Customer Reviews

The Last Laugh

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The lack of sound in a silent film often heightens the emotional intensity rather than diminishing it; such is the case in THE LAST LAUGH, a film that turns a rather mundane premise (an old man loses his job) into a visually potent and emotionally powerful experience. The absence of sound, and in fact, the near absence of words via title cards, is especially appropriate for the film's depiction of loneliness, despair, and mental stupor. Sound could add little, if anything at all, to the towering performance by Emil Jannings (who was actually much younger than his character), who conveys a wide array of emotions with only body gestures and facial expressions.

To correct the technical info above, this Kino DVD edition is for ALL REGIONS. It also contains some extra material: an excerpt from the German version showing the "epilogue" title card in German, and a still gallery. The picture of this DVD looks exactly the same as that of the Criterion laserdisc made in '93 -- picture is in good shape overall, but the image often looks soft, and details are sometimes hard to make out. While playing the disc on a PC with a software DVD player, I have to turn on "force BOB mode" in order to eliminate the frequent motion artifacts. On my non-progressive scan standalone DVD player, however, I do not see any motion artifacts, but paused frames are sometimes unstable and jittery.

The score on the LD, composed by Timothy Brock, is also used for the DVD. The running time of 91 minutes shown on the DVD case is incorrect. It runs 88 minutes, same as the Criterion LD. I was surprised that the PCFriendly software is included on this disc (and it will auto-run on your PC), but there is no DVD-ROM feature at all.

I concur with most of what is written in the reviews below: This indeed is one of the greatest silents ever made; Karl Freund's sauntering camerawork and lighting are gorgeous; Keith Brock's score is a nice fit, and; the transfer is from a well-preserved print.

That said, I did not get to find all that out, despite owning the DVD for over two months. Why?

Well, for one, I just got discharged from active duty service in the Army. I lived in a barracks at Fort Dix, NJ, and watched DVD movies on my laptop computer. So, after buying this gem of a flick, I rushed back to my room to watch it.

Nada.

Unfortunately, Kino Video -- a company that wants to be noted for its sterling film preservation efforts and highest quality transfers -- was not content with simply letting me watch this disc. No, instead, Kino used this disc as a veritable Trojan horse to smuggle a program called "PC Friendly DVD" onto my hard drive. Naturally, there was no labelling at all on the packaging, to let me know that Kino had ulterior motives, but I nonetheless loaded the program onto my hard drive, that I may watch this movie.

Ah, but there's one more catch: Once the software downloaded, a pop-up window came along to add insult to injury. Seems that even though I let Kino download a program onto my laptop without my consent, I then needed to register the damn thing before I could watch this movie! Talk about gall!

Problem was: My barracks room did not have an internet connection, so I couldn't register their software, thus was I verboten from being able to view this movie until I arrived back at home, sweet home, back in Texas, and was able to watch it on my home DVD player.

I talked to an Army buddy who bought Kino's release of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and he was unable to watch it on HIS laptop computer. He waited three weeks for his package to arrive from amazon, only to find that the insidious product registration requirements of the alleged "PC Friendly" DVD player made it impossible to view the movie.

Troops in the sands of Iraq don't have internet access for their laptop computers, either.

I saw this film at a time when I was kind of down and out, and it really meant something at the time. It's one of the most beautiful, sad, haunting, and innovative silent films ever made. It is also famous for the fact it is told (except for one) without title cards. It is told with nothing but visual imagery. It concerns itself with a doorman who ends up being demoted to washroom attendant. The man (played brilliantly by Emil Jannings) is very proud of himself and his station, then is told that he is being demoted simply to make room for the young guard. You really feel for Jennings's character. How often are you passed over for a promotion or feel that your long tenure of service is not appreciated? Murnau treats the subject with a deep humanism, making the film more powerful.

The cinematography is outstanding. Murnau's framing is immaculate, and it's to his credit that his visual style is so acute that he can tell this story with only images. There is only one title card, but it's a rather self conscious one, and it leads to the "happy" ending, which is so overplayed and boisterous one thinks that Murnau is just placing it as a farce. I admit I don't really like it very much, but it doesn't ruin the film at all. This is one of my all time favorite silent films, and my favorite Murnau film.

