In Wenders’ first widely released feature—after 1970’s rarely shown Summer in the City—a soccer goalie, Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss), is ejected after committing a foul during a match. After losing his bearings in the strange town his team was visiting, he spends the night with the box-office attendant of a movie theater (Erika Pluhar), and the next morning winds up murdering her for seemingly no reason. Instead of trying to cover up the crime or go into hiding, Bloch heads to the country place of an ex-girlfriend (Kai Fischer) and waits there for the police to come and get him. As Wenders himself has stated, the visual style of Alfred Hitchcock’s films provided the model for this film.