![]() The porter resembles an actor who’s lost his greatest role, allowing Jannings to plumb an artist’s worst fears of uselessness and dejection.Īs a fascinating making-of documentary included with this Kino Lorber release observes, The Last Laugh is a parody of the premium that Germans place on the power of rank and uniform-a cultural danger that isn’t exclusive to their country. The actor masochistically revels in the porter’s ruination, especially when the character’s crawling on the porcelain floor of the bathroom, which is on the lowest level of the Atlantic, suggesting a spotless hell that exists below paradise. Jannings subsequently alters his character’s body language, seemingly losing a foot of height in the process. When the porter’s forced to remove his uniform, a button falling onto the floor in a heartbreakingly impotent flourish, he suggests a walrus being skinned. The porter reads of his relegation to the lavatory, his face frozen in deflation that signals a fatal shattering of a personal sense of stature. The sequences detailing the porter’s demotion at the Atlantic are The Last Laugh’s most piercing. ![]() Yet connection isn’t always desirable, as illustrated by camera zooms that emphasize the stifling closeness of the porter’s neighbors, as they hear of his downfall and revel in his humiliation, shouting gossip from one apartment window to another. Everyone’s in this world together, simultaneously surrounded and separate. The camera’s movements alternately symbolize our point of view and that of the porter, tethering the two in a manner that parallels the film’s conjoining of the upper and lower classes. Jannings is more than formidable enough to hold up to the formal trickery that Murnau and Freund employ throughout the film, particularly the sets and roving tracking shots-early and influential attempts at Steadicam-that suggest floating consciousness. By contrast, Murnau and Jannings viscerally define the porter’s mindscape, exploring his fantasies and shifting emotional states. When modern filmmakers attempt to portray the plight of the poor, they often lean on condescendingly spare realist tropes, implying that impoverished people might not have the interiority that necessitates expressionism. When the porter removes an enormous trunk from the top of a cab in a rainstorm, Murnau and Jannings frame this action as a heroic quest, suggesting that this is the porter’s version of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. Clad in wild hair and poignantly ludicrous muttonchops, standing at seemingly seven feet in a 300-pound frame, Jannings offers a portrait of the worker bee as colossus, revealing the porter’s pride and vanity to be powerful and superficial as well as indicative of unbearable vulnerability. Holding these worlds together, offering us an entryway into The Last Laugh, is the hotel’s unnamed porter (Emil Jannings), a proletariat man who derives immense satisfaction from his proximity to the first class, as embodied by an elaborate uniform that causes him to resemble an antiquated military officer. Transporting people between these worlds are portals that embody the fragility of social boundaries, such as the rotating entryway of the Atlantic, which whisks the wealthy in and spits undesirables out into a cacophonous urban nightscape. Nearby is a lower-middle class neighborhood, composed of drab apartments that’re visually defined by women peering out of windows and beating dust out of rugs on stair railings. ![]() The Hotel Atlantic is a luxurious paradise, with feasts, classical music, ballrooms, and glass elevators. Working with screenwriter Carl Mayer and cinematographer Karl Freund, among other legends of German cinema, Murnau fashions a city of dreams that thrives on a resonant contrast between classes. ![]() Murnau’s The Last Laugh blows an elementally simple story up to the level of opera.
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