The Last Laugh

Rating:
Summary: Life and Tragedy
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Life and Tragedy
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Silent of Silents
Review: A combination of fairytale, tragicomedy, and something somewhere in between, THE LAST LAUGH holds the distinction of being one of the few films ever presented entirely visually; there are no title cards save one to announce the happy ending. This has prompted some to dub TLL 'the most silent of silents' ... and very true. However, nothing extra is actually necessary. Emil Jannings' expressive face shows all and the 'moving camera' manned by Karl Freund exquisitely reveals the story line. A Murnau trademark evident in this film is his clever use of light and shadow. Murnau manipulated lighting in such a way as to elevate it into an almost living, breathing entity. He utilized this technique in FAUST, NOSFERATU and SUNRISE also to great effect.

For the first part of the film we follow an aging hotel doorman as he plunges into the depths of despair. His entire reason for living has been snatched from him through a demotion. He is forced to surrender his prized doorman's coat and his coveted post at the entryway of the fine hotel for a chair in a basement men's room. He's a lowly washroom attendant and with every passing day becomes evermore despondent until death appears the only viable escape from his plight. So well presented is this downfall that we mourn for the poor man and his palpable heartache.

In the latter part of the film everything gets turned around. Our doorman becomes wealthy, life is good again, and his enemies are served their just desserts. I've been informed that this was done on purpose. Murnau's happy ending was meant to poke fun at movies with happy endings (thus the title). As the [sole] title card states, 'Here our story should end for if this were real life the old man would have nothing to look forward to but death. However the author took pity on him and provided a most improbable epilogue.'

While I concur, might I also mention that sometimes miracles DO happen? And certainly one did here, and to one most deserving.

By the way. This film prompted Hollywood to offer Jannings and Murnau contracts and invite them to make their move to America to further their careers.


Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: A wonderful integration of poignant musical composition, visual expressionism, and an O. Henry like plot twist into a cinematic masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Well made historical curio
Review: As a fossil from the silent era, this is an important film. Murnau is innovative and displays his usual poetic visual style to tell this story of a doorman who is demoted to latrine worker (and notice how so many German films are about humiliation?). Silent film lovers and film historians should not miss it. The rest of us may find it a bit creaky and dusty. Five minutes of plot are dragged out interminably. Jannings overacts, as usual. The new score on the Kino edition (which has the best film print) was distracting to me and sounded ponderous.

Rating:
Summary: The Pinnacle of Silent Cinema
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: one of the greatest silent movies
Review: F. W. Murnau showed the world with this movie, that silent cinema is able to express everything - even the tiniest, almost unnoticeable emotions. it's a deeply emotional and wonderful story, made by an excellent dierctor and a very good actor in the lead role. one of the best movies ever.

Rating:
Summary: Marnau is a true genius!
Review: F.W. Murnau one of the greates directors of all time was here able to create on the best silent movie ever made. In this movie , i.e., The Last Laugh (Remastered)~VHS, we follow the tragic story that centers on the life of an older hotel porter whom loses his job to a younger man. When the proud Emil Jannings loses his dignified uniform of his station, he is transformed and changed into a scared little man scurrying through the shadows to hide his demotion from friends and family. Highly Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Not very funny.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Movie is Great, BUT the Buyer Beware!
Review: 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.