It has the subtitle Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns (German: Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht).

The film is an adaptation of the 1959 novel Billiards at Half-past Nine by Heinrich Böll.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker reviewed the film in 2008: "Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely.

The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.

This article related to a German film of the 1960s is a stub.