SILVER SCREEN

THE LAST LAUGH AT ONE HUNDRED: CINEMA’S FORGOTTEN TURNING POINT

LARRY SERRALTA

September 19, 2025

One hundred years after its US release, F. W. Murnau’s “The Last Laugh” remains one of cinema’s most radical experiments, telling an entire story almost without words. Emil Jannings’s fallen doorman embodies the collapse of dignity in Weimar Germany, his uniform both costume and identity. The film’s famously “happy” ending, imposed by the studio, is less consolation than satire, exposing the artificiality of forced optimism.

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In 1925, US audiences first encountered F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, a German film that had premiered in Berlin just months earlier, in December 1924, as Der letzte Mann. Its centennial provides an occasion to return to a work that, though less famous than Metropolis (1927) or Nosferatu (1922), may be the single most important film most people have never seen. It is an anniversary worth marking not because anniversaries compel nostalgia, but because The Last Laugh changed cinema forever: It proved that a film could tell its story through images alone, and it captured with devastating clarity the fragility of German society in the aftermath of World War I.

Even the poster looks exhausted: dignity as woodcut, despair in black ink

Its German title, translating as “The Last Man,” already signaled a story about collapse. At its center is Emil Jannings playing a proud hotel doorman who, once stripped of his ornate uniform and reassigned to a basement washroom, loses his social standing, his dignity, and even his sense of self. His fall mirrors the wider humiliation of Germany after 1918—a once-proud empire reduced to dependency and ridicule. The uniform here is more than a costume: It is identity itself, brittle and contingent on the approval of others.

And yet, the paradox of The Last Laugh is that this bleak story is remembered today less for its social critique than for its formal revolution. Its director, F. W. Murnau, working with cinematographer Karl Freund, created what contemporaries called the “unchained camera” (die entfesselte Kamera), which moved through space with the fluidity of thought. The film contains only a single intertitle, and otherwise relies entirely on images to carry its narrative. In doing so, it gave cinema a new grammar.

The Last Laugh belongs to the years when Germany was still haunted by World War I. Six years after the armistice, the Weimar Republic was struggling to stabilize a wounded society. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed heavy reparations, unemployment remained high, and inflation had only recently been brought under control after a catastrophic collapse in 1923.

The psychological toll was profound. Millions of veterans had returned home disabled, traumatized, or otherwise unable to reintegrate. A sense of national humiliation pervaded public life. In this climate, cultural expression turned toward extremes. German Expressionism dominated the early 1920s: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Warning Shadows (1923). The jagged sets, distorted spaces, and exaggerated performances conveyed a world fractured by war and defeat.

The general of the lobby: buttons as medals, posture as rank

But by 1924, filmmakers began seeking a new path—one that preserved the psychological intensity of Expressionism but placed it in recognizable, realistic settings. The Last Laugh is a prime example of this transition. Its courtyard, hotel lobby, and wedding feast are true to life, while its camera movements and drunken hallucinations bend space to the protagonist’s despair. This mix of realism and expressionist subjectivity made it something entirely new.

The plot is deceptively simple. Jannings plays the doorman of the Atlantic Hotel, a grand Berlin establishment modeled on real luxury hotels. His uniform is everything: Its gold buttons and braided epaulets make him a figure of awe among his working-class neighbors. When he returns home at dawn from his night shift, he is admired like a general returning from battle. At his niece’s wedding celebration, his very presence lends prestige.

But age eventually betrays him. He struggles with heavy trunks, his body too slow and weak for the demands of his post. The hotel manager notices, and one morning, the uniform is taken away. He is reassigned to the washroom in the basement, forced to hand towels to guests in anonymity.

Prestige downgraded to janitor service

The descent is brutal. His neighbors discover the truth. His occupation, which once earned him admiration, now makes him a subject of ridicule. At the wedding feast, laughter replaces respect. He tries to hide his shame but is exposed. In the film’s most haunting sequence, Jannings, drunk and broken, stumbles into the night, the camera swaying with him. To create the sensation of vertigo, disorientation, and collapse, Freund strapped the camera to his chest. Jannings clings to walls, his body a ruin, his life reduced to ignominy.

