For years this film was counted as the most significant of the lost Murnaus; reconstructed, it reveals the richly detailed treatment that drew comparisons with the films of his Swedish contemporaries Sjöstrom and Stiller. The story concerns a peasant, Johannes, whose values and relationships are distorted by the prospect of wealth from the oil-rich land known as “the devil's field” into which he has married. Lotte Eisner writes in Murnau (1964) of this then-lost film: “German and foreign critics alike pronounced this film perfect. Everyone talked about the poetic charm of the snowy landscapes and the marvelous lighting that reached its peak in the fire at the oil-well at night, surrounded by snow.... Within (the) atmospheric interiors the characters were arranged with enormous skill according to value and tone, even when they were in movement. They had to convey at one and the same time these ‘tonal chords' and ‘dramatic chords in space', as Murnau said in one of his articles. But above everything else was the authenticity of all the complex psychological incident--what a French review called a sincerity ‘faithful to life and reality.'”