L'Escalier de service

Due to his conservative nature, this Herr Graf often doesn't want to run the risk of re-watching some old nitrate that in past have not met with aristocratic favour just to check if finally the passage of time did it some good. So, in order to avoid so risky adventures, this Herr Graf prefers to give support to a winner, watching a German silent masterpiece.

Because "Hintertreppe" ( Backstairs ) (1921) is certainly that; it's an absolutely brilliant ( in spite of the darkness included in the whole picture ) masterpiece, an intimate oeuvre in where the most inner human feelings are at loose.

The film was directed by Herr Leopold Jessner as assisted by Herr Paul Leni (who in many German film encyclopaedias is credited as co-director of the film). Certainly, his work as set designer is magnificent although Herr Jessner as one of the most innovative stage directors of the time is the responsible of the many merits of the picture.

"Hintertreppe" is considered an early "Kammerspielfilm" (with echoes of "Expressionism" for this German count). Certainly the atmosphere achieved by Herr Leni's décors contribute enormously to this aspect and the artistic concept of such a brilliant film piece, created thanks also to Herr Jessner's stage techniques. The result is a perfect atmosphere in relation with the story of a housemaid ( Frau Henny Porten ), her lover ( Herr Wilhelm Dieterle ) and a partly paralyzed postman ( Herr Fritz Kortner ) who secretly loves the girl.

These décors exude genuineness depicting the common life and labour of the main characters in the film: the household in which the girl works, her private room and the postman's one contrast with the bourgeoisie sets of the girl's masters, or the courtyard connection between the girl and the postman which lead the postman to his secret love. They are décors in where simple life is showed in a natural and dark way and drama will appear using the same artistic resources.

Thanks to Herr Jessner instructions, in these décors the characters freed their most emotive, inner and bare human feelings. They are universal feelings that certainly have no need to be explained by any intertitle, an exemplary lesson of performing ( stage performing if we want to say in that way having in mind Herr Jessner's background ). The most simple but careful gesture is important, reflecting in that way the actors the hopes and sorrows of the characters in what it is one of the most moving actors performing of the silent era. Frau Henny Porten and Herr Fritz Kortner are simply superb. A the third, Herr Wilhelm Dieterle, disappeared at the beginning of the film appearing almost at the end. It certainly would have been better that he hadn't done so having keeping in mind the terrible consequences that this had for the other two…

It is not very usual that this Herr Graf mention a modernen music score in a silent picture but in this occasion is necessary because such score is absolutely brilliant, rhythmically illustrate the happenings and creates the mood that the story needs. So, this Herr Graf would like to praise such beautiful score and even invite some longhaired youngsters to serve the tea if they will reveal who they are because there is no trace of the composers in the nitrate showed at the Schloss theatre.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must watch who use the Schloss backstairs.

A maid to a rich family loves a man, but a postman living in the courtyard of the same building secretly loves her and by interfering causes tragedy.

Perhaps best for the production design and for the fact that the three principles get most of the screen time.

The years from 1918-1920 are largely lost in Paul Leni's filmography, so it becomes difficult to see at this point if the more assured storytelling comes from Leni's increased experience or the added influence of the co-director Leopold Jessner. I'm actually leaning towards Jessner being the bigger influence because his sudden introduction feels different from what Leni had been making before. Leni's films had felt overstuffed to a certain extent, but Hintertreppe feels pared down, like a short story of five to ten pages spread over fifty minutes of screentime, like the work of someone who understood that, especially in silent cinema, less can be more. Also, the copy I had listed Leni as just doing the sets even though just about everywhere else lists Jessner and Leni as co-directors.

The maid (Henny Porten) works in a nice apartment owned by rich patrons and spends her days cleaning their kitchen and manning the back door to the back stairs (the literal translation of the title). After she's done with her work, she sneaks out to meet her lover (William Dieterle) in the street to embrace. One night, the lover does not come to meet her. The next night he does not come either, nor the following. This gets observed by the crippled mailman (Fritz Kortner) who loves the maid and hates to see her in pain, so he decides to forge a letter from the lover to give to her to make her feel better. She's so excited that she runs after him to thank him, meeting him in his dingy little underground apartment and discovering his secret of his forgery.

