Maria lives with her grandfather in a secluded fishing hut on Lake Constance where they barely survive on what the fishing grounds provide. The daughters from next door make things worse by scaring away the fish with their motorboat. But Hans, the son of a rich family, falls in love with Maria and tries to help her, although she is unsure if he can be trusted.
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.
Gilberte Montavon was a legend in her own lifetime. As a young woman, she was confidante to hundreds of thousands of Swiss-German speaking soldiers during the First World War, and remembered most of their names. She was still a teenager when the war began, and was immortalised by a song written during the war years by the Swiss-German bard and lute player, Hans Inn der Gand.
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...
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.
