The Last Laugh (1924)
After his success in Germany in the early 1920s with silent films such as Nosferatu (1922) and The Grand Duke's Finances (1924), German director F.W. Murnau was headhunted by UFA film studios, who were at the time the largest studios in Germany. They provided him with a modest budget of one million marks in order to make his debut feature for the company. By moving to UFA he was able to work with celebrated screenwriter Carl Mayer, demand for whose scripts had increased greatly since he co-wrote the screenplay to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The script for The Last Laugh was actually in place before Murnau joined the project, but a falling out between Mayer and his usual partner Lupu Pick opened up a vacancy which Murnau was able to fill. Indeed the film is most remembered today for having hardly any intertitles (title cards with text telling the audience things they couldn't pick up from visibly watching the film, such as speech or background), and though it wasn't the first film to do this (Mayer and Pick had made Shattered (1921) and New Year's Eve (1924) to a similar rule), it was by far, owing to Murnau's pioneering filming methods, the most successful.
When writing the screenplay, Mayer was influenced by Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat, but here focuses on a uniform as a representation of the power assigned to something which is essentially meaningless.
Emil Jannings plays the hotel doorman (not for the last time would Murnau's characters be nameless) who, due to the power he feels his smart uniform bestows upon him, struts around like an emperor, helping the people in the poor area of town in which he lives. When the hotel manager feels the doorman is getting too old for his job he is reshuffled and given the job of toilet attendant, drying guests' hands and cleaning the bathroom. Because he feels such shame at not wearing his uniform, he hides from the neighbourhood until eventually he steals his old uniform back so that he can reclaim his old role in the town. We see how the doorman deposits his uniform at the train station every morning before going to work, and collects it again every evening to maintain the charade. Inevitably, people realise that he is actually working a toilet attendant, but mistakenly believe that he has been employed in that job all along. Completely inconsolable and humiliated, he returns to the hotel at night to stay in the bathroom in which he works where only the night watchman takes pity on him and offers him his coat. Though this would have been the end, and a dour note to finish on, Jannings persuaded Murnau to change the ending, whilst maintaining the picture's anti-military message. It is revealed that a rich man died, leaving his fortune to the last person to be with him at the time of his death. As he was washing his hands at the hotel's bathroom at the time of his death, it is the ex-doorman who inherits his vast fortune. The doorman finally realises that as he has more respect now than he ever did before, it is money which really gives power and influence, not a uniform.
To portray the doorman, whom the entire film revolves around, Murnau looked to Emil Jannings, who was then the most popular (and expensive) actor in Germany. His price was so high that UFA ended up paying him 600,000 marks - 60% of the film's entire budget. He is brilliant as the old man though, and it's impressive to realise that he was only 40 years old when he starred in The Last Laugh - he was spending two hours a day before the cameras started rolling just having makeup and hair applied to his face. Murnau would be sufficiently impressed to employ him on his final two UFA films, Tartuffe and Faust, and Jannings, like Murnau, would end the decade in Hollywood, becoming the first ever actor to be presented with the Academy Award for Best Actor.
As well as lacking intertitles, The Last Laugh is also distinctive for its free use of the camera. Though it looks like the scenes outside the hotel, with cars driving around, are filmed on location, it's all a large set that was constructed especially for the film. Through ingenious use of false perspective, entire buildings and distant cars (which ranged from real motors to children driving small cars to remote controlled cars) all look very authentic. What this set allowed Murnau to do, as he would again in his 1927 masterpiece Sunrise, is set up advanced rigging to support the camera and allow him to films shots that were impossible through conventional means. A great example is when the camera is looking directly down at a horn player. As the musician blows, the camera is carried up and away from the man, as if it is riding on waves of music. One of the final shots, when it is announced that the doorman has been given the lucky inheritance, shows the camera, without cutting at all, float through the busy hotel restaurant where people are talking, eating, reading the news. The camera effortlessly follows people around until it turns around by a table, and waiters move away to reveal a huge cake. The waiter takes the cake out of shot, and we see a gloriously happy Jannings, eating from a table full of expensive food. It's a forerunner to one of the most impressive takes in cinema history at the beginning of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), where people seem to be carrying on with their lives as normal until eventually the main character is revealed. Apparently American film producers were confounded as to how the shot had been achieved, thinking it impossible. Though Murnau was director on The Last Laugh, the ability of his cinematographer Karl Freud (who would work on both Metropolis (1927) and Dracula (1931)) shouldn't be underestimated, though it's difficult to be sure who had the most influence directly behind the camera. Freud later dismissed Murnau's contributions to their films, but as these claims were made long after Murnau's death it's difficult to gain perspective. Certainly, from contemporary comments of how Murnau wanted to film this picture, it seems likely that Freud was somewhat underestimating his influence.
