From Morn to Midnight (1920)

Time for a silent German expressionist film, I think, and one that's a hundred years old this year. This has all the crooked, alienating, crooked set design that one would expect from the movement that gave us Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Quite rightly, neither the look nor the acting are having any of that realism nonsense.

This is based on a play by Georg Kaiser of which I know nothing except what I've just Googled. Apparently Kaiser eschewed such bourgeois affectations as characterisation and his plays all apply Nietzcgean philosophy. Here, then, we have a middle aged bank cashier who one day, on a whim, nicks a load of money because he wrongly thinks some Italian lady fancies him, abandons his wife and daughter, and aimlessly looks for meaning. It's quite the mid-life crisis, sort of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in the Weimar Republic but with added God being dead, supermen, will to power and whatever Nietzchean subtext there may be.

Whatever its philosophical underpinnings, the last scene is devilishly clever. Just as the cashier seems to find religion, and it all seems to be a morality play, this expectation is subverted as the Salvation Army lot turn out to be just as greedy and corruptible as everyone else. The only person standing by him is the girl (the same actress plays many parts, including hid daughter and the prostitute she pervs over... who promptly ships him to the police, whereupon he gets shot dead. Lovely.

This is an enjoyable, neglected gem, freely available on YouTube. Unfortunately though, there's a very dodgily stereotyped Jewish character early on, and we can hardly excuse this in Weimar Germany of all times and places.