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When he presented it at the Pacific Film Archive in 1989, historian William K. Everson described this charming early sound feature as a Disney-esque fairy tale, and he had a point: there's a disarming, almost childlike innocence to the characters and scenario. The film is part love story and part wildlife protection fable, following a pair of stray visitors (a precocious young boy and a beautiful, runaway orphan girl) who find adventure and (for the latter, at least) romance while trespassing after hours among the other caged animals in Hungary's capitol city. The setting may not have a convincing Middle European flavor, but the film is remarkably free of the awkward sentiment common to many early talkie productions. And the script shows surprising consistency for an effort credited to five writers, one of whom couldn't resist adding a slam-bang safari stampede climax totally out of step with the otherwise sensitive melodrama preceding it. The beautiful camera-work, no longer pristine in this surviving print, is the work of Lee Garmes.

The large cast of characters in this lively German feature provides a rough cross-section of a malcontent society in transit: corrupt policemen, cynical young prostitutes, illegal Lebanese aliens, delinquent runaway children, and Zischke himself: a sullen but self-reliant teenage cartoonist abandoned by his mother when she follows her American GI boyfriend back to the land of milk and honey across the Atlantic. Is it any wonder that a city with such a chronic identity problem as pre-unification Berlin would be inhabited by a shifting population of rootless, restless souls? Everyone here is vaguely dissatisfied and desperate for some way (any way) out, which soon arrives in the coveted form of two forged passports. The production benefits from some youthful enthusiasm on both sides of the camera, but there isn't much substance behind all the attractive black and white photography. And the script is fatally overwritten, introducing so many peripheral subplots that the final resolution can't help but seem anticlimactic.

Small movies can sometimes yield large pleasures, but to appreciate this modest, independently produced drama you'll have to first forgive a lot of its shortcomings. The film is more well-meant than well-made, following the battle of wills between a dictatorial grandmother and a benevolent French governess over the welfare of a precocious, orphaned poor-little-rich-girl. But it's an unfair competition from the start: Grandma Coco can only express her affection for young Phoebe through jealous tantrums and cruel discipline, while governess Zelly (short for Mademoiselle) is all compassion and tenderness (and very little else).

The film is a peculiar mixture of lukewarm nostalgia and cold, upper-crust alienation, showing more forbearance than might otherwise be expected from a story about child abuse. But the meager budget isn't enough to convincingly recreate the (somewhat arbitrary) 1958 setting, effectively isolating the action in a dramatic vacuum. A little more background detail might have made it more involving.

Look for cult director David Lynch in a small role, alongside his then girlfriend Isabella Rossellini.