One of the first Expressionist films, From Morning to Midnight anticipates the "street" cycle of films (Die Strasse, 1923, Nju, 1924, etc.), in which bourgeois rebels cast off their staid lives for the lure of the street. It tells of a bank teller who sits all day behind his cage, unshaven, empty-eyed, and at home suffers the endless monotony of his petty-bourgeois existence. Quite suddenly he decides to break out of his routine and experience life: he begins by defrauding the bank and successfully eluding the police. As in all the street films, the long arm of propriety catches up with our hapless hero, making the law superfluous. One of four films based on plays by Georg Kaiser, From Morning to Midnight was directed by the stage director Karl Heinz Martin, who achieved here a film that many consider the equal of Caligari in its pure Expressionism. The film was not shown in Germany for forty years, but was sold to Japanese distributors at the time, and there proved successful.