Krambambuli (1940)

The young vagabond Thomas Werndl comes across a stray dog. He names him “Krambambuli” and takes him along on his travels. Some time later, Werndl finds work on a farm run by the widow Crescentia Sonnleitner. She lives there with her daughter Anna and her brother Adam Holzapfel, a retired postman. Gradually, Werndl and his employer’s daughter fall in love, even though Anna Sonnleitner is promised to the gamekeeper Barthel Raunegger. One Sunday, after leaving church, Anna finds her beloved drunk, and when he and the gamekeeper nearly come to blows, she steps in front of the gamekeeper. Thomas leaves the farm. Shortly afterward, a fight breaks out between him and a farmhand at an inn. Thomas badly injures the young man, and the gendarme who is called in takes him into custody. With a heavy heart, Thomas has to part from his companion, Krambambuli. He leaves the dog in Adam’s care. When Anna eventually marries the gamekeeper, she takes Krambambuli with her to the gamekeeper’s house. At first, Barthel resents the animal because it reminds him of his former rival, but after a while he trains him to be a capable hunting dog. Thomas manages to escape from prison. His first stop is Adam Holzapfel’s, where he asks for some money and to collect Krambambuli. When he learns what has happened to the dog, he rushes off in anger. At the fairground, the waitress Kathrein admires his marksmanship at a shooting gallery. She takes him to her lodgings, and the next day she persuades him to poach. Thomas gets a job with Zirbel, an alcoholic gunsmith who can use a steady hand to sight in his rifles. One day, Thomas meets his former lover again in Zirbel’s shop. She suspects that Thomas is the poacher her husband has been searching for for some time. So she begs him to leave the area, and Thomas promises that he will. But Kathrein puts pressure on him, so he breaks his promise and goes poaching again. In the high forest, Thomas and the gamekeeper cross paths. The dog recognizes his former master. Called by both men, he does not know whom to obey. In the end, Krambambuli chooses Thomas and rushes toward him. The gamekeeper takes advantage of the moment and shoots the poacher dead. He casts Krambambuli out, believing him to be disloyal. The dog stays by the body at first and follows the pallbearers as far as the cemetery gate. After some time, he goes to the gamekeeper’s house and whines at the door, but is not let in. Over the following weeks, the dog roams the forest and repeatedly returns to the cemetery gate. Barthel has changed his mind and searched for the dog in vain. With no one to care for him anymore, Krambambuli grows increasingly gaunt. When it snows, he returns to the gamekeeper’s house and lies down on the doorstep. After a while, he lies there dead in the snow.