New York, 1941: As Ferry Tobler fades from view, anxious refugee Freddy Wolff (Gabriel Barylli) walks down the gangplank of a ship, only to be swept up in the tangle of inadvertent immigration. Like a child of Karl May, Freddy longs for the lonesome expanses of the West and carries with him a train ticket to Santa Fe, a rail he’ll never ride. Instead, the Manhattan skyline becomes his rocky range and the émigré community his frontier town. His fellow refugees are flummoxed by their troubling plight: an aging poet runs a deli; a skilled surgeon goes without work; a stage actor does animal calls on the radio; and Freddy stumbles along in a milliner’s sweatshop. There are always alluring dreams like Santa Fe, but in Corti’s assured film it is the inexorable stress of survival that marks humankind’s resilience.

—Steve Seid

• Written by Corti, Georg Stefan Troller. Photographed by Gernot Roll. With Johannes Silberschneider, Gabriel Barylli, Doris Buchrucker, Ernst Stankovsky. (110 mins, In German with English subtitles, B&W, Beta SP, From National Center for Jewish Film)