Der Letzte Mann (1924)

d. F.W. Murnau / Germany / 90 mins.
Alt: "The Last Laugh"


Note: The following review discusses the ending of the film.

Emil Jennings, as the old hotel porter in F.W. Murnau's Der Letzte Mann, commands attention. He is tall and rotund, proud of his profession and regal in his presentation, the sort of working class employee who simply loves what he does and perhaps receives a paycheck only incidentally. The film is the story of his downfall, an undoing from disinterested boss who removes him from his position as doorman and relocates him to the washroom. And with that, the nameless porter loses his self-worth and the clothes that made him feel kingly even if he wasn't compensated as such. He goes to great lengths to hide this reality from those whose respect he desires, and as these things are wont to go, he will soon face the seemingly bottomless pit of his own desolation.

This is one of cinema's few films to be told in virtual silence, produced almost exclusively through its cinematography, editing, and performance, with only one intertitle and a few diegetic words in the actual inner-workings of the film. It was a bold and powerful experiment even in 1924, when silent cinema was the only possibility, and rightly it has found its place in the annals of history. But even if it had not found its way into canon, even if it were sitting on a dusty shelf in some rural German studio factory and only discovered through an accident and watched by those with little to no understanding of film history, I have no doubt it would still resonate as a profound experience. It is one of Murnau's masterpieces and, subsequently, one of cinema's great treasures.

I've never wavered in my contention that one of the most (if not the most) difficult film genres to pull off is silent melodrama. The stakes are often too high, the stories often too histrionic. In many silent dramas, the cogs don't turn at the same speed — the story spins in underdeveloped slowness while the acting, spinning bombastically, attempts to fill the void. Murnau earned his way into the pantheon of extraordinary directors for his ability to bring a crucial equilibrium to silent dramas, a balance and steadiness in the narrative and performance while confidently incorporating bold and audacious production techniques. For Der Letzte Mann he was aided by the great cinematographer Karl Freund, a workhorse of expressionism in Germany. The film is as well known for its famously untethered camera as it is for its lack of intertitles; in key moments of emotional development, Freund's camera leaves the tripod for an early makeshift version of a stedicam, moving across the floor of the hotel or down the street in luxurious and dreamlike tracking shots that follow the porter or display an avant-garde sensibility in point-of-view, the likes of which cinema had seen very little of until that point.

Much of Der Letzte Mann feels like cross-hairs positioned over your heart. It is an epic downfall of a modest man, and Jennings's performance is tremendously affecting, among the best because it is entirely in pantomime (with the assistance of a narrowly tailored film score, which Murnau oversaw to ensure it captured the emotion on screen). The screenplay, by longtime Murnau collaborator Carl Mayer, is tight, engrossing, and unrelenting. The film missteps once, and, this must be admitted, rather egregiously. Der Letzte Mann stands as pure tragedy, of the ilk where the ending is a foregone conclusion — except in this case it is not. The single intertitle the film possesses arrives after we believe we've witnessed the utter destruction to a man's soul to inform us, rather shockingly, we haven't:

Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.

The word "author" is questionable in this context. The film's bathetic ending is credited to both Murnau and to Ufa, the production studio. To whom it belongs is largely beside the point. The porter, surprisingly (even shockingly), is saved from his life of destitution by a fluke inheritance, which enables him to return to the hotel donning expensive threads and treating his co-workers and friends to champagne and caviar, riding away in a carriage with a hearty laugh filling the air. In some respects the intertitle drips with sarcasm — "quite improbable" indeed — and even if it was the idea of Murnau, the phrasing suggests a reluctance on his part, the sense that he knew much better as a storyteller. The decision affects the film as a total experience, but it doesn't negate the hard-fought production that comes before it, assuring masterpiece status regardless. Still, the overtly happy ending is inharmonious to the preceding narrative and to the nightmarish expressionism brought to life by Murnau and Freund, who used the tools of a dream to make a poignant and insightful observation on society's dispassionate cruelty. The final scenes completely and unwisely invert that dynamic, no matter how strongly Murnau suggests that life would not play out in the way of the film's finale.

