From Morning to Midnight
About From Morning to Midnight
A bank cashier steals a large sum after a foreign woman fails to withdraw money and he sees a beggar girl as a figure of death. He offers her the cash at her hotel; she laughs and threatens to call her son. He buys evening clothes in the city, tries to buy passion at a bicycle race and a dance, and finds another reminder of death in a wooden leg. A Salvation Army girl stops a stabbing, hears his confession, and then goes for the reward. He shoots himself.
Cast & crew
More about From Morning to Midnight
Karlheinz Martin directed and, with Herbert Juttke, adapted Georg Kaiser's 1912 play. Ernst Deutsch plays the cashier. Roma Bahn plays the daughter, the beggar, a woman at the dance, and the Salvation Army girl. Carl Hoffmann photographed. Robert Neppach designed the sets, painted flats with little attempt at a real room.
Themes
Look
Carl Hoffmann shot Neppach's painted sets, with the cashier isolated against flat black-and-white shapes rather than a bank that looks habitable.
Preservation
Long treated as lost. A print was found in Tokyo in 1959 and first shown again in Germany, in East Berlin, in 1963.
Notes
- The film is in five acts, following the stations of Kaiser's play.
- Erna Morena plays the lady from the bank. Hans Heinrich von Twardowski plays the young man.
- It was shown in Japan in 1922. A German premiere at the time is not recorded.
- A print turned up in 1959 at the National Film Center in Tokyo and later went to the East German film archive.
- The first German screening of that print was in East Berlin in 1963.
Scenes
- The cashier sees the beggar girl as death and takes the bank's money.
- At the dance, a woman's wooden leg reads to him as another death.
- He throws the remaining notes at the Salvation Army hall and then shoots himself.
Influenced by
- Georg Kaiser's play From Morning to Midnight (1912)
