johnson), now working in a bar, attempts to keep a pretense of their former bourgeois lifestyle. After a mortal brawl, Franz lands in jail, where the monotony, and the sexual frustrations and temptations, are vividly portrayed by Dieterle. Franz eventually succumbs to the sexual charms of his cellmate, and leaves prison a different man. Elena, meanwhile, has secrets of her own. Freedom holds nothing for "two human beings made guilty by the rules of society," as the intertitles suggest, thus extending the film's condemnation of prison as a "societal act of revenge" beyond the prison gates.