A rare early work, Tonight or Never initiated Schmid’s filmic investigations of time and bourgeois culture. The film is a parable, based on the traditions of the Esterhazy family from sixteenth-century Prague. Schmid himself has described the custom and his contemporary reimagining of its scenario: "On one night of the year, the night of Saint Nepomuk (May 16), [the Esterhazys] would exchange roles with their servants. Tonight or Never takes up this tradition and introduces a third group, the comedians. Paid by the masters playing servant, they come to perform a potpourri of bourgeois entertainment. They put on assorted bits from the ‘cultural scrap heap’: a section of Gone with the Wind, a scene from Tennessee Williams, the death of Madame Bovary by Flaubert, and the end of Tschaikovsky’s Swan Lake."