Germany, 1920
Directed by Karlheinz Martin
With Ernst Deutsch (the Cashier), Roma Bahn (the Lady, the Beggar, the Cashier’s Daughter, the Whore, the Salvation Army Girl), Lotte Stein (the Cashier’s Wife), Frida Richard (the Cashier’s mother), Eberhard Wrede (the Cashier’s manager), Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (the Young Man with the Lady)

The film was shot soon after Robert Wiene shot “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” but there has been no trace of any public release of that other egregious example of Expressionism in Germany and for a long time copies were hard to get. That is hard to understand but these oddities go a long way to explain why it has been often overlooked even if the visual style is awesome and sharp – indeed, it could be argued this Karlheinz Martin film is an even more conspicuous and convincing Expressionist movie than that other 1920 masterwork.
The settings and the props are the most striking and incredible elements: roughly cut from wood, crudely painted, displaying systematically warped, jagged, and out-of-proportion shapes, flourished with odd lines and twirls, they sport the loosest connection with actual life and instead are redolent of a deeply distorted and disturbed vision. This is more a dreamy world, and even more obviously a nightmarish one, than the accurate representation cinema first captured with the shorts of Auguste and Louis Lumière. And the actors fit in this eerie background, with their extravagant clothes, outrageously theatrical gestures, and those stunning faces, either hysterical but barely colored or on the contrary with garish make-up.
This cryptic and creepy world, where lighting brightly lit the people against stifling dark, or at least sober, backdrops, in a sharp show of stark contrast, may be absurd to a rational mind but arguably reflects the state of mind of the lead character whose worried face opens the film and whose lifeless body ends it. This is a tormented soul, unsatisfied with his life and wrecked by bad impulses, the prey of an existential angst in a fast-changing and increasingly capitalistic and materialistic society – in that respect it naturally brings to mind the social critique and humanist concerns that stirred a few painters into action some fifteen years earlier, creating a group, Die Brücke, that would lead to a new, great artistic movement, Expressionism.
The plot, which is developed in a series of five acts, is simple. Sitting at his desk in a small bank, the cashier, a skinny and sullen ordinary worker who does not elicit much sympathy, haunted by thoughts about his home life, is mesmerized by a foreign-born and distinguished lady who comes in to cash money. It turns out she cannot as the bank manager has not received the document the bank needs to proceed. Out of the blue the cashier decides to steal the bank and to offer the money to the lady, clearly hoping to become her lover and to enjoy high life. But the lady has already a young boyfriend. Dejected, he goes back home where he is eagerly awaited by his mother, his wife and his daughter. The three women, who worship him, are amazed to see him in such a bad mood; he then tells them how he hates this family life; and runs away. He spends his money first to dress more elegantly and then to cater to the basest thrills: promising big rewards in an indoors bike race just to watch the motley public grow excited and mad, for money must fuel passion, and then coming into a nightclub, for money must sustain fun and lust; he later plays card with dubious guys, still for the fun of amassing more money. He eventually meets a female activist of the Salvation Army and, as he attends a gathering, suddenly realizes that fortune is just a bitter illusion and vows to redeem himself.
The events last a full day as the title points. Time is of the essence: with clocks always present in the acts, the cashier’s narrative arc is a rush to change as fast and as deeply he could, driven by an urge of live out of his desires and not out of social norms and habits. The best illustration remains the delirious vision he has as he talks with the lady: as she falls on a couch a stunning image is superimposed revealing the man’s expectation – the image of that woman with only part of her undergarments on and her bosom visible; lust is obviously is a big part of his insanity. This obsession with a wilder life does not stem only from frustration: fear of missing time does play a role. Death lurks in those streets shrouded by darkness and festooned with ugliness and where cold and snow assail the passers-by (this is a cruel winter tale, indeed). It confronts him on a regular basis: the cashier’s attention would be caught by a woman – a beggar, his daughter, a whore or even the Salvation Army girl – but if his scrutiny gets too keen, the woman’s face becomes then the skull of Death, which makes him run amok even more. His angst derives from the fear Death would deny him good opportunities; but Death is also the ultimate judge who could say how good or bad his life actually was.
“Von morgens bis mitternachts – From Morning to Midnight” ends in a moralistic way: the sudden enlightenment about good and evil as other sinners confess their lives and the need for redemption. Yet it is ambiguous: as soon as the girl learns who the man she met is she beckons to the police and when the police arrive the cashier panics again and is suddenly frozen in an odd position. The words “Ecce homo” appear above his head but his body looks more like a sad, imploring character like the Virgin Mary or an angel than the crucified Christ. But nothing in the narration gave a hint on a possible divine mystery, and more crucially the words defining him may come from another book than the Bible. They are the title of the autobiography of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who wielded such a huge influence in Germany in the decades immediately following his death in 1900 and certainly no big fan of Christianity. The man the cashier is heralded to be at the last minute, as he has just lost his illusion of power and satisfaction and broken the chains of his madness and impulses, may be a redemptive figure or a failed awakening or just the pathetic expression of human flaws that religion and philosophy have tried to address and that cinema now strives to depict and to investigate in the most daring manner.