Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh

In these days of low interest rates, the cautious investor will be happy to learn that the Translux has declared a dividend. For your money you not only get the classic Cabinet, but also the Last Laugh, a film that arty aficiandos have already embraced.

Cabinet has for so long been both fadishly and properly popular that we need say little about it. The prologue calls it the "prototype of horror pictures,'' and while it does not have the deep-freezing effect of the early Bela Lugosi films, it generates chill enough.

What separates Cabinet from the Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man class is its bizarre scenery, which is alone worth the admission. The sets are meant to appear painted, and their designers did not try to imitate reality; rather they depicted a mental world furbished by a madman. The prologue calls it "impressionistic," but it must be seen, not described.

The Last Laugh is the triple A, gilt edge part of the German silent-picture oaring. The title and billing suggest that it is a comedy, but actually it is the tragic story of an old man demoted from the splendor of his position as a doorman at a plush hotel to the ignominy of washroom attendant duty. The scenes of the man clinging pitifully to his braided doorman's coat, counterpointed only by the maudlin humor of a drunken party, play up the pathos of this demotion very effectively. The title refers to a purposely incongruous ending, one which I thought was the film's weakest moment.

The photography is the picture's main attraction, largely because Karl Freund uses his apparatus as if it were a miniature camera, picking out sharp contrasts and darting with remarkable mobility from scene to scene and view to view. Emil Jannings stars. The old man suffers from the medium, since he felt it necessary to dwell overly over each emotion to make it register without aid of a sound track.

Most remarkable of all, in these days of sorry cinema, fine pictures, replete with techniques Hollywood has yet to master, were considered entertainment in their day, not object d'art.