The Last Laugh (1924)

Hailed at the time of its release as the finest film ever made, Der Letzte Mann wowed domestic and international audiences with its stunning technical and stylistic innovation. Concerning the downward spiral of a proud hotel doorman who becomes a lowly bathroom attendant, the film captures the shame and humiliation felt by the German people in the aftermath of their World War I defeat, artfully fusing gritty social realism with the sort of expressionistic visual style found in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). When the doorman is stripped of his military-like uniform, this once proud and erect figure seems slumped and broken. Brought to life by Emil Jannings's once-in-a-lifetime performance, the defrocked Doorman clings to the walls as if the weight of his disgrace threatens to crush him. His almost fetishistic attachment to his uniform both mirrored Germany's longing for order after its forced, post-WWI disarmament and eerily presaged its slide into Nazism. Yet what proved to be the most influential aspect of this film was director F. W. Murnau's striking visual style. What cinematographer Karl Freund dubbed the "unchained camera" was strikingly mobile for its time, starting with the opening shot, in which the camera descends to a hotel lobby in an elevator and is then propelled through the room towards a revolving door and the protagonist. Murnau's and Freund's inventive camerawork broadened cinema's emotional palette. Never before had a film so penetrated the individual psyche of an individual character in the context of a more or less straightforward narrative. At one point in the film, after the Doorman steals the uniform, he perceives that the hotel is about to fall on top of him; in another, a montage of distorted and grotesque imagery brilliantly evokes the Doorman's drunken, dispirited point-of-view. Despite its absurdly tacked-on happy ending, reportedly forced by the studio, Der Letzte Mann remains a towering cinematic achievement that still moves and dazzles. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide