A historical Look at the production of Munau's "The Last Laugh"

The Last Laugh which had the original German title of Der Latzte Mann- Like the French title Le Dernier des Hommes- was an exteremely well appreciated and valued Film at the time. Bioscope called it: “the greatest film ever made” or referring to The Times, it was “unusually good.” It was the collaboration of three men, F. W. Murnau, Carl Mayer and Karl Freund, which resulted in a picture that with almost no inter-titles managed to be still intriguing and simulating.
The Last Laugh is a portrait of an elderly doorman, who identifies himself with his uniform. Once this uniform is taken away from him due to his age incapability, he finds himself depressed, destroyed and low. Especially that he is transferred to lavatory services, forced to wear a new mediocre white coat.

The story of The Last Laugh is simple, yet the context, in which it is represented in, is complex. The social cruelty that the film criticizes is not presented in the plot, rather in the impressions that the whole complex cinema visualization will leave on the mind, as well as social consciousness. “It is less a narrative of occurrences than a record of psychological experience.”
Although at the time of the screening of The Last Laugh, most of the credits were given to Murnau, scenarist Carl Mayer played an important role in the development of the film. Mayer wrote Scherben and Sylvester, the first two of the Kammerspielfilme trilogy, both directed by Lulu Pick. His disagreement with Pick resulted in Murnau directing The Last Laugh. Quoting Barton Palmer: “Murnau more than Pick was able to realize Mayer’s ideas about dynamic and flexible point of view.” Because of Murnau and Mayer’s understandings of each other The Last Laugh as an outcome was both technically and aesthetically brilliant.
More than anything else this film has been praised for its great use of mobile camera, a concept very new at the time. The Last Laugh’s reputation for great cinematography was a result of Mayer’s concern in writing for camera, describing in details perspectives, positions and movement , also, Murnau’s awareness of camera aesthetics and Karl Freund’s techniques. The utilization of a fully automatic camera, capable of all sorts of movements, enables Murnau to create Mayer’s desired fluidity in the title-free narrative structure.
Murnau and Karl Freund introduced the entfesselte or the “unchained camera”. Murnau employed this technique to create the famous drunk scene, illustrating porter’s distorted, dreamy vision. Freund achieved this kind of picture by attaching the camera to his chest using straps and staggering around the set. In the opening scene, the camera descends in the elevator, goes through the hall way and then exits the hotel entrance to where porter stands, having it all in a long traveling shot. According to Palmer: “Freund achieved this effect by mounting the camera on a bicycle. Another extraordinary shot was the passage of the camera through the glass wall, which was achieved by a discreet dissolve in the montage. Murnau also beautifully showed the movement of sound through camera: the trumpeter turns towards the camera, in a way that the opening of his horn fills the frame, then the camera tracks backward quickly, as if the sound of the trumpet was flying. Same method was used in the scene where the doorman’s neighbors shout the news of his degradation.

The Last Laugh’s set was entirely studio-built, and the whole film, except for the shot in the railway station interiors, was staged there.
What Mayer called ‘in Licht und Glanz’ in Sylvester, which means ‘luminous and resplendent’, was dramatically taken to another level by Murnau: The movement of flashlights, the reflective black oily and wet raincoat, glass surfaces with glitter, shinny coat buttons or the lighted windows of the apartments. Quoting Marc Silberman:
“Light here is not the reflection of an outside source or even an ornamental element but rather suggests in its intensity and dispersal another world, he unseen world of darkness and shadows opposed to such clarity.”
The objects as part of the mise-en-scene play an important role in the narrative structure of the film. For instance the doorman’s obsession with mirrors and the constant act of checking himself in them, which signals his crises over the notion of self-knowledge, or the use of swinging door for creating the ‘expressive framework of the protagonist’s actions’ . But more than anything else it was the doorman’s uniform that contributed to the narrative. Served as a symbol of authority, power and respect, it determined the doorman’s high “rank”(Stand) even though he was from a lower “class”.

Emil Jannings who played the role of the doorman, received a large amount of publicity at the time. Jannings, who was already well known in UK and US for his performances, was a key factor in the plot progression, especially that there was no inter-titles and everything must have been acted out.
One of the interesting instances that happened during the production of The Last Laugh was Hitchcock’s encounter with Murnau. Hitchcock who visited Berlin as an assistant director of an Anglo-German production, filming The Background at the UFA studios, was situated in the neighboring set to Murnau. Hitchcock carefully observed Murnau at work, and was fascinated by his methods. In an afternoon that Murnau and Hitchcock spent together, Murnau “proceeded to point things out” to Hitchcock, such as the use of the perspective.
It was Murnau’s Sense of direction, along with Mayer’s imagination and Freund technical creativity that created the appropriate fluidity in a film with no inter-titles. The mobile camera was a great asset in creating the flow, in a narrative story that was simple, yet complex in context.