Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Djayesse Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's wonderful direction. Karl Freund's living camera. Walter Röhrig's half-expressionist settings. And Emil Janning's performance. Everything which makes this film unforgettable. This is one of the greatest films of the silent cinema. Pure cinema: only images, no inter-titles. Well, just two: to warn us at the beginning; to explain that the end was so depressing that they had to shoot another one. This is what we call a universal film. It is also a very simple story: a hotel doorman sinks and becomes a bathroom attendant.What makes this film great is the way this story is told. We follow each level of the old man's downfall. This small and common story becomes a great classical tragedy. This man with his shiny costume is no ordinary doorman: he commands the army of the people receiving the customers in the hotel with his whistle. He is not a doorman, he is the Marshall Hindenburg! But Time gets a grip on him. He is now a weak old man. He cannot carry suitcases like before. He is "degraded". He cannot wear his uniform anymore: it will rot in a cupboard. Now, he will look after the hotel bathroom, in the basement. Everyone in the hotel is above him: professionally and physically. He now has the lowest job in the hotel. Moreover, he sometimes has to crawl on the floor to clean it. Now that he works in the basement, we can say that his job has become an inferno. But one has to save the face: nobody must know what happened to him. Before coming home, he brings his old costume and wears it in front of his daughter and the neighbors. Unfortunately, his secret is revealed and everyone mocks him. Even his daughter. He cannot come back home. So he stays in his bathroom, alone, forgotten. Maybe waiting for death. This is the first ending. But as I said previously, the producers thought it was a bit too pessimistic (or was it too realistic?). So they shot another one. I cannot believe in this second ending.

Steffi_P In the 1920s silent cinema was becoming ever more elaborate and literary. While visual means of storytelling were getting ever more sophisticated, the frequency and length of title cards was also on the up, often adding words where they weren't strictly necessary. This 1924 effort to create a picture entirely without intertitles (bar one at the beginning and one at the end) ought to be a real breath of fresh air, no? Well, director F.W. Murnau was certainly a talented enough fellow to pull off such a thing, in theory at least.Of course, your story can't be too complex – not everything can be explained visually. The Last Man is a simple tale of man enjoys job, man loses job, man mopes about a bit, man inherit fortune and has last laugh. Murnau himself later pointed out that the story is absurd because a washroom attendant (which said man subsequently becomes) would make more money than a doorman. This may be true, but at least the narrative goes to lengths to show the drop in status that the hero suffers. Much is made of the military-style uniform that doormen wear, and the being made redundant is made to look like the degradation of an army officer. The ironic reversal of fortune in the final reel seems both tacked on and dragged out too long. It would be fairly neat if it was just shown to happen, but instead the point is laboured into banality.But even with such a trite storyline, a silent picture without intertitles isn't necessarily easy. So what does Murnau do? He cheats. When Emil Jannings gets the news about his job, he is told in a letter which we see in close-up, which really amounts to the same thing as a title card of someone saying it. This shouldn't have been much of a distraction, but rather than just showing the letter we get words blurring back and forth across the screen, hammering the point home. And throughout the picture Murnau is continually showing off with technique, employing every cheap trick-shot the mechanics of the day allowed, as if that makes up for the lack of text. The bit where the old man dreams of throwing a trunk up and catching it might actually be quite funny, if it wasn't shot through some blurry filter with a wobbly camera. It's a pity because Murnau could be such a wonderful image-maker when he didn't get too absorbed in technical showmanship.Perhaps the worthy talents of lead actor Emil Jannings can help to salvage something of value. Unfortunately this giant of German cinema has one of his hammy turns in The Last Man, and his acting is just as exaggerated as Murnau's formal excess. His caricatured facial expressions and waddling walk are great for comedy, but when he gives that stupid doleful expression when his niece finds him working in the toilets it makes the scene unintentionally funny. Still, it's not all bad. For this performance Jannings has one of those elaborate moustache/sideburn combos which makes his mouth almost invisible, and this encourages him to emote more through his eyes and body language. There's a very touching moment where he sits by the basins drinking his soup.I suppose the fact that Murnau's other pictures are just as wordy as was the norm at that time ought to serve as a warning that he was not necessarily the best man to conduct such an experiment. There were around this time a number of directors who did make good pictures with very sparse intertitles, including Murnau's studio-mates Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst, or King Vidor in Hollywood. None of these attempted a picture without subtitles, instead recognising them as a necessary burden, using them when needed but keeping them to a minimum. And their late silent pictures are far more satisfying than this corny and overwrought bit of self-indulgence.