That is something like two-thirds of the film, and it really takes its time to tell it. I really don't mind here because it's about focusing on these two characters as they navigate each other cautiously in the middle of this dangerous looking place. The nature of the world is defined by the set design, and it's effectively another character (all praise goes to Leni for this). The kitchen looks well-put together, but the titular stairs are dark and decaying (so distinctive that they ended up firmly influencing a lot of German Expressionism afterwards) while the outside world (a very tall set of a pair of buildings up against each other) is dark and imposing. The postman's flat is simple and dirty. It all amounts to this imposing, grimy environment in which these two characters end up almost entirely alone.

Aside from the lover's early appearance for a minute or so, the maid and the postman are the only two characters for about forty minutes of the film's fifty minutes of screentime. We see shadows of the maid's employers behind a glass window having a party, but her existence is otherwise a lonely one. The lack of other actors could very well have been a cost saving move at the time, but it has a great effect of making the discovery between the two all the more affecting. They're alone, and all they can find is each other, so when the maid discovers the postman's ruse, she can't help feeling, after a minute of a sense of betrayal and invasion, that he was just trying to be kind to her (I was honestly expecting something far more nefarious, which I never got, and I don't mind).

The tragedy happens when the lover comes back and everything comes crashing down. It fully embraces its status as melodrama with its final movements, and it's not something I entirely oppose. I don't hate melodrama, but I think these final moves end up feeling like a more sensational out than something that could have been a bit more character-driven. The issue is that while the relationship between the maid and the postman is very nice, we don't get deeper senses of their character beyond their stations and the postman's deformity. Her feeling compelled to do something so drastic after we know so little about her individually feels almost like a cheat. It is essentially a scandalous ending that sort of works, but it could have been better with a fuller portrait of the maid.

However, that's not to take away from the central little tragic romance. It's quite nice, and it's framed greatly in this fantastic series of sets. I think it works quite well overall. It's small, looks great, and has an ending that goes a bit too far, but it's fine.

It's probably best to begin a review of the film I watched with liner notes by David Gasten of The Pola Negri Appreciation Site: "...Henny Porten's "Backstairs" (1921) (aka "Hintertreppe (its original title)) is one of the earliest attempts at reproducing a pioneering and revolutionary genre of German theatre called "intimate theatre" (kammerspiel). This purposefully minimalistic film seized the imaginations of film critics, and helped pioneer a small but very influential subgenre of German film called the kammerspielfilm; this film style would come to a greater fruition in F. W. Murnau's "Sunrise" (1927) and Hedy Lamarr's breakthrough film "Ecstasy" (1933)."

Quite honestly, I've never watched a film like this one. It nearly felt as if I were in a theater watching a huge, but somehow intensely intimate, stage performance by the three main players, and really only two. The film only lasts for 50 minutes. Henny Porten's performance is not only Academy Award worthy, but one of the finest performances I've ever seen on film - BUT - is also so stylized as to be disturbing at times, too. There are moments when time itself seems to slow down for her and fellow actor, Fritz Kortner, the other main actor of the piece; and when that occurs the actors seem to move in slow motion, though it's their movement and not a camera trick that is doing the linearity of the film. And - it's all very natural. The sets are simply amazing. The first thing that came to my mind were sets from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", expressionistic things that looked as if they came out of a dream sequence. The sets in "Backstairs" are small and cramped and dirty and poor and mis-shapen and dark and thick and at angles and curves that are claustrophobic. May I say, too, that the second thing that struck me immediately is that the set of the outside of the living quarters looked nearly identical to that which is in the later film, "The Last Laugh" (1924) - nearly exact, if not part of the same set.

I think to give what this film is about, I need to quote a review that appears in the IMDb because it clarifies several things that may be questioned while watching. This is a review by "fredhedges" that appeared last 19 August (2019); he begins by correcting a review that had appeared above that perhaps mis-interpreted the film: "The Synopsis given above is, I believe, inaccurate, a misreading of the narrative. The Lover, played by Wilhelm Dieterle, unexpectedly disappears and is not heard from - an occurrence which would have been understood by audiences of the time to imply the young man being at the front during the war. Out of love for the Girl, who is devastated by the man's absence incommunicado, the Mailman (Fritz Kortner) forges a letter to her, to make her happy. She discovers the ruse and is terribly upset; she has to assume that the Lover has been killed. But she also sees the kindness of the Mailman's actions, and returns his affection. But then the Lover returns, showing the Girl the letter she wrote him earlier, which no doubt declared her love for him. "What's going on? You wrote this to me, and now I see you creeping out of this person's place!" It looks like a betrayal, and perhaps it was, since a kiss can be a code for something more intimate. There is an inevitability to the tragic denouement...I take my reading of the narrative from Anton Kaes' excellent book Shellshock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War."

