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 thou...