The film disappeared after Helene Weigel, Brecht's widow, saw it on television and demanded that it no longer be shown.
[3] The film did not make the 1919 play a period piece, and some of the interiors featured intentionally over-the-top colors.
[citation needed] The film "explores the cult of the genius" as "an anti-heroic figure... chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality."
In the film, "Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969", as [p]oet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers.
At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men...[4] After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck.