The Last Laugh (2k Restoration) (Blu-ray)
One of the crowning achievements of the German expressionist movement, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) stars Emil Jannings stars as an aging doorman whose happiness crumbles when he is relieved of the duties and uniform which had for years been the foundation of his happiness and pride. Through Jannings’s colossal performance, The Last Laugh becomes more than the plight of a single doorman, but a mournful dramatization of the frustration and anguish of the universal working class. Featuring a new musical score by the Berklee College of Music, as well as the original score by Giuseppe Becca, this is the definitive edition of the landmark classic, mastered from a 2K restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung.
New Edition Released November 2017:
2K Restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung
New musical score (2017) by the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra
Original 1924 score by Giuseppe Becce, orchestrated by Detlev Glanert (2003)
Audio commentary by film historian Noah Isenberg
“The Last Laugh: The Making of,” a 40-minute documentary
Bonus DVD featuring the unrestored export version with music by Timothy Brock, performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra
- F. W. Murnau - Director
- Emil Jannings - Actor
Reviews
"A masterpiece of the German silent cinema, F. W. Murnau's 1924 film has never looked as dazzling on American home video as it does in this new edition from Kino International." - Dave Kehr, The New York Times
"F. W. Murnau's 1924 drama 'The Last Laugh' (a new restoration of which is featured in a two-disk set from Kino) may well be the apogee of silent-film production....The visual clarity of the new release reveals the extraordinary means by which Murnau united the emotional, political, psychological, and moral domains in his quasi-Biblical yet modern and naturalistic fable." - Richard Brody, The New Yorker
A RATING -"Rightly praised by Alfred Hitchcock as 'almost the perfect film.'" - Tim Purtell, Entertainment Weekly
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