The Last Laugh tells a simple tale through intensely subjective devices. A hotel doorman is forced by old age to trade in his gold-buttoned paramilitary finery for a lavatory attendant’s smock, falling from graceful dignity to stooped humiliation in a peculiarly German warning against the decline of benign authority. In contrast to the mechanical wonders of the modern world surrounding him—cars, trains, neon lights, elevators—the porter, and his old-fashioned values, are outdated hulks. A son of rural Westphalia, Murnau located terror in the countryside for Nosferatu; with The Last Laugh, he places it in the city, its reflective surfaces generating a frenzied kaleidoscope.