1924's "The Last Laugh" is a short, simple, direct tale of an elderly hotel doorman. Becoming complacent, he is smugly replaced by a younger man, and assigned to work in the washroom. Shocked and ashamed, he steals his old uniform to hide his fate from family and friends. A whirlwind of symbolism, the opening scene dances down a moving, mechanical elevator. Director F.W. Murnau tosses in multiple-image montages(all composed in the camera), hallucinatory lighting effects, scenes filmed through glass, and what is probably the first portable, hand-held camera shots. "The Last Laugh" was written by Carl Mayer. Paul Rotha's "Film Till Now" relates that Mayer "was a careful, patient worker. He would take days over a few shots. He would rather return the money than be forced to finish a script the wrong way. Film mattered most. His little money he gave away to make others happy". "The Last Laugh" was an unequaled example of universal co-operation: Director F.W. Murnau, cameraman Karl Freund(who filmed "Dracula" 7 years later), Carl Mayer, and the great German actor Emil Jannings. "The Last Laugh" DVD contains the unusual "happy", alternate ending, chapter stops, and several photo stills. After "Faust" in 1926, Murnau was whisked away to America, where he bought extravagant autos and a racing yacht. Talking movies emerged in 1927, but Murnau's final effort, "Tabu", contained no dialogue. F.W. Murnau's sound-film talents will never be known. A car crash took his life near Santa Barbara in 1931. Greatness suddenly became memory. But oh, what a memory.

This film is truly revolutionary. Pioneer camera man Freund uses moving shots to evoke the inner turmoil of the proud hotel porter Jannings. Sadly, he is demoted and his life turns to darkness and nightmares. Beautiful imagery, brilliant acting, and a magnificent feat of Master Murnau. This movie radiates like a 90 minute continuous Expressionist painting. I highly recommend Friedrich Murnau's work. This 1924 film is originally titled "Der letzte Mann" or "The Last Man."

F.W. Murnau's *The Last Laugh* may make you wonder if film technique has really advanced appreciably during the 80 or so years since its release. Murnau and cameraman Freund tell their story strictly with the camera. (There's only one title card during the movie -- an apologia for the tacked-on happy ending just after the story should've really ended.) As has been noted, the camera MOVES in *The Last Laugh*: it swoops down corridors, glides through doors, closes in on Emil Janning's Porter, creates hypnotic hallucinations, on and on. I'll grant that these moves can make you feel as if you're attending Film School 101, creating the problem of detaching you from the actual story. Well, the industry had to start somewhere! Murnau's Expressionist advances in movie art over the even-earlier giants like Griffith remain not only significant but still inspiring to watch. As for the story itself, it's a nauseatingly depressing tale of a genial, rather pompous old doorman who can no longer cut the mustard. "Out of consideration" for his previous decades of service, the management at the ritzy hotel Atlantic doesn't out-and-out fire him -- they send him down, Dante-like, to the washroom, to towel-dry the hands of capitalist pigs. (This may be the only movie in existence wherein a demotion at work is the prime source of tragedy.) The degradation is most keenly symbolized by the exchange in uniforms -- from gold-buttoned, Colonel-of-the-Guards magnificence to unadorned, white proletarian oblivion. It's basically a movie about the eternal class struggle, though some have seen, in Jannings' transformation from blustering bigwig to sagging, nearly immobile old man, an allegory of Germany itself after the Great War. Maybe . . . maybe not. However you interpret *The Last Laugh*, you should probably own it if you're serious about movies. If you haven't yet seen it, rent it at least, and discover where guys like Orson Welles stole all their ideas.

The poor old doorman (he is so PROUD of his job, and his uniform!) comes to work one day, and finds out that he has been replaced--in the worst possible way: someone else is already doing his job. Then, when he goes to see the boss, he is handed a slip saying that since he has been working there so long, the hotel management has decided to put their oldest employee in a home, and give him that fellow's job (giving the viewer yet another man to feel sorry for). But Jannings sees to it that even as a washroom attendant, he won't be any good either: he sees a heavy trunk on the boss's floor, and to prove that he is still capable of being a doorman, he tries to lift it--whereupon he has some sort of stroke, and for the rest of the film, walks around conscious only part of the time, and unable to stand up straight. He stands by the sink as a man washes his hands, with his arms full of little towels--but doesn't offer the man one. The man snatches one for himself, and of course leaves no tip.

