Bolwieser (Kurt Raab) is a small-town stationmaster in the late 1920s whose slavish passion for his wife Hanni allows him to turn a blind eye to her affairs with the local romeos. Hanni (Elizabeth Trissenaar) is the Emma Bovary of Bavaria, no more, no less, but small-town hypocrisy, jealousy, and his own subservient mentality fuel Bolwieser's inexorable rush to his own demise. "The Bolwieser of Kurt Raab makes the wretches of Emil Jannings look like fun people," wrote Andrew Sarris. "Oddly, (this) is one of the most beautiful films I have seen, and one of the most genuinely modernist as well." More than the complete Heimat, this one film shows, indirectly and thus powerfully, the conditions of prewar petty bourgeois life that led to the rise of fascism. "A misanthropic fairy tale so lushly designed and photographed it seems to have been conceived in a fever dream....There is a sweet little yellow canary in the Bolwieser apartment, just above the railroad station. When the canary chirps, as it does almost constantly, it sounds as if a fingernail were being drawn across a blackboard." (Vincent Canby)