60- The Last Laugh - Director:F.W. Murnau - Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller and Emilie Kurz." F.W. Murnau's 'The Last Laugh' (1924) tells this story in one of the most famous of silent films, and one of the most truly silent, because it does not even use printed intertitles. Silent directors were proud of their ability to tell a story through pantomime and the language of the camera, but no one before Murnau had ever entirely done away with all written words on the screen . He tells his story through shots, angles, moves, facial expressions and easily read visual cues.
But "The Last Laugh" is remarkable also for its moving camera. It is often described as the first film to make great use of a moving point of view. It isn't, really; the silent historian Kevin Brownlow cites "The Second-in-Command," made 10 years earlier. But it is certainly the film that made the most spectacular early use of movement, with shots that track down an elevator and out through a hotel lobby, or seemingly move through the plate-glass window of a hotel manager's office (influencing the famous shot in "Citizen Kane" that swoops down through the skylight of a nightclub).
Murnau's technical mastery makes all of his films exciting to see.
Here he liberated the camera from gravity. There is a shot where the camera seems to float through the air, and it literally does; Freund( cinematographer) had himself and the camera mounted on a swing, and Abel Gance borrowed the technique a few years later for his "Napoleon." There are shots where superimposed images swim through the air, the famous shot that seems to move through the glass window, and a moment when the towering Hotel Atlantic seems to lean over to crush the staggering doorman."
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Roger Ebert-"- Alfred Hitchcock: I made a silent film, The Farmer's Wife, a play that was all dialogue, but we tried to avoid using titles and, wherever possible, to use the pictorial expression instead. I suppose the only film made without any titles at all was 'The Last Laugh', with Emil Jannings.
-Francois Truffaut: A great picture, one of Murnau's best.
-Alfred Hitchcock: They were making it while I worked at UFA. In that film Murnau even tried to establish a universal language by using a kind of Esperanto. All the street signs, the posters, the shop signs, were in this synthetic language."
"The Last Laugh was almost the perfect film"
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Alfred Hitchcock-
