Der letzte Mann (Stummfilm mit live Musik)

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Silent film with musical accompaniment: Stefan Heckel (accordion) and Maria Gstättner (bassoon)

As part of the Accordion Festival

An ageing hotel porter is only employed as a toilet attendant. For him, who proudly paraded with his uniform in his poor neighbourhood, an orderly world collapses. He steals the uniform to cover up his loss of status. But he is exposed and ridiculed by a relative.
‘This is where the film should actually end,’ Mayer says in one of the few intertitles, in order to insert the happy ending desired by Ufa and simultaneously caricature it. ‘In real life, the unhappy old man would have little else to expect but death. But the scriptwriter took pity on him and envisaged an almost improbable aftermath’. An American millionaire dies in the porter's arms, bequeathing him his fortune and helping him to live a luxurious life in a hotel.

DER LETZTE MANN could be another part of the trilogy of chamber films (SCHERBEN, HINTERTREPPE, SYLVESTER), which are not directly connected anyway. But Murnau is a very elegant director who, with Mayer's camera suggestions, gives the film a visual opulence and social precision that caused a sensation. He translates the simple fable, the introspective view of social declassification and the promise of luxury, of harsh reality and beautiful dreams, into an almost too poetic film.