The screenplay by Ernst Redlich and Johannes Riemann is based on a true story, and was adapted from the play by Fritz Gottwald and Rudolph Lothar.

Elsewhere in the same town, widowed shopkeeper Frieda pines for her long-lost son Franz, also an Austrian soldier during the War, who disappeared in a prison camp.

After a convoluted chain of events involving several trips to the newspaper's office and the police station (filled with cantankerous bureaucrats), Frieda finds the veteran in a tavern and lovingly takes him home.

"Franz" stresses to Anny the importance of maintaining his secret, while, in the back seat, Frieda confesses to her friend that she had known all along that the veteran was not her son, and she had taken him in out of mere kindness.

He cast Attila Hörbiger from the Josefstadt company and Viennese musical comedy star Hansi Niese in the lead roles and managed to elicit from them an acting style better suited to the screen than stage.

[1][2] Although the film, which opened at the Emperor Theater in Vienna on 21 December 1931, was a critical and commercial success, in later years Preminger described it as a juvenile folly he preferred to forget.