It seemed to me that nobody was supposed to believe the happy tacked-on ending, in which someone leaves him a million marks, and, with the one man who didn't laugh at him--a fellow worker--celebrates by having a sumpteous meal in an elegant restaurant, and drives off in a coach and four with his friend. It is between Jannings' failure as a washroom attendant (when we see him fading into the dark color of the washroom walls) and the "happy ending" that we see the one card, which clearly says: life doesn't go this way, but for this occasion, we are going to pretend that life goes the way it doesn't.
The original title of the film was "The Last Man," not "The Last Laugh." There is a sex joke involved in the title, and the million marks Jannings inherits, so of course the title was changed. (The fact that Jannings has nothing to do with sex makes it all the funnier---ha. ha. ha.) NOTHING about this film will tickle your ribs!

One thing that was so shocking about the film is that as soon as Jannings' fortunes change for the worse, everyone laughs at him! I found myself thinking: when the Eskimos put the old man or woman out on an ice floe to die, because he/she could no longer be of any use to the community, DID THEY LAUGH AT HIM? I asked the film owner about this, and he started explaining about how the Germans in the '20s had no hearts, and went on and on about the treaty of Versailles....hey! I am very familiar with some Germans who lived through the '20s, and they didn't all laugh at the unfortunate. As with all other people, some did and some didn't. The closer you are to being in Jannings' shoes, the more likely you were to laugh at him. But the rich laughed too...
The faces in Murnau's films speak volumes; everyone's soul is layed bare. Murnau make you ralize how actually unnecessary language is most of the time, and how simple so many stories are. The film is perfectly crafted. The only question is: can you stand it?

I don't want to see it again. It is my third favorite Murnau film (the glorious "Sunrisre" and the terrifying "Nosferatu" tying for first and second).

But you gotta see it once. And maybe...don't laugh at the misfortunes of others, no matter how foolish they are.

This beautiful brilliant film is ample proof of why F.W. Murnau was one of the finest directors of the silent era. He may not have churned out as many films as the likes of, say, Ernst Lubitsch or Thomas Ince, but he proved that quality can be more meaningful than quantity. He was more interested in pure artistic creative vision than in churning out a lot of films in a short timespan to make a lot of money and be hailed as a commercial success. What makes this film even more brilliant is the fact that it's told entirely devoid of intertitles, but for some writing on a cake, a letter, a newspaper article, and the text introducing the epilogue. And yet the film doesn't suffer at all from no explanatory intertitles or dialogue. Those would actually get in the way and interrupt the flow of this beautiful perfect story of a lonely old man dealing with an increasingly low point in his life. The best directors of the silent era tried not to over-rely upon intertitles for this very reason, and felt that a really good story could tell itself on its own merits.

The plot seems simple enough. An old doorman at the posh Atlantic Hotel, Emil Jannings, is very proud of his position and his imperial-looking uniform, though many of his neighbors feel he's too full of himself over his high position. Today one might not think of a hotel doorman/porter as being a very important job at all, but one has to remember that not only does he live in the poor side of town, but also what the economic situation in Germany was like during the Twenties. A hotel porter living in the slums would have been considered like a prince in this era of off-the-charts inflation and national depression and malaise over the heavy handed treatment it was being given after having lost the First World War. One day, however, he discovers that another man has taken his job, and finds himself demoted to the position held by the hotel's oldest employee, who has just retired--the lowly, menial, humiliating job of a bathroom attendant. (It's hard to believe that once such a position actually existed; it just seems lazy that anyone would expect someone to hand them a towel and soap and dry their hands and turn the water on for them instead of doing it themselves! This part of the plot also really hit home for me, since I had a temp job in an insurance company after graduating college but after only a month or so was told that the job I'd been doing was going to be finished by someone within the company, and my next temp job after that was cleaning the bathrooms in that very same building where I'd once had a more prestigious and less humiliating position.) This really depresses the old man, and he rankles under the treatment he gets from the people using the bathroom, but he doesn't want to tell his family the truth, so he pretends he's still working as the doorman. The ruse doesn't hold up, and when it's discovered, he becomes the laughingstock of the whole neighborhood. Emil Jannings does a super job at portraying this lonely anguished old man's heartbreaking poignant emotional journey. The ending is also fantastic; though it does rather go against everything that's been established in this poignant character study, to have just ended the film on the depressing note before the epilogue begins would seem wrong. Hasn't this poor old man already suffered enough slings and arrows? He deserves a happy ending and to have "the last laugh."