This is why although the German-to-English translation of Der Letzte Mann is "The Last Man," the film is known in English as "The Last Laugh." For authenticity's sake, I do wish it was instead referred to as "The Last Man," but with more than eighty years since its U.S. release, I doubt the change will arrive any time soon. Both titles convey an important degree of ambiguity — the concept of "the last man" applies the porter as the actual last (or, previous) man to hold the job and applies both to his inner depression and the social statement Murnau makes about an industrial society that abandons its elderly. "The Last Laugh" holds that same degree of ambiguity in the way it first represents the absence of laughter (the porter's depression) and the one-upmanship bestowed on him through his inheritance (in his fortune he literally gets the last laugh against those who wronged him). But because I'm someone who doesn't believe the coda is necessary, if possible I would have preferred distributors stick to the more existential title of "The Last Man." It encapsulates the film, and perhaps Murnau's legacy, more appropriately.

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Nosferatu (1922)

d. F.W. Murnau / Germany / 94 mins.
Alt. "Nosferatu, eien Symphonie des Grauens."


Of all the facts and fables surrounding Nosferatu, none is more important than to say it was first film adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. This gives it a chronological place, yes, but more importantly it places the film in a proper context of its horror ratio. The tropes of vampirism – particularly the mythos as defined by Stoker – have been copied, imitated, and parodied almost compulsively in the last century. But how would these tropes have played with audiences unfamiliar with the text in 1922 Germany or 1929 America? The minor chills we feel today are surely just the weak echoes from their nightmares.

By today's standards, Nosferatu (or as it is formally known in English, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) is occasionally guilty of silliness as it explores these tropes. When a young real estate agent drops a picture of his wife on a table, the vampire's eyes widen, cuing this nugget of foreshadowing: "Your wife has a beautiful neck." Admittedly, it's difficult not to chuckle. But some of the film's imagery constructed by director F.W. Murnau retains surprising degrees of horror and power: the expressionist and haunting shadows that were staples of early German cinema; the coffins full of cursed soil and diseased rats; the chamber doors that open and close with near sentience; the ghostly horse-drawn carriage that picks up the hero and delivers him to the vampire's castle; the stiff-as-a-board count rising in a perfect ninety-degree arc out of his crypt; the procession of coffins, full of victims, down a cobblestone street.

Today we're lucky we even have the film, and the story of its survival is infamous. Murnau and his screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, were denied permission from Stoker's widow to adapt the novel, but they went ahead and did it anyway, changing the names – Harker to Hutter, Mina to Ellen, Dracula to Orlok – and altering a few of the situations but rather audaciously lifting the plot. Not surprisingly, the ploy is as transparent on-screen as I make it sound, and Stoker's widow won a lawsuit that called for all copies of the film to be destroyed, which obviously didn't happen. (More interesting, I think, is that by violating the terms of the lawsuit, ironically Nosferatu has gone on to be considered by many the finest adaptation of Stoker's text.)

In many ways it is a great film. It was perhaps inevitable that Stoker's novel would see adaptation, and lovers of cinema can rejoice that such a talented director arrived at it first. (I'm no fan of copyright infringement; I'm just looking at it purely in hindsight.) We begin with Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), a real estate agent sent into the spooky countryside at the behest of his boss (named Knock, played by Alexander Granach) to finalize the purchase of an abandoned town house. This normal act is imbued with suspicious elements: Hutter's wife Ellen (Greta Schroeder) does not want him to go; the letter Knock receives about the property is written in runes, and oddly understands them; and the carriage originally meant to carry Hutter to the castle of Count Orlok (Max Shreck) will not venture past a certain point. When we first see Orlok – his pale skin, his sharp ears, his hungry eyes, his elongated front teeth – immediately we know why.

All of the actors are competent, but none reach the level of Shreck, who plays Orlok with unsettling focus and inhuman removal. His disturbing performance would inspire one big wink of a film, Shadow of the Vampire (2000), in which Shreck's eeriness is "explained" by the fact that he is an actual vampire. (Of course it's fiction, but what flattering fiction it is.) Shreck can be commended for his own bizarreness in the role, but the real power comes in the differences between Orlok as a visual character and Stoker's written descriptions of Count Dracula. Orlok is stripped of Dracula's stated debonair and urbane manner and given the hybridized characteristics of both rats and bats, not to mention a physically manifested pestilence that makes him more than a tad off-putting. You can at least understand why, in the novel, Jonathan Harker might have been charmed by Dracula; in Nosferatu, you want Hutter to turn around and run away at the mere sight of Orlok.

