Josef von Sternberg -- who directed Jannings' Russian émigré general reduced to eking out a living as a lowly Hollywood extra in The Last Command and his schoolmaster ruined by obsessive love for a cabaret floozy in The Blue Angel -- is amusingly acerbic about Jannings in his memoir. Von Sternberg describes how Jannings would warm up by trying to wring pathos from the makeup man as he prepared to immerse himself in each day's shooting. Not that it helped him. He walked on The Blue Angel set a star, and walked off eclipsed by an overnight sensation named Marlene Dietrich.
In The Last Laugh, filmed by F.W. Murnau, and famous for its virtual abandonment of title cards (the visuals are that eloquent!), there's an interesting tension between the clash of styles Murnau's expressionist modernity played against Jannings' melodramatic theatrcality from an earlier era. It's as if the film has one foot in one era, the other in another. Jannings lays on the pathos as the longtime doorman of a swanky Berlin hotel, demoted to washroom attendant when he gets too old to easily heft trunks from taxis and is caught taking one snooze too many alongside the concierge's desk. Not accidentally, the men's washroom that becomes his new stage is physically lower, not just socially, one flight down from the lobby of the smart Atlantic Hotel.
How closely his identity is tied to his job eerily persistent theme! is expressed by his shame at having to return to his grubby apartment in a working-class neighborhood, reduced in status. He begins the film bursting with an almost pompous pride and complacency portly in build, eyes aglow in his mutton-chopped visage, encased in an intentionally exaggerated greatcoat. Long, thick, festooned with brass buttons and gold braid, topped by a visored hat, parodying the look of a military hero, it's a character in the film, too. It covers him like a carapace of reassurance, an embrace by the power structure. Without it, he feels naked, once-proud military gait replaced by a dazed shuffle. Small wonder he had worn it to and from work, enjoying the incongruity between his home street and the garment. Totally out of place in his neighborhood, its implication of borrowed clout set him apart, and a notch above, his fellow proles.
Smarting under the jeers of the neighbors in his apartment building, stripped of job and coat, he desperately attempts to sneak back to the hotel at night and steal the coat back, as if that will restore his damaged status. He does, it doesn't. But the film veers improbably into an upbeat ending ordered by the producer that Murnau all but openly mocks, no less than Brecht did when rescuing Macheath from the gallows with a pardon in The Threepenny Opera. This time, the pardon comes not from the king of England, but from a modern king, a capitalist, who becomes the means for the doorman turned doormat to ascend into the ranks of the plutocracy, treated as royalty at the hotel that employed him, lighting a zeppilin of a cigar, soaking up the fawning of his former boss. Thus Jannings' factotum comes full circle. He begins and ends exuberant, extroverted, a man buoyed by the belief that his place in the world is secured sandwiched around an incident of calamity during much of which Jannings resorts to an old actor's trick, being photographed from the rear, using his slumped back to convey a dejection that borders on implosion.
It's a frankly old-fashioned characterization, as big in its behaviors, expressions and gestures as Jannings himself was ample in girth. His doorman seems almost oblivious at being ushered into a new visual world for which Murnau was one of the standard-bearers. His contrast between the almost deco luxe of the grand hotel, and the crumbling shabbiness of the doorman's neighborhood, seems bounded, stylistically, by the skewed streets of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) on the one hand and the sleek visuals of a Berlin knocking at the door of modernity in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1928). Karl Freund, Murnau's cameraman (he also photographed Symphony of a Great City), brilliantly anticipates a lot of the nocturnal angularity with which he was to enrich so many Hollywood films. Just who has The Last Laugh in "The Last Laugh" isn't clear. Probably not the doorman, as blind to being a pawn at the end as in the beginning. Probably Murnau and Freund. Still, there are several reasons it has become a film school staple, and they're readily apparent here.
Kino, taking the view that it's all about options, gives us, in exemplary fashion, a crisp 2003 restoration of the 1924 German original, the unrestored export version and a 40-minute making-of documentary. Two soundtracks, too, including a new performance of the original 1924 score by Giuseppe Becce. It seems an uneasy amalgam of Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherezade on the one hand and a lot of Wagner Lite on the other. But if the music seems a dated curio rather than an integral part of an esthetic whole, it never seriously gets in the way of the film's still-stunning visual style and the oblivious threshings about of Jannings' gored then restored ox.
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by Jay Carr
