The Last Laugh

F. W. Murnau's Der letzte Mann (released in English as The Last Laugh) opened in Berlin in December 1924, and is widely considered the apex of the late silent-cinema period before sound disrupted everything. The film tells its story almost entirely without intertitles (a technical demand Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer set themselves) relying instead on the visual storytelling of Karl Freund's mobile camera, which became a foundational reference point for the cinematic vocabulary of the next century.

An ageing doorman (Emil Jannings, in the role that established him as the most internationally recognised German actor of the silent era) is demoted from his prized position at a luxury hotel to washroom attendant, and watches the uniform-bound dignity that had defined him in front of his tenement neighbours collapse into shame. The film is a study of masculinity built entirely on costume and station, and what remains when the costume is removed.

The famous Hollywood ending (a tacked-on miraculous reversal that Murnau objected to but the studio insisted on) is included in most surviving prints with an explicit intertitle apology, the only one in the film. Karl Freund's entfesselte Kamera (unchained camera) (strapped to a bicycle, lowered on cables, sent up in elevators) produced sequences that Hollywood would not match for another decade. The film's influence runs through Hitchcock, Renoir and Wenders.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that proved silent cinema could tell complex psychological stories without titles, by sheer command of the moving image. Jannings's central performance is one of the great acting feats of the silent era.