Yet the brilliance of the film is that while there's nothing seductive about Orlok, when he's onscreen it's difficult to look away. Such can be said too for the film as a whole. Murnau's acute directorial sense gives Nosferatu an unmistakable visual appeal, even compared against other examples of German expressionism. The shadows are used liberally and the special effects (or rather, the elementary effects of fading and dissolving) are used minimally. The world of Nosferatu feels real, and Orlok's otherworldly presence makes him, and the fear, all the more disconcerting.

It is worth noting that it has become more important than ever to do your best and try to find the most traditional copy of a film that you can in order to appreciate it for its initial artistic merits. Nosferatu is one of the most famous films in public domain, which has made it susceptible to DVD releases that want to play around with the title cards and the score. The best copy available to the public at my local library is a DVD release from a few years ago, given comically green title cards (it looks like something from an amateurish pulp magazine) and a score performed on a synthesizer that electronically imitates the cries, gasps, and pleas. Another version has a jazz fusion score, and still others exist. It's sad; the ordeal of trying to make a silent movie "hip" by adding contemporary sounds is really embarrassing for the companies and insulting to the viewers.

Nosferatu should be enjoyed as Murnau meant for it to be enjoyed, and fortunately last year Kino released a stellar DVD that uses the original German title cards (with caption translations) and a recording of the Hans Erdmann score that accompanied the film in its initial releases. I strongly recommend going with that DVD if at all possible, but let me say too that even if the lovingly prepared authentic release is not a possibility for you, Nosferatu is still very much worth your time. It's arguably Murnau's most famous film, although certainly not his best (see: Sunrise), and also one of the great films of the horror genre. Just do yourself and Murnau a favor: the moment you hear a ridiculous synthesizer, hit the mute button.

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Sunrise (1927)

d. F.W. Murnau / USA / 95 mins.


I've heard people say they can't see the magic in Citizen Kane because Orson Welles's aesthetic innovations have become so commonplace in movies today. As much I fervently disagree with that statement (full disclosure: I used to say it before I sat down and revisited Kane as a free-thinking adult), I don't think the same can be said for F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. Murnau's film was a technical breakthrough in its own time, on par with the work in Kane but still somehow different. Put simply, it's quite unlike any other film I've ever seen.

If you only had time in your life for one silent drama (a preposterous notion, indeed; why don't more people make time for silent films?), I think you'd probably have to go with Sunrise (often referred to by its full title, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans). It holds up remarkably well under 80-plus years of imitators, and watching it again it's impossible not to awe at the totality of Murnau's expressionist vision – the shadow-soaked atmosphere, the poetic art direction, the zero-gravity camera work in an age when film cameras weighed as much as men.

The plot is as follows: A man and a woman (never named, but amiably acted by George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor) live in the country, where the man is having an affair with a "Woman from the City" (actual casting credit there). The city-woman wants the wife killed, and the man and his wife venture toward the city via boat, where he is expected to throw his wife overboard, and yet...

Well, you'll just have to see it. At first the story seems a little too simplistic, and it's often where the detractors of Sunrise sink their fangs; there aren't many title cards because the film is so straightforward. But how then do we understand it as clearly as we do? The answer, of course, is that the actual storytelling device in any silent drama is neither the acting nor the title cards but rather the camera. (The silent comedies, like those of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, depend more heavily on the characters.) Charles Rosher and Karl Struss shared an Academy Award for their cinematography, which is among the best of the silent period. Gaynor took home the film's third Oscar, for Best Actress.

Murnau's ability to weave emotion with technical wizardry is undeniably powerful and still amazing. A lesser director could have produced the material with the depth of a wading pool; Murnau's film is infused with his masterly touch and its emotional range exists somewhere out in the depths under a diving board. (It lost the best production category at the 1927-1928 Oscars to William Wellman's war melodrama Wings, and instead took home a well-deserved award for unique and artistic vision. History has fallen on the side of Sunrise, however; in 2002 it turned up on the esteemed Sight & Sound poll of the ten greatest films.)

Murnau's German expressionist work back in Europe – where the technical aspects of filmmaking influenced the look, feel, and tone of a movie – made him one of the great directors of the early twentieth century (and some, I'm sure, would say of the entire century). In Germany he steered such classics as Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924), and Faust (1926). He was invited to Hollywood by William Fox to make an expressionist film, which turned out to be Sunrise. His next two films were made with sound and flopped, and he died in a car accident less than five years after the release of Sunrise, missing the premiere of his final film, Tabu (1931). Sunrise remains Murnau's greatest film and is among the best out there.

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