MORE MURNAU: Over the weekend, I realized that I’d completely neglected to give Murnau props for the astonishing technical/artistic achievement of “The Last Laugh” (scroll down to previous Murnau post if you want to find my disses of the master): TLL is a silent film with no title cards. (Maybe one or two, but no more than that.) This means that the entire plot, all the inner life of the characters, everything we typically expect from dialogue, must be expressed physically and visually. No words. This is doubtless one of the main reasons TLL was so groundbreaking, and why it was especially loved by filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock who use the camera to “replace” or counterpoint the dialogue. (I’ll post an apposite quotation above.)

So let me try to make my problem with TLL clearer. It’s remarkable that I could follow the plot of TLL, get a sense of the characters’ motives, with no words. But that’s all you get. The doorman (the main character) gets a pretty complex characterization–we see his pride in his position, but also his love of children, his pompousness but also his kindness. But none of the other characters are anything more than a collection of actions and motives. We know that his daughter and her husband reject him, but why? What in their personalities prompted the rejection? What in their personalities spoke against it but was overruled? Nothing, as far as we know. The movie offers melodrama in place of psychological insight. Camerawork can and should turn a character into a (relatively) full personality, not a mere plot device. So put it this way: Objectively, TLL features excellent camerawork; subjectively, in the way the movie was experienced by at least one viewer (hi there), the camera didn’t do what it needed to do in order to make the picture more engaging than any random melodrama I could have seen.