Le monde des musicals

In 1920s Hamburg, Professor Raat, a tyrannical and repressed elderly school-teacher, pursues a group of errant pupils into a cheap waterfront cabaret where he becomes hopelessly infatuated and obsessed with Lola, the seductive, skimpily clad resident chanteuse. Eventually she marries him for his money and then leaves him when the money has gone. At the same time, he has been rejected by polite society because of Lola’s profession, and takes his revenge by cultivating a nice line in blackmail. However, his enemies get the better of him, and he ends up being forced to play the clown (literally) for their benefit.