Summary
A brittle marriage fractures under the weight of suspicion when a Berlin industrialist’s wife is found lifeless beside a shattered cognac glass; the husband, volatile and debt-smeared, becomes the prime quarry of Inspector Rieding, a man whose moustache bristles with the certainty of statistics. Into this suffocating parlour of accusations stumbles Walter Wolffgram’s jittery secretary, pocketing clandestine IOUs; Frida Richard’s widowed aunt, whose lace handkerchief reeks of bitter almond; and Emmerich Hanus’s gaunt physician, brandifying forged prescriptions like ecclesiastical relics. Rudolf Del Zopp orchestrates the husband’s every flinch into a shadow-play of guilt, yet the camera—sniffing along corridors of chiaroscuro—keeps unveiling contradictory reflections: a torn glove, a bloodless razor, a locked conservatory door breathing open in moonlight. Each reel peels back strata of Wilhelmine propriety to expose the rattle of class terror beneath, until the final twist lands not as whodunit revelation but as surgical indictment of a society that criminalises despair while laundering its own sins through polished silver.
