The plot is broadly similar to Murnau's more upbeat 'Sunrise' a few years later, which also centred upon a stylised city teeming with prostitutes and spivs elaborately recreated from scratch. Although superficially a 'realistic' subject, Karl Grune's fanciful direction emphasises what would now be called the 'noirish', and on the strength of this one would have expected him to have ended his days in Hollywood rather than Bournemouth.
(Since German films were popular with sophisticated American audiences at the time, it's quite possible that F.Scott Fitzgerald saw the film - or at least stills from it - hence the reappearance of the enormous spectacles that famously dominate one scene in the book he was working upon at the time, 'The Great Gatsby'. The deathshead makeup worn by a lady of the night early on also anticipates the yuppie aliens in John Carpenter's 'They Live'.)
(Since German films were popular with sophisticated American audiences at the time, it's quite possible that F.Scott Fitzgerald saw the film - or at least stills from it - hence the reappearance of the enormous spectacles that famously dominate one scene in the book he was working upon at the time, 'The Great Gatsby'. The deathshead makeup worn by a lady of the night early on also anticipates the yuppie aliens in John Carpenter's 'They Live'.)