The Last Laugh

F.W. Murnau's devastating character study, told almost entirely without intertitles — a radical choice for 1924. Emil Jannings gives the performance of his career as an aging hotel doorman whose entire identity is wrapped up in his magnificent uniform and the prestige of his position at a grand Atlantic hotel. When he is demoted to lavatory attendant, his world collapses. Murnau and his cinematographer Karl Freund unleash the newly invented "unchained camera" technique, strapping the camera to a bicycle, a fire ladder, even Freund's chest, creating a fluid, subjective visual style that was years ahead of its time. The studio-imposed happy ending (acknowledged with a winking intertitle) does little to diminish the film's searing portrait of class, dignity, and the cruelty of aging in a status-obsessed society.