cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Like The Last Laugh, it turns social standing into a devastatingly fragile performance, tracking a proud man’s public humiliation with German Expressionist intensity and Emil Jannings’s forceful physical vulnerability.
02
Why this pick
Its restless camera and urban scale turn an ordinary worker’s hopes, setbacks, and wounded pride into a deeply empathetic portrait of an individual being dwarfed by modern life.
03
Why this pick
For the same wordless emotional directness and visual daring: faces, framing, and movement carry the experience of a person stripped of dignity under an unfeeling public gaze.
04
Why this pick
A visually sumptuous silent-era tragedy about identity becoming spectacle, with Expressionist shadows and a protagonist whose outward role conceals profound hurt and longing for human tenderness.
05
Why this pick
Another Weimar chamber drama in which virtuoso camera movement and performance make social respectability feel perilously unstable, building intense feeling through image and gesture rather than dialogue.
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01 / THE STORY
Jannings' character is a doorman for a famous hotel, who takes great pride in his work and position. His manager decides that the doorman is getting too old and infirm to present the image of the hotel, and so demotes him to a less demanding job, of washroom attendant. He tries to conceal his demotion from his friends and family but, to his shame, he is discovered. His friends, thinking he has lied to them all along about his prestigious job, taunt him mercilessly while his family rejects him out of shame. The man, shocked and in incredible grief, returns to the hotel to sleep in the washroom where he works. The only person to be kind towards him is the night watchman, who covers him with his coat as he falls asleep.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Hotelportier [Hotel Doorman]
Nachtwächter [Night Watchman]
