THE LAST LAUGH Movie Review

Der Letzte Mann

The great moment of German silent star Emil Jannings's career was his performance as the proud hotel doorman who is demoted to washroom attendant in F.W. Murnau's brilliant expressionist fable The Last Laugh. The doorman, whose age prevents him from lifting the guests' overstuffed baggage as easily as he used to, is so humiliated by the demotion that he hides the fact from his wife and neighbors. He stashes his doorman's uniform in a closet, putting it on just before returning to his apartment's courtyard. Though he is degraded at having to descend (literally, as if going down to Hell) to the bustling Berlin hotel's basement washroom as his new station in life, it's the loss of his elaborate, gold-buttoned doorman's uniform that seems to be the real source of his shame. (There's something peculiarly Teutonic about this obsession with uniform and rank, and when students look at The Last Laugh in film history classes they sometimes just can't connect with the whole uniform thing; they figure if his pay's the same, what's the difference?) Murnau's camera reveals the doorman's internal states through dizzying motion, distorted, rotating lenses, lighting, and set design—the entire film, including the street scenes, were photographed under strictly controlled conditions within the huge UFA film studios. Murnau was forced by the studio to tack on a happy ending to what was obviously intended to be an operatic-style tragedy, but he made the most of it; it's impossible to leave The Last Laugh unmoved or unimpressed.

NEXT STOP … The Joyless Street, Sunrise, The Crowd

1924 77m/B Gf Emil Jannings, Maly Delshaft, Max Hiller; D: F.W. Murnau. VHS NOS, FCT, IHF