DVD of the Week: The Last Laugh

In this clip, I discuss F. W. Murnau’s seminal silent film “The Last Laugh,” a crucial inspiration for last week’s film, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “A Screaming Man.” The thematic connection is apparent: Both films feature a hotel employee who loses his position due to his advancing age, and whose identity and moral fibre are thereby shattered. Both films face bitter ironies of class and privilege, both reflect sharply on the societies where they’re set—Weimar Germany and Chad, respectively—and both involve the fate of children. In Haroun’s film, when civil war arises the moral stakes suddenly ramp up, becoming mortally high. Murnau was filming in a democracy, albeit a fledgling one, and his vision of inequality and cavalier authority—of the vast contrast between the individual, with his vast dreams and fragile dignity, and the overwhelming, impersonal, implacable force of a society burdened with unquestioned traditions and ruthless habits—virtually shrieks with warnings of impending disaster.