"While the performance is mostly stagey - the bowler-clad, raffish Forster is nonchalant from stem to stern, a demure Neher (whose own personal tragedy during the WWII would overshadow her final screen presence) keeps her character alive and kicking with nothing much to offer; Schünzel is the comic relief here, discombobulated and antsy while Rasp is a tinpot leader, but the real deal here is Lenya, with her unusual underbite, she can belt out poignantly, but in the next breath, stuns as a cunning vamp who can sell her lover down the river, yet, that isn't her verdict -, Pabst gins up the beggar-belief storytelling with steadfast visual idioms (superimpositions, dolly shots, including an antic of a self-elevating bowler!), and really goes the distance with
the marching lumbering mass climax, zombie-like and unstoppable, the proletariat power wanes in favor of a veiled validation of capitalism, for sure Brecht is not happy about that."