Tales from the Vienna Woods

You'd never guess it from this film version, but Odin von Horvath's play, premiered in Germany in 1931 and successfully staged by Schell at the National Theatre in 1977, has been held up for favourable comparison with Brecht. Set in the Vienna of Hitler's day but ironically drenched in Strauss waltzes, it chronicles the tragi-comic tribulations of an honest middle class shopkeeper whose rebellious daughter runs away from an approved marriage, gets herself pregnant, and ends up face-to-face with daddy in the nightclub to which she has sinfully gravitated. The film is so lumpishly stagebound that its satire of the bourgeoisie and conventional values emerges as painfully crude caricature.