A BUSTLING URBAN street hisses and roars with the traffic of automobiles and pedestrians. The clamor centers around an upscale establishment, the Hotel Atlantic, where a uniformed doorman hustles to and fro, ushering guests into the hotel on their way in, and to their cars on the way out. Impressed by the unceasing energy of the doorman, it takes a moment to notice that he is an older man, weighed down with age. He pauses briefly in the hotel's lobby to catch his breath, enjoying a drink brought to him by a page young enough to be his grandson. It is at this moment that the hotel's manager, about to push his way through the hotel's revolving doors, notices him, and jots something in his notebook.
F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) is a song of the machine age's dark side, and its key images are those symbols of modernity's perpetual motion—the revolving door and the elevator. Murnau opens the film with a POV shot from within the hotel elevator, our line of sight dropping steadily until it is level with the hotel's ground floor. As such, it sets the direction for the film—down, and further down, into the depths of disillusionment and misery. The revolving door is a fecund motif as well, its constant rotation blurring the difference between inside and outside, the security of the interior and the dazzling uncertainty of the street.
In Murnau's vision of modernity, urban life has become a perpetual revolving door, the stability of work and home a thing of the past. The doorman is demoted from his prominent position to work as a bathroom attendant, and his elegant coat is taken away from him. Too ashamed to tell his family of his reversal of fortune, he steals the coat back, wearing it to and from work as if nothing had happened. Exhausted by the long, unrewarded toil of his life, and by his lowly new position, he is a man whose spirit has been broken. At least, this is the case until an implausible turn of events, so outlandish that even Murnau felt the need to apologize for it with an explanatory intertitle (the only one in the film), where the doorman inherits a large fortune, and comes back to the hotel to lord it over everyone.
The Last Laugh is a tragedy of aging and economics, propelled by Murnau and Karl Freund's camera wizardry. Determined to make a film almost entirely without intertitles, The Last Laugh features some of the most astounding camera work of the silent era, including numerous superimpositions and remarkably free-floating camera movement.
The Last Laugh is merely one of the gems on display at Film Forum's Murnau retrospective. The series kicks off with a one-week showing of Sunrise, a bittersweet love story that is without doubt one of the three or four greatest silent films ever made.
Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (betw. Varick St. & 6th Ave.), 212-727-8110; 1, 4:25, 7:50, $10.
SAUL AUSTERLITZ
