Abenteuer mit Deutsch 1

This weekend I saw a silent movie in German at the Detroit Institute of Arts Theater. The movie had been lost for years and a Japanese export just turned up recently, and the censorship board had saved the original German intertitles. It was called Morgen bis Mitternachts [Morning to Midnight]. I wished you all could have been there. The intertitles--those slides between the film segments explaining what is going on--were usually extremely short, and you would have been able to understand a lot.

The story was about a bank cashier who thinks that he can convince an Italian client to run off with him, if he robs the bank and shows up at her doorstep with money. This plan flops, and he angrily abandons his "trautes Heim" ["sweet home"], and goes on bizarre, expensive adventures while the police pursue him. The home he left is later described as "urgemütlich."  A subtitle translates that as "extremely comfortable," but it probably connotes something like "comfortable as the womb" or at least "as home," since "ur-" refers to the origin, the source, the primal. If gemütlich refers to comfort, what do you think an "ur-" would mean in front of it?

Another word of note that came up was "Holzbein" ["wooden leg"], which served as a woman's single word explanation for why she could not dance with the renegade cashier.

bis morgen! [til tomorrow!]
Spencer