Metrograph

A revolution in the use of the moving camera in which the use of intertitles was dispensed with—save for one, introducing its fairy-tale epilogue—almost entirely, Murnau’s Kammerspielfilm follows the unnamed, gray-whiskered doorman (Emil Jannings) of a swank hotel who, believed by management to have grown too old and doddering to present a proper image for the business, loses his pride and his precious gold-braided uniform when demoted to the post of washroom attendant. Per film historian Lotte Eisner, The Last Laugh is “pre-eminently a German tragedy [that] can only be understood in a country where uniform is king”… though the common association of middle age with obsolescence which sends Jannings’s character into tailspin is very much universal.

Distributor: Kino Lorber