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

[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*

[my_daroga]

Well, that's an interesting question in general. How much does the "artist's" intent matter when you're judging the effectiveness of the work? There's disagreement about the status of Caligari--as in, whether the asylum portion was originally there or whether it was imposed upon the film--and I suppose it's possible to say that even if the director/writer was wrong, and his/her intent subverted, does that make the end result less valuable? Because Murnau didn't see it?

I don't know. Sometimes director's cuts are great things. Sometimes they do diminish the power of the work because, for whatever reason, the person in charge couldn't stand back far enough, or had some stake in it that didn't help artistically, or... I don't know.