The Last Laugh (1924, F.W. Murnau) (Patreon)

89/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Two shots in, I was ready to declare Murnau the greatest pure crafter of moving images who's ever lived; his introduction of the film's nameless protagonist, glimpsed through a revolving door kept constantly spinning by some other employee of the Hotel Atlantic, is dynamic enough to shame almost every director working just shy of a century later. Famously, The Last Laugh features no intertitles—just an epigraph, one expository memo, and a crucial author's note of sorts, which I'll get to below—and none are needed. Each aspect of the simple, heartrending story has been worked out visually, with composition, design and performance all aiming for maximum pathos (and rivaling that of Umberto D., without a dog). Not having seen the 1955 remake, I find it—or indeed any hypothetical sound version—quite hard to imagine, as naturalism would surely render this scenario painfully mawkish; Murnau's film  achieves its power via expressionistic hyperbole, right down to Jannings making the guy incapable of standing up straight except when he's in uniform. It's an absolute piledriver of shameless manipulation, which I might resist were it not for one key element (that nobody ever talks about, as far as I can tell): Our hero's "demotion" is fundamentally meaningless. He wasn't the hotel manager, or even a desk clerk—doorman and washroom attendant are the same job, creating a superficial impression of luxury by performing tasks that the guests could easily do for themselves. The only difference (apart from the arduousness of lifting luggage, which gets him reassigned in old age) is that one entails wearing a spiffy uniform and not standing in such close proximity to toilets. Only his pride has been wounded, and in the basest possible fashion. It's akin to someone being genuinely mortified that Musk took his verified checkmark away.

That's why the hostile reaction of Ex-Doorman's family and neighbors, upon learning of his new position, slightly disappoints me. He's so sure that he'll become a figure of scorn and ridicule that he takes the risk of stealing back his uniform, in order to wear it home every night and maintain the illusion; being proved absolutely right about this (which entails everyone in his life being utterly reprehensible) somehow cheapens his desperation. Or flattens it, perhaps. I would prefer that he were wrong, or that we simply never learn whether he were right or wrong (as in, say, Cantet's Time Out). On the other hand, the more wretched his circumstances as we reach what Murnau admits should be the film's conclusion, the more perversely rapturous does Last Laugh's phony epilogue become. Above all else, that final sequence is a masterstroke of pre-emptive deflation: By telling us in advance that it's total bullshit, provided solely because the reality of this man's future would be too bleak to endure, Murnau creates a magnificent cognitive dissonance in which we simultaneously revel in Jannings' outsize merriment and feel crushed by the weight of its falsity. (This even though we know perfectly well that the entire movie is a fiction. It's not as if the alternative credible ending would be in any way "real.") Shift that author's note to the very end, so that it negates what we've seen after the fact, and I don't think it's remotely as effective, despite my having seen that approach be devastating in other contexts. (Thinking particularly of [spoiler] in Brazil, which you really need to think is actually happening the first time you see it.) Still in its infancy, cinema had already become richly meta-textual, and Murnau, both here and in Sunrise, brilliantly toys with the still-emergent understanding of what a movie even is, what it should be, what it can uniquely accomplish. After that first NYU screening, back in '95, I wrote to a friend* that "there are moments in the film that have been neither duplicated nor equalled in seventy years." Today, I'd alter that sentence only by replacing the word "seventy" with "a hundred."

* The friend in question, Eric C. Johnson, was kind enough to send me, at my request, approximately 20 bazillion emails that I wrote him in the '90s (didn't know enough then to retain a sent-mail archive); it's a treasure trove of ancient reactions to which I'll be referring frequently henceforth. Also unearthed some stuff that I'd thought lost, e.g. my original contemporaneous top 10 lists from 1988–94 (which were never on my website and got altered over the years as my taste changed). Maybe I'll share those at some point, though they don't quite correspond to my current lists, since they went by U.S. commercial release rather than by world premiere (i.e. lots of foreign films land in different years).