G K The film is among the finest achievements of the silent cinema. The old doorman (Emil Jannings) of a luxury hotel is demoted to the job of lavatory attendant, but comes into a fortune and gets his revenge.The Last Laugh is an ironic silent anecdote, made important by its virtual abandonment of dialogue and the whole-hearted adoption of a freewheeling camera technique which gives some thrilling dramatic effects. The film is the most famous example of the short-lived Kammerspiel or "chamber-drama" genre. The set was built entirely within a studio, unusual for director F.W. Murnau, who preferred to shoot on location.

JoeytheBrit In 1920s Germany, a hotel doorman takes great pride in both his job and the grand uniform that denotes his position. The uniform earns him the unquestioning respect of his neighbours, so when he is demoted through no fault of his own to the lowly position of lavatory attendant, the doorman is devastated. Stealing the uniform that once was his, he makes a sad attempt to fool his neighbours into thinking he still manages the door of the prestigious Atlantic Hotel but, before long, the truth is uncovered, and the respect they once paid him quickly dissolves.The Last Laugh stands as one of the finest creations of a remarkable director, F.W. Murnau, whose credits include Nosferatu, Faust and Sunrise. Filmed without use of subtitles – and to appreciate what an astounding achievement this is, try imagining a dramatic film made without any form of dialogue today – Murnau crafts a beautiful, compelling and tragic tale that stands as both testimony to his undoubted skills and to the artistic heights to which silent cinema often aspired.The venerated German actor Emil Jannings was only 40 when he took on the role of the unnamed porter, and yet a combination of Waldemar Jabs painstaking make-up and Jannings' own ability to convey his character's heartache in simple ways, such as the stoop of his shoulders or a bent leg, means he gives a towering performance that never threatens, however, to overshadow the story being told.The story revolves as much around the grandiose uniform Jannings wears as it does the man. A symbol of the contemporary German importance attached to uniforms and their unavoidably militaristic connotations, the uniform is portrayed as making the man – and it is only the contentious ending that spins the message that it is not uniforms but compassion and kindness that make men great – not only through the respect he receives from all around him, but in the transformation the porter undergoes whenever he is parted from it. From a ramrod-backed creature of magnificence, with elaborately arranged hair and whiskers, he turns into a fumbling old man with bowed back and shaking hands. In the hands of a lesser actor, the demands of this transformation may have descended into cheap caricature, but Jannings never lets us lose sight of the proud man lurking within the bowed and beaten body.Karl Freund's camera-work is a revelation in this film, right from the opening shot as we descend with the lift into the foyer of the opulent Atlantic hotel. Numerous tricks are used without drawing attention to their use and thus distracting the viewer from the tragedy that is taking place: the drunken POV shot (achieved by strapping the camera to Freund's chest) in Jannings' flat after his niece's wedding reception; the blurred fantasy sequences (themselves a breakthrough in film narrative) achieved by smearing Vaseline onto the camera lens, and the use of dialectic montage and dolly shots, were all groundbreaking techniques never before used, but copied forevermore.Murnau directs the film with the assurance of a man at the top of his form – where he would arguably remain until his tragically early death – and the care taken with this film is evident throughout every shot. This is why Murnau made relatively few films in an era when many directors churned them out at a rate of a dozen or more per year. The degree of a director's conscientiousness is always evident on the screen, and it is always a pleasure to view a Murnau film, because it is clear that his commitment to his work was always second to none.