At the climax of the film, the director focused on depicting the faces of all kinds of ugly, powerful, ignorant, and despicable women through black and white lenses, which is wonderful. Just looking at the clothes, not the soul, the sinister world is really endless.
As a representative of the "chamber drama" works in the three major categories of German silent films in the early 1920s, "The Meanest Man" is different from historical, mythological films and thriller and psychedelic films, and its expressionist tendencies are the least obvious. . However, the development of film technology in this type of "indoor drama" is very impressive. This type of film often has no subtitles, and there are only a few characters, and they are often middle- and lower-class. The film sets and furnishings often have some kind of metaphor, alluding to the psychology of the characters. For example, the revolving door that appears many times in the film, the author thinks this is a metaphor for the change of personnel and the impermanence of rotation. This can be seen in the protagonist who falls from the middle class to the lower class and becomes a rich man, and in the neighbors whose attitude changes with the change of the protagonist's status. There is also the work uniform as a clue in the film, which represents the distance between people. This distance can be understood as the distance between "low-level" and "high-level", which is insurmountable, and all the characters in the film think so too. And once the protagonist loses it, then this distance is no longer a distance. Then the ugly and the good showed a difference that was not seen before.
The contingency of the ending and the unexpectedness created by the slow, long takes further exaggerate and satirize the ugly, indifferent reality. Yeah, unfortunately, this story doesn't usually happen in real life.
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