Joyless Street
Joyless Street, also titled The Street of Sorrow or The Joyless Street, is a 1925 German silent film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst starring Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen. It is based on a novel by Hugo Bettauer and widely considered an expression of New Objectivity in film.
Plot
In an alley called Melchiorgasse in a poor quarter of 1921 Vienna, Austria, the lives of several people coincide. Marie, daughter of an abusive war veteran father, hopes to escape her home with the help of her boyfriend Egon, a bank clerk. Grete is the elder daughter of impoverished civil servant Rumfort. Marie and Grete join the overnight line of waiting customers outside of the butcher's shop run by the abusive Josef Geiringer, but Grete passes out and loses her place. Marie and her friend Else manage to enter Geiringer's shop, where they receive a piece of meat in exchange for Else's sexual services. Else offers Marie to share the meat with her, but Marie declines, knowing that Else, whose husband is unemployed, has a young child to feed.
More details
| author | Willy Haas |
|---|---|
| contentLocation | Vienna |
| director | Georg Wilhelm Pabst |
| editor | Mark Sorkin |
| events | prostitution |
| genre | drama social |
| keywords | american red cross bank clerk civil servant falsely accused high society impoverish meet murder night club red cross starve steal stock exchange unemployed wait war veteran |
| musicBy | Max Deutsch |
| producer | Michael Salkin Romain Pinès |
| productionCompany | Sofar-Film-Produktion GmbH |
| publisher | Sofar-Film-Produktion GmbH |
| theme | silent |