Review: The Last Laugh (1924)

* * * *
Director: F.W. Murnau
Starring: Emil Jannings

For a visual medium, film tends to rely a lot on words – from dialogue to voice-overs to inter-titles, words can play a large part in conveying and advancing stories. With The Last Laugh, F.W. Murnau shows just how effectively a story can be told in the absence of words. This is a silent film with just one inter-title (officially, that is; at the beginning there’s a close-up of a letter and at the end a close-up of a newspaper article, both of which could qualify as inter-titles in a casual sense), which might sound daunting but the end result is a thing of absolute beauty.

The story is simple. Emil Jannings stars as a doorman at a fancy hotel who takes pride in his work and especially in his uniform. One day he arrives at the hotel to find another man - a younger, more virile man - standing at the door in the uniform and he’s informed by the management that he’s no longer seen as fit for the physically demanding job. Rather than being fired, though, he's simply demoted to bathroom attendant - a symbolic last stop if ever there was one given that the man he's replacing is being demoted from bathroom attendant to resident in a home for the elderly.

This transition is devastating to him because being a doorman isn’t just his job, but his entire identity; when they strip him of the uniform, they might as well be stripping the very skin from his bones. He becomes desperate and steals the uniform back, wearing it home so that his family and neighbours won’t know the truth. It isn't long, however, before the truth does come out and he finds himself the subject of derision by the people around him, who take great pleasure in taking him down a peg.

The doorman is thoroughly humiliated, defeated and demoralized as he's forced to accept that he's lost his uniform and his position. If the film ended here, it would be pure tragedy, but then there's that one inter-title, the one which introduces an epilogue that only works because it acknowlegdes that it shouldn't work at all. The filmmakers take pity on the doorman and allow him to have the last laugh and we the audience allow them to get away with it because after watching him get kicked around for the better part of an hour and a half, we want to see him turn it around no matter how fantastical the circumstances.

After seeing Nosferatu and Sunrise and loving both, I’ve been trying to seek out more Murnau and with just three films he’s solidified himself as one of my favourite filmmakers. Much like Sunrise, The Last Laugh unfolds in a graceful and dream-like fashion; at times it seems more like a ballet than a film, particularly a dream sequence in which the doorman imagines himself restored to his former glory. The film comes out of a period of time when movies didn’t actually move that much, when cameras didn’t have the same freedom that they do now. In this film and his others, Murnau consistently breaks free of the limitations standing in the way to create works of art that seem truly alive. His ability, as well as the performance by Jannings, which is so rich and full that it does not require words to support it, make it easy to forget about the lack of titles.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Director: F.W. Murnau
Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

To call Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans simply a film is to do it an injustice. This is poetry in motion, a graceful and haunting gift to anyone who loves the art of filmmaking. Even today, with technology so far advanced from what F.W. Murnau had to work with, it is rare to see a film that moves so fluidly and with such ease. This beautiful, atmospheric film is a must-see for any movie lover.

The plot of the film is straight forward. The characters are the Man (George O’Brien) and his Wife (Janet Gaynor, who won the first Academy Award for Best Actress for this film), and a Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). The story takes place in the countryside where the Man is a farmer and has fallen under the spell of the Woman, who wants him to kill the Wife so that they can run off together. “Spell” is the only way to accurately describe their relationship. The film begins with the Woman creeping near the couple’s home and whistling to the Man. He stands as if in a trance and follows her out to the woods. The scene that follows him through the woods to his meeting with the Woman is breathtakingly beautiful, one of many examples in the film of Murnau freeing the story from the conventions of contemporaneous filmmaking and letting it move. The Woman plants her idea in the Man’s head. He’s horrified at first but quickly acquiesces. He will kill the Wife so that he and the Woman can be together. He takes the Wife on a boat ride (another beautifully shot scene) and attempts to kill her but can’t bring himself to do it. She flees and he chases her, trying to convince her that it was all a mistake. They spend time together in the city and fall in love once again. This sequence is the most charming of the film, alternating between romance and comedy. Happy once again, they return to the country where tragedy strikes – the circumstances and resolution, I won’t reveal.

This is a very simple story, but it’s the way that the story is presented to us that makes this film brilliant. Murnau creates a mood here, not only through the seeming weightlessness of his camera and the tone set by the cinematography, but also through the inter-titles which, though spare, contribute a great deal to the style of the film. When The Woman suggests that the Man kill his Wife, it isn’t shown to us with a flat title, but rather she suggests that he drown his wife and the words run down the screen like water. Murnau also seems to use all the technology at his disposal in order to let the film glide from one moment to another. In one sequence the Man and the Wife are crossing the street, the shot dissolves to them walking through a woodland and then dissolves back to the street where the Man and Wife are kissing and bringing traffic to a stop. The ways that Murnau finds to engage us in the world on screen and convey the changing relationships of the film are wonderfully innovative from both a technical and an artistic standpoint.

