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

Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh

 Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller, Emilie Kurz, Hans Unterkircher, George John. Screenplay: Carl Mayer. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Production design: Edgar G. Ulmer. Film editing: Elfi Böttrich. 

F.W. Murnau's landmark film The Last Laugh tells a simple story: An elderly, preening doorman (Emil Jannings) at a luxury hotel struggles to unload a large trunk one rainy evening, and the hotel manager (Hans Unterkircher) takes notice. The doorman goes home to his apartment building where he's greeted with the usual deference accorded to his regal bearing and his brass-buttoned uniform. But when he returns to work the next day he finds a new doorman wearing a copy of the uniform. The hotel manager tells him that he's been replaced, and to turn in the uniform and report to his new job: lavatory attendant. Appalled and crushed, he swipes his old uniform and goes home that night wearing it as if nothing has happened. His niece (Maly Delschaft) is being married. and the ex-doorman celebrates well into the night. Still tipsy the next day, he goes back to the hotel and his new job, stashing the uniform in a checkroom at the railroad station. He bumbles through his duties, but when he returns home he's mocked by his neighbors, who have discovered his fall from grace. The next day he's even more disenchanted with his new job, and incurs the anger of a patron who reports him to the hotel manager, who reprimands him. That night he stays in the washroom, where he's found by the night watchman (Georg John), who helps him retrieve the old uniform and return it to storage. Exhausted, he falls asleep in his chair, and the night watchman tenderly covers him with his coat. And that's where the one and only intertitle occurs: It proclaims that this is where the story would most likely end in reality, with the lavatory attendant living out the rest of his days with "little to look forward to but death." But instead, "The author took pity on him ... and provided quite an improbable epilogue." In short, the protagonist inherits a fortune and invites the night watchman to join him as they're wined and dined by the hotel. It's an audacious ending to a remarkably innovative film. The innovations have received most of the attention, especially Karl Freund's camerawork, which involved far more movement than was usual for the day, with Freund sometimes mounting the camera on a wheelchair or strapping it to his body and riding a bicycle through the sets. The doorman's drunkenness is simulated with a subjective camera, double-exposures, and focus changes. The absence of intertitles is also striking, with no loss of narrative coherence and only a little uncertainty about who some of the characters are: I wasn't sure about the identity of the bride until I saw her listed as his niece in the credits on IMDb. But it's the provision of an alternate ending that strikes me as most audacious. The English title, The Last Laugh, seems to derive from this "improbable epilogue." (The German title,  Der letzte Mann, means "the last man.") Does the last laugh really belong to Murnau and scenarist Carl Mayer, mocking the audience's sentimentality in wanting an unearned happy ending? 

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel

Prof. Immanuel Rath: Emil Jannings
Lola Lola: Marlene Dietrich
Kiepert, the Magician: Kurt Gerron
Guste Kiepert: Rosa Valetti
Mazeppa, the Strongman: Hans Albers
The Clown: Reinhold Bernt
Director of the School: Eduard von Winterstein
School Caretaker: Hans Roth
Angst, a Student: Rolf Müller
Lohmann, a Student: Roland Varno
Erztum, a Student: Carl Balhaus
Goldstaub, a Student: Robert Klein-Lörk
Innkeeper: Károly Huszár
Rath's Maid: Ilse Fürstenberg

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, Robert Liebmann
Based on a novel by Heinrich Mann
Cinematography: Günther Rittau
Art direction: Otto Hunte
Film editing: Sam Winston
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel still has some of the earmarks of a film made during the transition from silence to synchronized sound, namely the tendency to hold a shot a beat or two longer than is actually necessary, so the narrative doesn't always move along at the speed we anticipate. But Sternberg is clearly ready for sound, as the final scene shows. The camera tracks back from the dead professor, clutching his old desk so tightly that the caretaker who found his body has been unable to loosen his grip. Meanwhile, we hear the clock striking midnight, with the twelfth stroke barely audible as the screen fades to black. It's a touching moment, made possible by the several shots and sounds of the clock* that occur through the film as a kind of indicator of Rath's decline from precise and punctual to dissipated and tardy. Otherwise the sound on the film is sometimes a little harsh to the ear, which makes Sternberg's relatively sparing use of it welcome. Many scenes are staged in near-silence, letting the action rather than the dialogue carry the story.  Marlene Dietrich's baritone recorded well, which is one reason her career took off when sound was introduced, but early in the film she's allowed to sing in an upper key which is more than a little off-putting. Fortunately, by the time we get to Lola Lola's big number, Friedrich Hollaender's "Ich bin von Kopf zu Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" (the subtitles use the English language version, "Falling in Love Again" instead of a literal translation), Dietrich is back in the correct register. The Blue Angel thrives on Dietrich's performance, which eclipses Emil Jannings's overacting, though he does provide some genuine pathos toward the end of the film. I don't quite believe the ease with which the professor falls from grace, but I'm not sure whether the fault lies entirely with Jannings or with the screenplay.

*I don't think there's ever an establishing shot of the tower where this clock resides, only closeups of its face and the procession of figures below as the hour strikes. Is it perhaps on the town hall, the Rathaus, in which case there's a kind of submerged pun at work?

Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

Power corrupts, as we knew long before John Dalberg-Acton so nicely formulated it for us. It's the truth underlying so many myths, from the Garden of Eden to the Nibelungenlied to the Faust legend. Goethe's Faust is a philosophical poem, a closet drama not designed for stage or film, but that hasn't prevented playwrights, opera librettists, or screenwriters from making the attempt. F.W. Murnau's version is probably the most distinguished cinematic attempt, but not because of its fidelity to the source. Murnau's version works because it concentrates on the power struggle, initially between Good, as represented by the archangel (Werner Fuetterer), and Evil, as represented by Mephisto (Emil Jannings), and later by the attempt of Faust (Gösta Ekman) to obtain mastery over Time. It begins with a wager, borrowed from the book of Job, between the archangel and Mephisto, over whom Faust's soul will belong to. Then it eventually devolves into what is the core of most dramatic treatments of Goethe's story, the seduction of Gretchen (Camilla Horn), with the aid of Mephisto. In the end, both Gretchen and Faust are redeemed by his willingness to sacrifice himself, an abnegation of power. But that too-familiar story is distinguished by Murnau's staging of it, with the significant help of Carl Hoffmann's cinematography and the art direction of Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig. This is one of the most beautiful of silent films because of the interplay between light and dark, a superb evocation of the paintings of Rembrandt in the way scenes are composed and lighted. The tone of the film is set near the beginning by the spectacular image (above) of a gigantic Mephisto looming over a German town, which clearly influenced the similar scene in the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). Jannings manages to be both sinister and gross as Mephisto -- the latter mode most in evidence in his scenes with Gretchen's lustful Aunt Marthe (Yvette Guilbert). (If Guilbert looks familiar it's because, as a Parisian cabaret singer during the Belle Époque, she was the subject of numerous portraits by Toulouse-Lautrec.) This was the last of Murnau's films in Germany: The following year he moved to Hollywood, where he made probably his greatest film, Sunrise. He was soon followed to America by the actor who played Gretchen's brother, Valentin, William Dieterle, who became a prominent Hollywood director.