For you Murnau people

[laughingrat]

OK, this is kind of a weird question. At the end of "The Last Laugh," there's a title card that comes up saying, effectively, that Murnau was forced by convention to add a happy ending. (It's been a while since I saw the movie, so I remembered it as saying the studio forced him into it--but this review says otherwise.) The title card sounds really cynical, which would be understandable if Murnau really did feel forced to add a false ending, and Roger Ebert, in the link above, refers to the act as "dimwitted," as if it were a crummy artistic choice.

Did Murnau really feel this way, though? Can anyone who's a little more familiar with the guy himself, or with how he worked, tell me what they think? My personal response as a viewer was that the happy ending was a really masterful stroke, one that was a deliberate and cunning choice. The happy ending is so patently impossible that it makes the "real" ending, the one that would have occurred in real life, that much sadder. When I watched it, it was like there were two stories running in my head at the same time--one where the old man died alone and miserable, and one where he rather improbably ended up just fine. The difference between the two was staggering.

Anyway, I've been wondering about this one for a while and wanted to see if anyone had some info or just a point of view about the movie and its ending.

Comments

[my_daroga]

Ridiculously, I haven't seen "The Last Laugh" yet, but I did just read about it in A History of Narrative Film. I'll have to go home to see what exactly Cook says, but he's taken the party line that Murnau was forced. I'll try to remember to look it up.

[laughingrat]

I suppose it's possible he was! Somehow, between Murnau's status in the film world and the fact that (for me, anyway) the false ending worked so powerfully to subvert itself, I've always thought it couldn't be the result of an imposition from studio admins. But what if it is? Does that make the ending any less effective? *ponders*

[laughingrat]

Oh yeah, I think Lang imposed the framing device on "Caligari," right? Because UFA (or whichever studio it was) was all "Oh god, this crazy mess is never gonna work. Fritz, fix this, will you?"

(That's my heavily-paraphrased apocryphal version. ;))

I really see what you mean. Like...well, you can tell that somehow I feel like the ending of LL would be a little less awesome for me if it was accidental. I know that's kind of an idiosyncratic personal opinion, though, not an objective thing. Like, I feel fine about "Caligari," and that was definitely tampered with. Wacky.

Have you seen much of Chaplin's stuff? Talk about an artist who was in his own bubble and couldn't stand back from his work. I love his stuff, but when he was older, in the 60s I think, he went back and fooled with a lot of his earlier works. Some of them he re-cut slightly, and most of them he re-scored. And it's not a good thing! His compositional skills were moderate at best, and although that worked well at the time (like the "Modern Times" soundtrack), it seems like he was really artistically wacko once he got a few decades between himself and the work. And have you seen the version of "The Gold Rush" that's his official authorized version? It's got a really, really irritating voice-over. Oy.

If you actually like all of those things, I'm sorry for being a little extra-flaily about them. ;)