Friendship develops between an aging, former railroad worker living in an abandoned theater and Willie, the wayward, alcoholic architect he shelters (Elliot Gould).
In Vienna, in 1930, a young woman falls in love with a gambler and leaves her fiancé, a common butcher. They become a couple and have a baby, but he gets bored and leaves them. Without means to support herself, her downfall begins.
Kurt Gerber is attending his final class and gets into trouble with the math professor, a frustrated self-assured petty bourgeois sadist. The duel ends in catastrophe.