The echo chamber of humiliation

It is here that Murnau’s film touches the core of its allegory. The doorman is every worker whose dignity is bound to his labor, every veteran who returned from war to find himself obsolete, every nation that has lost its power and the symbols thereof. Identity, the film insists, is contingent and socially constructed. Without his uniform, the doorman ceases to exist.

At this point, the story should have ended. But the studio feared that a tale of pure despair would alienate audiences. Murnau complied, but on his own terms, prefacing it with the following:

Even the intertitle rolls its eyes at the ending, as if embarrassed that the film is still on the screen.

What follows is absurd. A wealthy American dies in the hotel, leaving his fortune to Jannings. Suddenly rich, he feasts on champagne and caviar, and returns triumphantly to the washroom, where he rewards the attendant who once pitied him. The sequence plays like parody. The subtitle itself breaks the fourth wall, announcing the falseness of what we subsequently see.

He is back—champagne in hand, cigar in mouth, dignity nowhere in sight

The effect is double-edged. On the one hand, audiences get the “happy ending” the studio insisted upon. On the other, the film itself exposes the artificiality of such endings. By foregrounding its contrivance, Murnau invites us to read it as ironic, even satirical. It is as though he wanted to say: You asked for happiness, here it is, grotesque and unearned.

At this moment, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) was already established as one of Germany’s foremost directors. A veteran of World War I and a student of art history and literature, he had turned to film in the early 1920s. His Nosferatu remains one of the landmarks of horror. But with The Last Laugh, he aimed at something even more ambitious: a cinema freed from words.

Nosferatu walked so the doorman could stumble.

Working with Freund, he developed techniques that changed the medium. Freund’s “unchained camera” moved like a body: it glided into elevators, swung through revolving doors, swayed with drunkenness, plunged into basements. The camera was no longer a static observer but a participant in the drama.

Murnau sought what he called “pure film”—storytelling through movement, light, and gesture alone. It was a manifesto as much as a moviemaking technique, and it astonished critics who had never imagined a film achieving such narrative clarity without text.

The film also belongs to Emil Jannings. His performance is extraordinary: He embodies pride in the set of his shoulders, humiliation in the collapse of his face, despair in the weight of his walk. His body becomes the story, more eloquent than any dialogue could be. The role brought him international fame. In the late 1920s he moved to Hollywood, where he starred in Victor Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh (1927) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928). When the first Academy Awards were held in 1929, Jannings won the inaugural Oscar for Best Actor for his work in these two films.

Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the role that won him Hollywood’s first Oscar, before history sentenced him otherwise

But his career took a dark turn. With the coming of sound, his heavy German accent limited his prospects in Hollywood. He returned to Germany, where he became a leading actor in the Third Reich, starring in propaganda films. After 1945, he was disgraced, never acted again, and lived the rest of his life in obscurity. This trajectory haunts his legacy. The man who once embodied the fall of dignity on-screen later lent his talents to a regime that destroyed millions. Watching The Last Laugh today means confronting not only a cinematic triumph but also the shadow of its star’s later compromises.

When The Last Laugh premiered in Berlin in December 1924, critics hailed it as a breakthrough. Film-Kurier praised its realism. For German audiences, the story struck a deep chord. Many had seen their own dignity eroded by inflation, unemployment, and defeat. The courtyard scenes mirrored their own tenements; the humiliation of losing work was their own daily fear. The ironic ending was met with ambivalence. Some welcomed the relief, others felt betrayed. But even with its contrived conclusion, the film was recognized as a daring experiment. Its success confirmed Murnau as the leading director of his generation.

