The film stars Gustav Fröhlich and Betty Amann and is about a young woman in Berlin who is driven into poverty and steals a valuable piece of jewelry.

Her high fashion clothes and perfectly ornamented makeup make her deserving to be peering over diamond cases while batting her eyes in want at the jeweler.

She stares and smiles at his picture again in the nightclub, when she becomes compelled to return his passport and give him a gift of cigars, a scene that results in a confession of love from both Else and Albert.

[3] In 1993, the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin discovered a print of Asphalt at the Gosfilmofond archive in Moscow which seemed to have been sourced from the original film negative.

[3] The newly discovered version of the film was released on DVD by the Masters of Cinema on April 11, 2005 with a score by Karl-Ernst Sasse.

[2] Lotte Eisner related to this statement, writing in 1965 that "Within this insipid plot Joe May occasionally remembers his artistic ambitions.

Similarly, the wide shots are used and sustained with enormous strength of style, and the roaming camera is extremely skilled in the way it reveals human co-existence and spaces"[2]