Having gained great fame in the period of silent cinema, first with expressionist tapes, and later breaking with the key film aesthetics of Germany of the 1920s, Pabst did not get lost in sound cinema. Of course, next to the adaptations of “Threepenny Opera” or “Don Quixote” with the great Ernst Bush and Fyodor Chaliapin, respectively, “Top Down” can look like a trifle of the French period of the director. But that's not at all true.
Long before the fashion for multi-character films (here Altman was, is and will remain a luminary), Pabst managed to bring together a number of plots that are played out separately, in parallel, from time to time intersect, or even desperately clash within the framework of a small topos of a large apartment building that inhabit a variety of inhabitants. It is impressive that the whole story is associated with a very modest timekeeping, but an hour and a little was enough for Pabst to place all the necessary accents as in the key story of the beginning and development of the relationship of the famous but simple football scorer, the main “star” of the house and a novice teacher who went to the maids on someone else’s certificate in anticipation of a better share.
Of course, the big house and its inhabitants are not the find of Pabst himself, it is enough to recall at least “Under the roofs of Paris” and “Million” by René Kler, but the German director, who shoots a film in French about the capital of Austria, succeeded in an ensemble film. The key story does not suppress all the other elements of the film with its melodramatism, the main intonation of which can be described more as comedic-poetic, but not melodramatic in essence. In the acting ensemble stands out a lot. And rich spouses, to whom the main character is arranged, where the wife is too grumpy, and the husband is an unsuccessful libertine. And the character of Michel Simon, lumpenized, but not losing his human dignity even without trousers, who is extremely sympathetic to the naive but kind cook, who owns in his native village "one eighth part of the cow." Remembered and very small role of the third star of the film, Peter Lorre, playing a trickster vagrant.
That is, the main characters do not completely overlap the mobile and active background, which does not turn the language in the background. Without pedantic moralizing and unambiguous social seriousness of many of his German films, Pabst made a truly French film, in no way inferior to the French directors of that time.