The Great Love (German: Lang) is a 1931 Austrian drama film directed by Otto Preminger, the first of his career. The screenplay by Ernst Redlich and Johannes Riemann is based on a true story, and was adapted from the play by Fritz Gottwald and Rudolph Lothar.

Plot

In 1927, ten years following the end of World War I, an unnamed Austrian soldier leaves a job in Tbilisi and returns to his Austrian village. He is unemployed and virtually penniless, but is determined to earn a living for himself. Elsewhere in the same town, widowed shopkeeper Frieda pines for her long-lost son Franz, also an Austrian soldier during the War, who disappeared in a prison camp. The unnamed veteran surveys the village from a bridge, from which he sees a young girl fall into the river below. He jumps after and rescues her, refusing any reward but allowing a passing journalist to take his picture. The image of the soldier appears on the front page of the next day's newspaper. Frieda mistakes the veteran for Franz and sets out to find him. After a convoluted chain of events involving several trips to the newspaper's office and the police station (filled with cantankerous bureaucrats), Frieda finds the veteran in a tavern and lovingly takes him home.