This film is easily one of the finest films of the silent era, for its brilliance in telling an entire story with nary an interruption for an intertitle but instead a constantly fluid camera doing the work, and possibly could also be considered one of the finest films period. It does so much with so little, and makes one wonder if film-making has really advanced that much since the Twenties. One does not need constant talk, be it through spoken dialogue or printed intertitles, to create a beautiful film with a convincing compelling understandable storyline.

F. W. Murnau's THE LAST LAUGH is a remarkable movie about one of the least remarkable subjects you can imagine. An old hotel doorman, played by Emil Jannings, perhaps because of his age, is demoted from his prestigious job to that of washroom attendant. It's a character study of one man's solitary journey through lonely despair. If you can overcome the somewhat exaggerated acting style and the black-and-white silence - not even any inter-title cards in this one - it's a harrowing experience. Jannings is a brilliant silent actor, and the ability to tell a complex story without words is revelatory. It's obvious that by 1924 Murnau had the medium down cold.

With miniatures and some impressive recreations, Murnau built a realistic set of city streets on the studio back lots. He tells his story with a number of subtle camera techniques - long dollies in and out, spinning rooms, the famous opening shot on the descending glass elevator, distortion, and a camera that seemingly walks through a revolving door. All of it's common enough now, but it makes of this one of the supplest of silent movies. Murnau's camera is sinuous, and it pushed the art forward.

At the insistence of the studio Murnau adds an `Improbable Epilogue.' Thankfully he announces it with one of the few title cards in the movie. The epilogue is so at variance with what precedes it that it's practically sardonic. The real movie ends right before the epilogue. The print is in very good condition and the dvd includes a series of production stills and a deleted scene.

F. W Murnau works are rare things - he made very few compared to other directors of his day, and many of those he did make have been lost. The reason he made so few can perhaps be understood by watching The Last Laugh. Like Chaplin, Kubrick and Leone, the effort that went into a single picture was the same effort another director might spread across ten. Nosferatu, his famous Dracula story, is great, and i hear his Faust and Sunrise are also things to behold - but many regard "The Last Laugh" as his masterwork, and also one of the greatest movies of all time. Lillian Gish once said that she never approved of the talkies - she felt that silents were starting to create a whole new art form. She was right, but the proof of this can not be seen in the work of Griffith, who was her frequent collaborator, and who she probably was thinking about when she made this statement - but in the work of German director F. W Murnau.

D. W Griffith is usually shunned for his stance on racial issues and praised for his abilities as an influential film artist. I believe he doesn't deserve this praise - and this movie is why. Not only was Griffith about as subtle as a migraine, but watching a Griffith silent, you get more words than images. There's a title card telling you what is about to happen in every image before it does. The images themselves are almost unnecessary - his style is more literary than cinematic. The difference between watching Griffith's Intolerance and watching F. W Murnau's The Last Laugh is like the difference between watching a silent comedy by Hal Roach and one by Charlie Chaplin. The latter of each pair (Murnau and Chaplin) were visualists and artists, using few words, constructing beauty and high emotion through seemingly simple situations (a tramp who discovers a lost child, or a hotel doorman who loses his job, which is the basis of The Last Laugh).

Silent directors strove to and were praised for their ability to tell stories through images alone, as much as possible, and this is one of the reasons silent cinema reached its pinnacle in F. W Murnau's The Last Laugh - which tells the story of a proud hotel doorman (Emil Jennings), who, after many years of service, is demoted from his position to a mens' bathroom attendant. Murnau tells an incredibly sensitive and human tale, showing how much the job meant to him by having him go to work instead of going to his daughter's wedding. He shows how the position made him respected in his neighbourhood, and how he could not face the neighbourhood without his doorman's uniform. And he tells the story almost entirely through images.

There are no title cards telling us what the images are - they are allowed to speak for themselves. The few words used are worked in through letters and signs. Many silent directors cheated and used title cards to explain the images, but only in this movie did the art form of silent movies, which Lillian Gish refers to, take shape.

I was amazed at the level of depth and emotional complexity that Murnau was capable of conveying without resorting to title cards (or their equivalent in talkies, the voiceover). This movie is also noteable for its brilliant use of expressionism, and the first brilliant use of a tracking shot. In Murnau's The Last Laugh, silent movies metaphorically were given movement, and learned to run.