This film tells the story of a long-standing hotel employee’s tragic and humiliating demotion from doorman to bathroom attendant.This plot itself, whilst very affecting (thanks primarily to Emil Jannings’ lead performance), is nothing particularly special. However, it is technically innovative, eschewing intertitles in favour of an exclusively cinematic experience. Murnau also makes spectacular use of camera movement, exploring and penetrating cinematic depth of space with shots that track down an elevator and out through a hotel lobby or through the window of the hotel manager’s office. In this film (and even more so in the director’s masterwork Sunrise (1927)), Murnau liberates the camera from gravity: the camera seems to float through the air.
Unfortunately, the film’s average plot is undermined further by an improbable and unsatisfying epilogue required by the Weimar censorship authorities. We see the old man wrapped in the cloak of the night watchman who was his friend, and the movie seems over. But then Murnau uses the film’s only titlecard, almost as an apology for what follows: ‘Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.’ The doorman accidentally inherits a fortune, returns to the hotel in glory and treats all his friends to champagne and caviar, integrating himself into the system which led to his near-destruction.
