Joel Adlen on Piano. (Die Hintertreppe). Backstairs is the earliest example of the intimate psychological film that took the label Kammerspielfilm from the theater of Max Reinhardt, at which spectators could perceive the smallest, subtlest details of gestures and movement. Scenarist Carl Mayer was a specialist in this chamber play form of filmic character study. His famous script for Murnau's Last Laugh (1924) shares with Backstairs the suppression of explanatory or dialogue titles and the thematic focus on drab lower-middle-class social existence. The drama involves three people: a housemaid (Henny Porten) absorbed in everyday chores, her lover (Wilhelm Dieterle) who has promised to write her from afar, and a partly paralyzed postman (Fritz Kortner) who morbidly desires the girl and intercepts the letters. The directors were Leopold Jessner, one of the most progressive stage directors of the period, and Paul Leni, who later made Waxworks in Germany and The Cat and the Canary in Hollywood.