When Mel gets the ax from his well paid job, his wife takes a job to tide them over. Then she too is sacked. Mel is fighting a losing battle with the very environs of life. Polluted air is killing everything that grows on his terrace; the walls of the high rise apartment are paper thin so the private lives of a pair of German airline attendants are open books to him; the apartment is burglarized and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000.00 of his money. Mel has a nervous breakdown, but he has the grit to survive.

“Creates an everyday urban purgatory from which laughter seems to be released like vapour from the city’s manholes.” - Time