[1] It is a cinematic example of the Kammerspielfilm or "chamber-drama" genre, which follows the style of short, sparse plays of lower middle-class life that emphasized the psychology of the characters rather than the sets and action.

The genre tried to avoid the intertitles (title cards) of spoken dialogue or description that characterize most silent films, in the belief that the visuals themselves should carry most of the meaning.

His uncaring manager decides that the doorman is getting too old and feeble to present the image of the hotel, and so demotes him to a less demanding job, of washroom attendant.

His friends and neighbors, thinking he has lied to them all along about his prestigious job, taunt him mercilessly while his family rejects him out of shame.

Following this comes the film's only title card, which says: "Here our story should really end, for in actual life, the forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death.

"[2] At the end, the audience reads in the newspaper that the doorman inherited a fortune from an eccentric millionaire named A. G. Monen, a patron who died in his arms in the hotel washroom.

French filmmaker Marcel Carné later said that "The camera...glides, rises, zooms or weaves where the story takes it.

"[5] The film's set designers Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig denied this statement and defended Murnau.

The contrast between the rich environment of the Atlantic hotel and the lower class housing, gives an impression of a realistic presentation of situations.

[12] Another use of contrast was the illustration of the respect and essentially the power of the uniform combined with the ridicule and disregard which the doorman experienced after his demotion.

[citation needed] The power of the uniform in the German culture was analyzed in a scholarly article by Jon Hughes.

[14] The film Der letzte Mann illustrates clearly this effect of self-confidence and personal/institutional power as connected to wearing of a decorated uniform.

[16] This perspective led Murnau to experiment with different visual strategies to communicate the film's narrative, like subjective camera movement and mise-en-scène.

This intertitle introduces a tonally different scene where the film jumps forward in time, showing the now wealthy doorman dining in the hotel.

The war reparation payments imposed on Germany caused skyrocketing inflation, economic collapse, food shortages, poverty, malnutrition and hunger.

This need for hope and the director's knowledge of the expectations of the general public were the reasons that Der letzte Mann had a happy, although unrealistic, epilogue.

[20] One of the results of this early cooperation was that director Alfred Hitchcock went to Berlin and started working with Friedrich Murnau.

[22] Hitchcock also expressed his appreciation for Murnau's camera-points-of-view and the subjective shots which provided "audience identification" with the main character.

It influenced the future of motion picture photography... all over the world, and without suggesting any revolution in method, without storming critical opinion as Caligari had done, it turned technical attention towards experiment, and stimulated... a new kind of camera-thinking with a definite narrative end.

"[5] The film's story and content were also praised by critics, with Eisner stating that it "is pre-eminently a German tragedy, and can only be understood in a country where uniform is king, not to say god.