Acting
A young soldier in an army camp near a small Swiss village gets into an argument with his sergeant, which winds up in a fight. The soldier, believing he has killed the sergeant, flees to Zurich, determined to disguise himself and cross the border into France. However, things don't work out quite as he had planned.
The title means "The last postillion (stage-coachman) of the St.Gotthard-pass". A company of select people joins the horse-driven coach for crossing the center of the Alps over the traditional path high on the mountain valley. It is the time of railways as the means of modernization. A tunnel is going to be built. The new fast way would render useless the small transport industry from which local people had made their living. The great mountainous landscape is the background for the conflicts which arise between rich and poor, local traditionalists and foreign modernizers. The daughter of a local, who is opposed against the tunnel, would like to get engaged with a tunnel engineer, but is also coveted by a local favored by her father.
A man in his fifties returns from America to his native village. Everyone knows that in the New World he served a lengthy prison sentence for manslaughter. He retreats to an isolated quarry in the woods he inherited. There he lives like a hermit, gruffly disencouraging anyone to come near the place.
The story takes place in Mythikon, a small village on Lake Zurich in the 17th century. The pastor of a rural Zurich community is so obsessed with hunting that his passion threatens to cost him his office and dignity. Now, help is sought from the famous general and cousin of the pastor, who is supposed to set things right with a clever plan.
The daughter of a traveling circus director falls in love with a young farmer and finds herself in a life-changing conflict.
A policeman is not convinced that the prime suspect in a murder case is realty guilty and so decides to reinvestigate the case, despite the lack of co-operation from locals.
While on a longer business trip, a wannabe poet urges his beautiful but more simple wife to answer his overly swollen love letters. With no idea how to respond she forwards the letters to a new young school teacher to use his answers instead...
If any one man is responsible for the rejuvenation of the postwar Swiss film industry, that man was director Leopold Lindtberg. Matto Regiert (Madness Rules) was co-adapted for the screen by Lindtberg from a novel by Friedrich Glauser. Heinrich Gretler stars as Police Constable Studer, the hero of several of Glauser's most popular works. This time, Studer must solve the murder of the director of an insane asylum -- and it's not (surprise, surprise) the most likely suspect, manic-depressive patient Herbert Caplaun. For box-office purposes, Matto Regiert stresses a romantic subplot involving Caplaun and nurse Irma Wasem.
