The Last Laugh (1924)
Plays here · source: Internet Archive
An aging hotel doorman's gold-braided uniform is the whole of his pride and standing in his tenement neighborhood, so when he is demoted to washroom attendant, the quiet humiliation unravels his life, until an outlandish inheritance turns the story around.
The Last Laugh tells almost its entire story without a single intertitle, leaning instead on Karl Freund’s revolutionary “unchained camera” — mounted on bicycles, cranes, and the cameraman’s own chest — to carry the emotion, a technical leap that Hollywood studios studied and imported within the year.
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