Truly a great movie with only one, maybe two, intertitles in the whole thing. Not for everybody, but for those interested in early experiments in cinema, and not necessarily avant garde , this could be a revelation.

Stars again Henny Porten, Fritz Kortner, and Wilhelm Dieterle and Eugene Dieterle, with several extras near the tragic end.

The absolute incomprehension (sometimes comical because of the contradictions)shown by many of the commentators on this film (the notable exception is of course the exquisite Von Galitzen) is really rather sad but not I think so surprising. We are a long way here from the US cinema tradition and in the vanguard of the synthesis between the naturalistic (known in Germany as "neue Sachligkeit") and the non-realist (variously surrealist, expressionist, futurist) that will characterise the finest flowering of European film in the decade that follows and will continue to inform "social realism" (Russia), "poetic realism" (France), neo-realism (thirties Japan and post-war Italy) and "new wave" (France, Eastern Europe, Japan, Iran) right into modern times.

This film is a little gem, a dark reverse-fairy tale, bleak as a winter morning, told with much compassion but with a merciless absence of sentimentality. It mixes elements of the naturalistic and the non-realistic (broadly "expressionistic") in a very typical manner. There is for instance a very deliberate and highly effective contrast between the acting style of Henny Porten and that of the two men. Every shot is stunning and there is interest in every small element of its mise en scène.

Jessner was basically a man of the theatre (director of the Berlin Staatstheater) but there is a completely fluid relationship between theatre and film in Weimar Germany and the influence of theatre (to be found in all German films of the period) does not in the least mean that the films are "uncinematic". Quite the contrary. The principle of mise en scène developed in the naturalistic theatre demands precisely that the director's approach should reflect the medium he or she is using (one finds the same for instance with the very cinematic films of André Antoine, the doyen of French naturalistic theatre) So the political symbolism of the famous "Jessenscher treppen" was already well known from the director's work in the theatre but is here, with the help of Leni's superb sets and the expert camera-work of Willy Hameister and Karl Hasselmann given a supremely cinematic function that will frequently be copied in later German films of the period.

The film has a small set, virtually no titles, only three actors for most of its length but there is a great freedom allowed to the spectator to construct for him of herself the context of the action, a context that lives in the various inanimate objects that represent a presence of others never seen (the shoes, the plates, the glassware, the table-setting, the flowers, the punch) as well as in the Chinese shadows" occasionally seen in the room(s) beyond. The famous stair are not the only powerful symbol. Another is the small half-moon shaped barred window for which, as far as I know there is no word in English but which s called in French a "soupirail" and is a feature to basement flats throughout Continental Europe and will turn up as commonly as the backstairs in the films of the period.

It is one of the great films of the year which also saw Lang's Der müde Tod, Lubitsch's Die Bergkatze, Pick's Scherben, Murnau's Der Gang in der nacht, Buchetowski's Sappho, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Blade af Satans Bog, Feyder's L'Atlantide, the Asta Nielsen Hamlet, Sjöström's Phantom Carriage, Stiller's Johan. Altogether a very remarkable year for European cinema.

In the US there were several fine comedy classics (an area in which the US no longer had any rivals) but otherwise....Blood and Sand and The Sheik, The Three Musketeers, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Molly O' - puerile fun but not much else.

Of "serious" films, Tol'able David by the still much-undervalued Henry King stands out but even this film has something of that quality of false, mythologising sentimentality that is the curse of US film. It was unsurprisingly a favourite film of John Ford's.

In 1923 Pickford would invite Lubitsch to the US to try and inject adult content into her films (it did not work) and in 1926 the great F.W. Murnau would be persuaded to come.

Briefly the US glimpses the possibility of a rather different cinema (so Sunrise, Paul Fejos' Lonesome, King Vidor's The Crowd) but the attempt will attract great hostility from the production companies and never take, the effort to do anything different in US film being definitively abandoned (at least till the time of Orson Welles) with the advent of sound in 1928-9. Sound, the emergence of a new generation of young actors from the theatre (Cagney, Bogart, Tracy etc) and the arrival in large numbers of German, Austrian and Hungarian directors after 1933) all do combine to produce much more adult content in US films but it will now always have to be contained and confined within the limits of the dominant "realistic" mode.