In The Joyless Street (1925), Pabst overlaps the stories of three desperate women to highlight the post-war catastrophe in Vienna during 1921. In a climate of scarcity and exploitation, women are appraised and traded like any piece of meat in a butcher's shop. The director asks us to consider what value morality has when people starve. While the men speculate on stocks with reckless abandon, women worry about feeding the family and paying the bills.

I close the episode with a brief passage from Garbo by Barry Paris.