the coat in the closet
by Douglas Messerli
Carl
Mayer (writer), F. W. Murnau (director) Der
letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) /
1924
If one wanted to explain to someone the basic difference between an art film and a cranked-out Hollywood-like production, one could not choose a better example than the two films that make up F. W. Murnau’s German-produced The Last Laugh. For the larger part of this film is one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever filmed, using the camera (strapped to photographer’s chests, held by cinematographers rolled about on wheelchairs, and dropped from heights via rope) in near constant motion, zooming in and out of the major rooms of the Atlantic Hotel, where most of the action takes place, in a way that was not only ahead of its time, but which has seldom been matched in the art form since.
From the very first moment of Murnau’s Kammerspielfilm we are awed as we descend,
within the glass encased hotel elevator, into the vast lobby that tells us
immediately we are in a world of lavish pomposity and wealth. A few seconds
later the camera comes to focus on almost as large mass, that hotel’s Charon,
the grandly coated doorman, Emil Jannings, the central character in Murnau’s
morality play.
His
home life, similarly, is presented as nearly idyllic. On the night we first see
him at home, his niece is quite apparently overjoyed: she is to be married the
very next day. Both wife and niece treat their breadwinner with love and loyalty,
overjoyed just to see him strut imperiously through the apartment yard on his
way to work.
During the rainy afternoon of the day before, however, we have witnessed
a small flaw in this man’s charmed world: rushing in and out, umbrella in hand,
to usher the hotel guests back and forth, he has been asked to lift down one of
the customer’s huge trunks. Gathering up all his strength, he brings the burden
into the hotel, but he is exhausted by act, in need of a small sip of schnapps
to regain his vigor. The hotel doorman, it is clear, is growing old, a fact not
lost on the Geschätsführer, the hotel manager. The very next morning, the
doorman is called in and handed a note. Taking out his glasses, another sign of
his age, he slowly reads what’s written upon the paper (the only use of the
written word in the central part of Marnau’s film): he has been relieved of his
position as a doorman and ordered to replace the hotel’s oldest employee, the
washroom attendant.
Murnau quipped that the switch was actually for the better—“everyone
knows that a washroom attendant makes more than a doorman”—but for Jannings'
character the change is utterly inconceivable. As the manager forces him to
remove his beloved uniform, the former doorman gradually shifts from a Charon
into an Atlas, as he replaces the previous burden of a trunk by the weight of
the world. Before our eyes, Jannings ages, by scene’s end hardly able to move.
The uniform and all that it stands for is locked away into a closet, the key
for which this now old man cannot resist stealing.
Doors, which have previously been busy centers of entry and egress, suddenly
grow into objects of gigantean proportions eerily rocking against their jambs
without a person in sight. The world of the lavatories lies below the busy first-floor
lobby, a journey that takes one through long, arched corridors that cannot help
but remind one of entering Hades. Forced to put on a white work jacket,
Jennings sits, his huge frame exposed, as if he were now naked.
At
the close of the day, this destroyed being is now reduced to sneaking into the
manager’s office, escaping the harsh light of the hotel watchman, in order to
retrieve his treasured coat. As he slinks out of the hotel, his whole being is
possessed by a vision of the world that can only remind one of the First World
War-time depictions of the German Expressionists, everything is askew, at an
angle, dizzying in perspective.
He
has also forgotten his lunch, and we soon witness his joyful wife on her way to
deliver it to him. She quickly shows herself at the front door, darting behind
a nearby wall to await his appearance. When he doesn’t show, she shows herself
again, but cannot spot him; another man has apparently taken his place. An
inquiry leads her into the hotel’s bowels where she sends a message for him to appear.
When he does, she faces the nobody he has become, shocked, angry, ashamed. The
new attendant painfully sits out the day, but by the time he picks up his
former uniform in a train station check where he has left it, word has gotten out
among the apartment dwellers: he has lost his job!
Together the two descend into the inferno of the men’s lavatory, where
the watchman gently strokes his friend’s head and covers him with a coat before
leaving, the camera documenting the sad heap of a the proud man he once was.
So
ends this great work of art.
Or so it should have ended. Universum Film
(UFA) executives demanded a more positive close, forcing the director and
writer to add an epilogue, prefaced for the first time with an actual title
card reading: “Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn
man would have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him
and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.” Mocking both the epilogue and
the reason for it, the title card makes clear the creative partner’s perspective.
And, in fact, the rest of the tale is acted out mostly with the other
characters laughing in derision of the now wealthy former doorman, who has
inherited a fortune from an American millionaire named A. G. Money, a patron
who died in his arms in the hotel bathroom. Or perhaps they are just laughing
at this ludicrous appendage.
Where
is this unlikely couple going, one well might ask? Why to Hollywood, of course,
where Murnau showed up two years later, to escape, as a homosexual, Germany’s severe
penal code! Cut to sunrise, the name of his next feature.
Los
Angeles, May 21, 2012
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