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The Last Laugh
by F.W Murnau
An aging doorman, after being fired from his prestigious job at a luxurious hotel, is forced to face the scorn of his friends, neighbours and society.
A touchstone of modernist cinema, ‘The Last Laugh’ is a remarkable film for many reasons, including its incorporation of newly developing cinematography techniques and its near lack of intertitles. The film considers the effects of modernity on different generations and social strata.
REASONS TO WATCH
– One of the most truly silent films ever made; directors were proud of their ability to tell a story through pantomime and the language of the camera, but no one before F.W Murnau had ever entirely done away with all written words on the screen. He tells his story through angles, moves, facial expressions and easily read visual cues.
– The first “dolly” (a device that allows a camera to move during a shot) was created for this film. According to Edgar G. Ulmer, who worked on the film, the idea to make the first dolly came from the desire to focus on Emil Jannings’ face during the first shot of the movie, as he moved through the hotel. They obviously didn’t know how to make a dolly technically, so they created the first one out of a baby’s carriage. They then pulled the carriage on a sort of railway that was built on the studio.
– A lot of the new techniques such as seemingly moving through the plate-glass window of a hotel manager’s office influenced Orson Welles during the shoot of ‘Citizen Kane’; namely the famous shot that swoops down through the skylight of a nightclub
– Most of the film, including rainy exteriors, was shot on sound stages.
– Included among the ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ and included on Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” list.
NOTES
The great tragedy “could only be a German story,” wrote the critic Lotte Eisner, whose 1964 book on Murnau reawakened interest in his work. “It could only happen in a country where the uniform (as it was at the time the film was made) was more than God.” Perhaps the doorman’s total identification with his job, his position, his uniform and his image helps foreshadow the rise of the Nazi Party; once he puts on his uniform, the doorman is no longer an individual but a slavishly loyal instrument of a larger organization. And when he takes the uniform off, he ceases to exist, even in his own eyes.
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