Backstairs

In a poor quarter of a large city, a partly paralysed postman is in love with a maid who works in the same building. She is in love with a well-off young man who one day disappears. To keep her hope alive the postman brings her letters, and that is where the tragedy that finishes all three of them begins. The fifty-minute film was made from a script Carl Mayer wrote for Leopold Jessner, and it was Jessner’s first work as a director, co-directed with Paul Leni. Henny Porten, who also produced, plays the maid; Fritz Kortner is the postman; and the young man is Wilhelm Dieterle, later William Dieterle in Hollywood. It is counted among the first examples of the German kammerspielfilm.