I know people who shun silent films like the plague because they’ve convinced themselves that these films will be hard to follow (I usually find that these same people claim that films shot in black and white make things on screen more difficult to distinguish, a notion I find ridiculous), but that idea really couldn’t be further from the truth. This is a film that is better for not having dialogue because to have the characters speak to each other would spoil the dreamlike quality of the way the narrative unfolds. The dialogue would perhaps ring false, too sentimental, and therefore drag the film down; but freed from dialogue, the film is able to soar above what words would convey and present the emotions at play – desire, jealousy, love, fear, remorse – with an urgency and intensity that remains undiluted. There are many films that are great but flawed. Sunrise is a film that is perfect. A truly unqualified masterpiece.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Nosferatu (1922)

Director: F.W. Murnau
Starring: Max Schreck, Greta Shroeder, Gustav von Wagenheim

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror isn’t an especially scary film, but it is a particularly haunting one. Directed by the brilliant F.W. Murnau, this is a horror film less concerned with gore and creatures jumping out from their hiding places, and more concerned with creating an atmosphere of terror and anxiety. Max Schreck’s performance as the vampire, Count Orlock, creates one of the most lasting impressions ever made on screen and adds immensely to the sinister genius of the film.

Nosferatu is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but the names of the characters were changed in an attempt to avoid a lawsuit by Stoker’s widow - which didn’t work and her victory in court almost resulted in the film being lost forever. In the film, the protagonist, Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), is summoned to the dwelling (“home” is too warm a word for so dark a place) of Count Orlock. The mere mention of Orlock’s name is enough to cause dread in the hearts of the people who reside in the village below the manor, but Hutter carries on regardless. Orlock emerges from the darkness to greet Hutter and invites him to sit down to dinner. During the course of the meal, Hutter cuts himself (“Your precious blood!” Orlock exclaims) and Orlock looks lustily at Hutter’s wound, then sees Hutter’s picture of his wife, Ellen (Greta Shroeder), and transfers his lust to her (“What a lovely throat…”). His growing determination to have her will ultimately lead to his destruction.

Part of the reason why Nosferatu works is that it’s a very economical adaptation. Murnau and writer Henrik Galeen knew how to focus the story for maximum effect and cut out the parts of Stoker’s novel that aren’t really necessary for this kind of story, things like Stoker’s fascination with emerging technologies (incidentally, if you want to see a Dracula adaptation that fully embraces all the quirks and asides of the novel, I recommend Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which may not be the “best” vampire film ever, but is a guilty pleasure movie if ever there was one). Another reason is the underlying sexual aspect to the terror. The most obvious sexual connotation of this film (and other vampire films) is that the menace comes in the form of an exchange of bodily fluid, and that the terror reaches its peak when the menace comes to visit a woman while she’s in bed. The anxiety that runs through this film isn’t an anxiety about death but about sex, specifically about the connection of sex to women. It’s interesting that vampire films begin here with sexual threat framed clearly as something monstrous, a “creature” who inspires revulsion from those around him, and evolve over time (beginning with Tod Browning’s Dracula) into the trope of the “seductive” vampire, to whom victims succumb almost willingly. There is nothing seductive about Orlock. He appears terrifying and inhuman – a assemblage of ugliness almost beyond imagining.

Murnau is a master of tone and style, creating here a film that is hypnotic in the way that it unfolds. The first sighting of Orlock is especially memorable and enduring, as he emerges from the darkness looking ghoulish and alien – the level of creepiness established here would have been enough to carry the film to its conclusion even if the story didn't take us into Orlock's mansion. According to IMDB, Orlock only appears in about nine of the film’s ninety or so minutes, which is startling when you consider how deeply his presence seems engrained in the film from beginning to end. It’s a credit not only to Schreck’s acting, but also to Murnau’s direction that the character is able to loom so large over the film, becoming larger than the narrative itself. By confining the character, limiting his space within the film, Murnau gives him license to run loose in our imaginations (off the top of my head I can think of two other big screen terrors whose limited time in the film has the same effect: the shark in Jaws and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs).

Nosferatu is a film that can be watched today without seeming dated because it exists so firmly in the realm of fantasy. It floats before us like a nightmare, touching on our deepest fears and twisting them into shapes all the more frightening for their unfamiliarity. This is a definite must see for anyone who loves movies.