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THE  LAST  LAUGH
( Der letzte Mann )

Director:	Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
Sreenplay:	Carl Mayer
Cinematograhy:	Karl Freund
Art direction:	Robert Herlth & Walter Röhrig
Music:	Giuseppe Becce
Cast:	Emil Jannings (the porter), Maly Delschaft (his daughter), Max Hiller (her fiancé), Emilie Kurz (his aunt), Hans Unterkirchner (hotel manager), Olaf Storm (a young guest), Hermann Vallentin (a corpulent guest), Georg John (a night-watchman), Emmy Wyda (a slim neighbor), Erich Schönfelder, Neumann Schüler
Production:	Ufa
Location:	Atelier Neubabelsberg
Premiere:	December 23, 1924, Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin
Length:	2315 meters (86 minutes)

A friend once described Murnau as a curious mixture of wandering gypsy and cultivated gentleman. Although a disciplined worker, there was a good deal of the poet and dreamer in Murnau which was reflected in the rhythm and imagery of his films. As Eisner notes, Murnau's films had always possessed a Kammerspiel-Stimmung at once more vibrant and more diffused than Pick's, a kind of anxiety floating around the character, as in "Phantom"; as if the ground below their feet was never quite secure, as if Destiny might tear away from every lost feeling of security.

The film opens in the lobby of the Hotel Atlantis, the camera having traveled continuously from an elevator to the revolving front door, something between a merry-go-round and a roulette wheel, as Kracauer put it, where the viewer is introduced to a bewhiskered porter, resplendent in his braided uniform and visored cap. The majestic figure is accorded the respect of his family and neighbors. But it is the uniform which they admire, not the man. One day the porter is seen to stagger under the weight of a large trunk. His failure is observed by the manager who summarily demotes him to lavatory attendant. The ornate great coat must be exchanged for a starched white jacket. Towel in hand, he dejectedly performs the demeaning duties of attendant in the marbled and mirrored confines of the hotel lavatory. Ostracized by family and friends who have discovered his new and unrespectable identity, the old porter returns to the hotel where he is consoled by a solicitous night-watchman.

But the porter is spared an unhappy fate by the addition of an epilogue. We learn from a newspaper account that an eccentric American millionaire bequeathed a fortune to the last person who should attend him at the time of his death. The lavatory attendant was this letzte Mann. After enjoying an enormous meal with his friend the night watchman, he merrily passes through the revolving door of the Atlantis, and together with his companion, enters a carriage drawn by four horses.

Murnau was entirely dedicated to the art of making motion pictures. He often worked until 10 p.m. and would meet afterwards with his closest collaborators in his apartment to discuss the next day's shooting or to explore solutions to difficult problems. To give the impression of Jannings hearing the sound of a trumpet in a courtyard, for example, Murnau and his co-workers fitted a camera into a basket mounted on rails. The basket slid down from Jannings' ear to the mouth of the trumpet. And to photograph the dream sequence in which the porter imagines that he can juggle suitcases, Murnau attached valises of various sizes to wires that ran on pulleys. When Jannings touched them, they would appear to fly into the air. The shot was repeated many times because Jannings, who was somewhat apprehensive, held onto the handles a few seconds too long which caused the cables to snap. The actor was on the verge of tears but Murnau remained calm and smiling, seated in his chair. As Robert Herlth recalled, There was no question, with him, of giving up. The difficult effect was completed at 2 a.m.

Karl Freund, who bad photographed Murnau's Satanas five years before, worked tirelessly to translate the ideas of Murnau and Mayer into filmic form. Freund's unchained camera, as Kracauer noted, pans, travels, and tilts up and down with a perseverance which not only results in a pictorial narrative of complete fluidity, but also enables the spectator to follow the course of events from various viewpoints. The traveling shot which opens The Last Laugh presented Freund with his greatest challenge. The camera was attached to a bicycle and made to descend, focused on the hotel vestibule, Robert Herlth recounted. The bicycle went across the hall to the porter, and then, with a cut between shots, continued into the street, which bad been built on the lot. Herlth remembered that on other occasions, the camera was fixed to Freund's stomach, sometimes it flew through the air attached to a scaffolding, or moved forward with Freund on a rubber-wheeled trolley I had built.

The Last Laugh raised the art of the silent film to its highest level of achievement. That it disappeared was a circumstance which Freund lamented in an interview with B. R. Crisler of The New York Times in 1937. The camera is no longer important, he said. Now we are just a record, like on a gramophone. Freund believed, as did other artists of the silent screen, that sound bad entailed a sacrifice in the visual poetry of motion pictures. But as Crisler observed, In The Last Laugh Mr. Freund's camera was unforgettably not just a gramophone record, but was a living narrative instrument, as lean and eloquent as the prose of Hemingway at his best.

     pictures:

shooting (on the left: Murnau) // the porter // the porter and a hotel-boy // the dismissal // der loss of his uniform // his new job // the degraded // his friend the night-watchman // the porter and his daughter // the porter and some women // the porter and a neighbor // laughing faces // a newspaper-article // his new life

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