What makes the film remarkable is its balance of styles. Its settings—the hotel lobby, the courtyard, the washroom—are realistic, shot with attention to detail and atmosphere. Yet its camera movements are expressionistic, conveying interior states through external space. At its heart is the working class. The courtyard community is not a backdrop but a social world that defines the doorman’s status. The uniform is not just clothing, but the frangible marker of dignity. Without it, he is nothing. In Weimar Germany, where millions faced unemployment and poverty, this was more than metaphor. It was reality.

In 1925, Universal Pictures brought The Last Laugh to the United States. Critics there were astonished by its technique: the moving camera, the visual storytelling, the absence of intertitles. But socially, the story resonated less directly. For US audiences in the roaring twenties, the humiliation of a doorman did not mirror their own struggles. To them, it was a morality tale, or perhaps just a curiosity, rather than a reflection of daily life.

Yet its influence on US filmmakers was enormous. The fluid camera and visual narrative inspired directors like King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and, later, Alfred Hitchcock. In a sense, the US release ensured that The Last Laugh would shape world cinema, even if US audiences never embraced it as their own.

One hundred years later, the film still feels contemporary. The anxiety of losing work, the dependence on external signs of status, the fragility of the self in a society that prizes appearances—all remain with us in the age of gig economies, perpetual layoffs, and precarious labor.

Murnau would go on to make Faust (1926) and then travel to Hollywood, where his Sunrise (1927) is often hailed as the greatest silent film ever made. In 1931, at the age of forty-two, he died in a car accident in California, cutting short a career that had already reshaped cinema.

Murnau’s Sunrise (1927): the silent film that spoke louder than words ever could

And so, the centennial of The Last Laugh is not just an occasion for film history but a reminder of what cinema can do at its best: capture a society’s wounds, elevate the ordinary to the tragic, and invent new forms to express what words cannot.

To place The Last Laugh in its proper historical setting, one must see it in dialogue with other films of the mid-1920s that were reshaping the language of cinema. In Germany, it followed Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), which had given Expressionist cinema its vocabulary of stylized sets and sinister psychology. But Murnau broke from these painted abstractions, replacing them with real streets, real courtyards, and a camera that bent the world through movement rather than distortion. At almost the same moment, G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925) depicted the poverty and disillusion of postwar Vienna with raw social realism. Together, Pabst and Murnau marked the transition from expressionist stylization to the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in cinema.

The Joyless Street (1925): Greta Garbo framed by poverty, style as survival

Other directors elsewhere in the world were also pursuing the idea of a specifically cinematic language. In Hollywood, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) sought a radical naturalism, filmed on location in Death Valley and stretching to epic length, while Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) fused technical wizardry with comedic invention, experimenting with dream logic and cinematic illusion. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) premiered just months after Murnau’s film, introducing montage as a new grammar of editing: a dynamic collision of images that contrasted with Murnau’s fluid camera. Meanwhile, in Denmark, Carl Theodor Dreyer released Master of the House (1925), a domestic drama whose psychological realism and close-up intimacy anticipated his later masterpieces.

Even against this international backdrop, The Last Laugh occupies a singular position. It is less panoramic than Greed, less didactic than Strike, less comic than Keaton, and it fuses realism with subjectivity in a way none of the others attempted. Murnau’s achievement was to demonstrate that cinema could be psychological and social, realistic and dreamlike—a synthesis that marked a turning point not only in German film but in the history of world cinema.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Strike (1925): Eisenstein’s factory floor, where images collide like fists

A century later, its intertitle still stings. It tells us that Murnau knew the truth: that life, unlike cinema, rarely provides miracles, and that sometimes the most honest story is the one that stops before the ending.

Larry Serralta (b. 1962 in Nouméa, New Caledonia) has lectured, without invitation, in several universities where his presence went unnoticed. His writings appear only in journals that fold immediately after publication, which he considers a mark of integrity. Serralta currently divides his time between a disused observatory in the Andes and a rented mailbox in Maputo.

Cover image: Optimism, served with extra foam