As an entry into Weimar life, well Vienna, Austria, but it must have spoken to and about both places equally after the war, this opens a window in a time of hyperinflation and scarcity. And this is what I was looking for, direct experience from within the world that gives rise to it, as something that was about life "now".
We see on one hand the controllers, from the butcher that people line up to buy his precious meat, to the war profiteer who's come to run a scheme on the stockmarket, to the madame of a private club who exploits innocent desperation. All of them lecherous cutouts - but no doubt cut from life. Meanwhile around them dance and mingle various crowds of those who still have.
And on the other side the hapless schmucks dangling on strings of this cruel world being manipulated from above, the poor family downstairs, the girl whose father loses everything when the market tumbles and she's forced to entertain in the club, the unemployed couple who must live in someone's barn. The fancy rooms are closed to them, the streets they know bleak and ugly.
It is all here in a sense, however much schematic. Being a silent, the visceral impression is of a nightmare and reverie, something you'd want to wake up from - and yet the presentation of reality, within silent limits of the era of course, we would call realist, not expressionist.
And this is seen in another way. One of the things that first stirred in the murk of Weimar was film noir, not the actual thing but its ghostly progenitors. Mabuse would posit a bleak world much like we see here, inspired from the same dazed hopelessness no doubt, but a devious mastermind was behind it, the product of dazed imagination. There are devious minds here, but all of them ordinary schemers.
There's clear sight in other words. It was still too early in Pabst's career however and for where I know him to have gone with characters and story much like these, this seems like a modest beginning, a ground floor for future ones to be built on top.
