In a port city, Paul Rehkopf is a beggar, with a regular stand on a busy street. One day he spots a pearl necklace just lying on the ground. He grabs it. He tells no one but Fritz Genschow, the unemployed man who lives with him. They'll wait until they're sure it's safe, he tells Gentschow, then sell it. But they don't know that Lissy Arna, a coked-out street walker saw him take it. And she wants out of this life as much as anyone.
Looking at this, I wondered if Fritz Lang had seen this, with its view of the society of low-lifes who inhabit the demi-monde, and how they mostly tolerate each other. Part of that is the presence of Friederich Gnass, and part is Sig Arno as the rapacious fence. He's disgusting, far from the comic characters he would play for Preston Sturges a decade latr, and equally far from Gustaf Gründgens. His far more suave and prepossessing analogue in M.
But clearly this silent movie, shot in the final days of the period, takes advantage of the things you could do with a mobile camera. Images float. They are made from a variety of angles; and the editing is lightning fast, forming montages to excite the audience's imagination.
And therefore, it seems to me to be one of the sort of movies that would begin to coalesce a decade later into film noir. True, it hasn't been filtered through French poetic realism, but there's the German expressionist camerawork, a corrupt world for it to look at, and even endpieces to place the story within an ironic and very sad framework. Don't look here for a happy ending. But try to imagine what might have become of the movies had sound been put off for another ten years.
