Großstadtnacht Review: A dusty, beautifully messy 1930s street drama

If you have a soft spot for early 1930s European cinema where everyone communicates via intense staring, this one is worth a look today. People who love gritty, street-level Weimar-era vibes will definitely eat it up. But if you get annoyed by main characters who make incredibly dumb decisions just to kickstart the plot, you will probably want to throw your remote at the wall. 😅

The whole thing starts with Madeleine, this young French student who decides she must be in the theater. She literally just walks out of her safe school into the jaws of Paris. Talk about zero survival instincts.

It actually reminds me a bit of the sheer dramatic stubbornness in Nothing Matters, where characters just run headfirst into ruin because they have a "feeling."

The actress playing Madeleine has these huge, expressive eyes that make you want to shake her. She arrives in Paris looking like she expects the streets to be paved with stage scripts. Instead, she gets the cold shoulder and ends up drifting onto the rough streets. It gets dark fast.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Großstadtnacht (1932) through its definitive frames.

There is this one scene in a cheap cafe that is just brilliant. The background noise is this messy mix of clinking glasses and accordion music that feels totally real. You can almost smell the stale beer and cheap tobacco. A guy in the corner just stares at his soup for like three minutes. I love weird, useless details like that.

But then the movie gets a bit clumsy. Ivan Koval-Samborsky shows up, and the plot tries to turn into this heavy-handed moral lesson. It feels like the writers—Fyodor Otsep was one of them, which explains some of the weirdly intense editing—could not decide if they wanted a gritty documentary or a stagey melodrama.

Some of the transitions are so abrupt it feels like the projectionist accidentally skipped a reel. One second she is talking to a shady guy, the next she is wandering near the Seine looking miserable. It has that classic early-sound jankiness where the camera is clearly locked in a heavy soundproof box and can barely move.

Still, there is something really charming about how earnest it all is.

Things I scribbled down while watching:

• The headmistress at the school has the most terrifying eyebrows I have ever seen on a human being. 🤨
• Paris looks incredibly dark, like they ran out of budget for streetlights.
• The accordion player in the tavern is definitely not playing the actual song we are hearing on the soundtrack. His fingers are doing something completely different.
• Why does everyone in 1930s movies pack their entire life into one tiny suitcase?

If you are expecting a masterpiece like some of Otsep's other stuff, you will probably be disappointed. But as a dusty little slice of late-night melodrama? It is kind of perfect for a rainy Sunday when you do not want to think too hard but still want to feel artsy.