The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh

Made in the early days of the German film industry, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh are still well worth seeing, by anybody's standards. Comparing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with American movies, Will Rogers said that the former was frankly about the ravings of two maniacs while the latter was the result of the ravings of director and star.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari describes a mountebank monk's visit to a small German town. Apparently Dr. Caligari wishes to exhibit his somnambulist at the town's fair. But a series of unexplained murders follows their arrival. At last Dr. Caligari is caught and led off in a strait-jacket. This story, however, is told by a young man in an institution. When the director of the institution walks among his patients after the story, he himself appears to be Dr. Caligari. Recognizing him, the patient screams, "You are Dr. Caligari!" and he too is led off in a strait-jacket, at which point the movie ends.

Written by the Czech Hans Janowitz and the Austrian Carl Mayer, the film was the product partly of their own experience (Janowitz' father had gone insane), and it was partly intended as the masque of an attack on the unlimited authority of the German government. But the director, Dr. Robert Wiene, added the first and last sequences, in the institution, so that the movie lost its political meaning, and offers no ending outside the puzzle of appearances.

Skipping without explanation from the institution to the village, the movie shows the adventures of a madman in the distorted way a madman might see them. The adventures are not explained but only magnified for the expressionist settings in which the material things are emotional adornments, parts of a state of mind. Cesare's body leans with the lean of a crooked chimney, Caligari appears to grow out of his tent. The wild windows like kites, roofs that look like knives, and the black and white strips across the institution's floor reinforce the uneasiness. But these devices, like the shadows painted on the scenery, are all in the setting, of which the heavily made-up characters are a part, products of a "draftman's imagination." The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is less a movie than a picture pictured; and the camera work lacks the variety of The Last Laugh.

Unlike The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Last Laugh has a simple story: that of the doorman of a huge hotel who, when he is replaced, believes he has lost his identity. The movie lacks subtitles, and the story-telling comes through picture progression in which the old man himself appears less than his image. You see him pictured in the mirror of the hotel's washroom, and in the imaginings which return to his old post. Unlike The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari where the complex settings were photographed straight-on, the camera work, done by Carl Freund, is essential to the doorman's fantasies. These dreams superimpose the hotel's revolving door or its shadow on his visions of himself in full uniform. When he gets drunk you don't see it all in his gestures, the camera does it for him. The Last Laugh was made in 1924, five years after Caligari; the film medium's posibilities for representing the feelings of one man had never before been so fully exploited. The image we have of the doorman owes as much to the director F. W. Murnaw as to the actor Emil Jannings.

Though techniques of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari have been in many ways outdated, and The Last Laugh's innovations became conventions, both movies are still much alive, and deserve to be seen. Together they make the best bill the Brattle has offered in some months.