The Last Laugh (no 28)

by Allan Fish

(Germany 1924 90m) DVD1/2

Aka. Der Letzte Mann

Do you know what you will be tomorrow?

p  Erich Pommer  d  Friedrich W.Murnau  w  Carl Meyer  ph  Karl Freund  ed  Friedrich W.Murnau  m  Giuseppe Becce  art  Robert Herlth, Walter Röhrig

Emil Jannings (the doorman), Max Hiller (the bridegroom), Maly Delschaft (doorman’s niece), Hans Unterkirchen (hotelier), Emilie Kurtz (aunt),

If ever a film summed up German cinema and its ambition in the twenties, this was it.  Just one look at that list of credits tells you that much, reading as it does as a who’s who of German cinema of the period.  All the names in question played their part in what is still, after eighty intervening years, both the perfect representation of German expressionism and its antithesis.  By which I mean that, though it may also be very much a film about the distortion of the psyche, it contains few of the encircling, distorted sets and camera angles that mark out the expressionist films of the era.  The Last Laugh shows the distortions of the mind through the camera’s eye, whereas expressionistic films seem to show the camera through the mind’s eye.

            The story such as it is follows an ageing portly doorman at the Atlantic hotel who loses his job on account of his frailty (ageism, as we would now call it) and is reduced to being a washroom attendant.  Yet his beloved niece is about to get married and his position as doorman was seen as respectable, so he endeavours to try and keep up the pretence of his former job and disguise his new, humbler employment.  Needless to say, he doesn’t and he thus reaches a new low, only for the title to be given meaning when a twist of fate sees him the beneficiary of a remarkable stroke of luck.

            By the time of this film’s release, Murnau was already regarded as one of the leading lights in German cinema, following his successes with Nosferatu and The Burning Soil.  Yet The Last Laugh was probably his most ambitious film in his resume, more ambitious even than Sunrise.  He dared to let the camera tell the story, with the only titles at the very beginning during the prologue.  This is the closest the cinema ever got to pure cinema, an idea that only very few film-makers of the era attempted (one can only recall Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness), and it’s undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of German cinema.  Carl Meyer’s scenario is deceptive in its simplicity; there are many subtexts here and different audiences will find different morals behind the story.  To some it is an ode to the fickle fortunes of fate.  To others it’s a film about the pride of one’s position and the vanity such positions of power, however subservient, may instil, with their shiny uniforms.  In that respect all figures of authority are ridiculed and the ordinary man is championed, in the same way Chaplin had been doing in Hollywood.  Jannings’ doorman starts out one unacceptable face of capitalism, too old to be the welcoming face of a swanky hotel.  By the end he’s still unacceptable, the caricature of the American tycoon, blowing wads of cash on fine meals, smoking cigars like fashion accessories and swanking around giving money away like a philanthropist.  He may be still in essence a good man, but he’s still preening like a prize hen.  Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas. 

            In 1924 Jannings was in the middle of a run of grandiose performances (Henry VIII, Nero, Haroun al Rachid, Othello, Mephistopheles, Peter the Great and here acting like he’s ready for Falstaff) and this is arguably his greatest.  It may contain much that teeters on the precipice of pathos, but it’s a great performance nonetheless.  The sets, all angular and towering, likewise ingrain themselves on the psyche of the viewer, but it is cinematographer Karl Freund who proves Murnau’s best collaborator, and he experiments like an intoxicated cinematic Henry Jekyll.  Not only would the disorienting effects of the drunken binge prove influential to Napoleon, but they were revolutionary in itself, one of cinema’s first real attempts to achieve what had then been thought of as impossible.  If Murnau is the sorcerer supreme, Freund is the apprentice worthy of his own piece by Dukas.