Critically and commercially The Last Laugh was a success, and Hollywood started to take notice of Murnau (and Emil Jannings) and began plotting to get him to America. The film was released in Germany as Der letzte Mann, the true translation of which is "The Last Man". However when America picked the film up for distribution in early 1925 the title was changed to The Last Laugh in order to avoid confusion with Frederick Reel Jr's 1924 film The Last Man, and it has been known in the English-speaking world by that title ever since.
Though The Last Laugh does indeed have one intertitle, the film is still unique in that there are no intertitles to represent spoken dialogue - meaning that as far as the audience is concerned there is not a line of dialogue in the entire film - a silent film indeed. Some of the themes that were started here Murnau would carry over to America, and again in the middle third of Sunrise there are notably no title cards - relying on what's on screen to tell a completely pictorial story. Certainly for Murnau this was the film that bought him to international acclaim, and stands today as one of the very best silent films ever made.
When writing the screenplay, Mayer was influenced by Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat, but here focuses on a uniform as a representation of the power assigned to something which is essentially meaningless.
To portray the doorman, whom the entire film revolves around, Murnau looked to Emil Jannings, who was then the most popular (and expensive) actor in Germany. His price was so high that UFA ended up paying him 600,000 marks - 60% of the film's entire budget. He is brilliant as the old man though, and it's impressive to realise that he was only 40 years old when he starred in The Last Laugh - he was spending two hours a day before the cameras started rolling just having makeup and hair applied to his face. Murnau would be sufficiently impressed to employ him on his final two UFA films, Tartuffe and Faust, and Jannings, like Murnau, would end the decade in Hollywood, becoming the first ever actor to be presented with the Academy Award for Best Actor.
As well as lacking intertitles, The Last Laugh is also distinctive for its free use of the camera. Though it looks like the scenes outside the hotel, with cars driving around, are filmed on location, it's all a large set that was constructed especially for the film. Through ingenious use of false perspective, entire buildings and distant cars (which ranged from real motors to children driving small cars to remote controlled cars) all look very authentic. What this set allowed Murnau to do, as he would again in his 1927 masterpiece Sunrise, is set up advanced rigging to support the camera and allow him to films shots that were impossible through conventional means. A great example is when the camera is looking directly down at a horn player. As the musician blows, the camera is carried up and away from the man, as if it is riding on waves of music. One of the final shots, when it is announced that the doorman has been given the lucky inheritance, shows the camera, without cutting at all, float through the busy hotel restaurant where people are talking, eating, reading the news. The camera effortlessly follows people around until it turns around by a table, and waiters move away to reveal a huge cake. The waiter takes the cake out of shot, and we see a gloriously happy Jannings, eating from a table full of expensive food. It's a forerunner to one of the most impressive takes in cinema history at the beginning of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), where people seem to be carrying on with their lives as normal until eventually the main character is revealed. Apparently American film producers were confounded as to how the shot had been achieved, thinking it impossible. Though Murnau was director on The Last Laugh, the ability of his cinematographer Karl Freud (who would work on both Metropolis (1927) and Dracula (1931)) shouldn't be underestimated, though it's difficult to be sure who had the most influence directly behind the camera. Freud later dismissed Murnau's contributions to their films, but as these claims were made long after Murnau's death it's difficult to gain perspective. Certainly, from contemporary comments of how Murnau wanted to film this picture, it seems likely that Freud was somewhat underestimating his influence.
Critically and commercially The Last Laugh was a success, and Hollywood started to take notice of Murnau (and Emil Jannings) and began plotting to get him to America. The film was released in Germany as Der letzte Mann, the true translation of which is "The Last Man". However when America picked the film up for distribution in early 1925 the title was changed to The Last Laugh in order to avoid confusion with Frederick Reel Jr's 1924 film The Last Man, and it has been known in the English-speaking world by that title ever since.Though The Last Laugh does indeed have one intertitle, the film is still unique in that there are no intertitles to represent spoken dialogue - meaning that as far as the audience is concerned there is not a line of dialogue in the entire film - a silent film indeed. Some of the themes that were started here Murnau would carry over to America, and again in the middle third of Sunrise there are notably no title cards - relying on what's on screen to tell a completely pictorial story. Certainly for Murnau this was the film that bought him to international acclaim, and stands today as one of the very best silent films ever made.
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