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Last Command, The (1928)

**** (out of 4)

Marvelous drama about a former Russian General (Emil Jannings) who after the war fled the country and ended up in America where ten years later he's working as an extra in Hollywood. A director (William Powell) is making a movie about that Russian war when he comes across a picture of the former General and recognizes him as the man who threw him in prison years earlier. This here certainly turned out to be something truly special and a lot of the credit has to go to director von Sternberg but we also have Jannings turning in a magnificent performance, which ended up winning him an Oscar. The story also won a Oscar and it's easy to see why because the screenplay pretty much contains ever bit of emotion you could possibly want. There's some nice laughs, a pretty good love story, some political drama and some incredibly tense scenes. What shocked me so much is that it seems like von Sternberg wanted the first twenty-minutes or so to gain sympathy for our main character as we see him obviously destroyed by life and working for peanuts as an extra. When then get the grand flashback to when he was pretty much the ruler of Russia and how his encounter with a woman (Evelyn Brent) pretty much changes the rest of his life. The story is part tragedy but it also works incredibly well as a character study because one can't help but love this guy and feel sorry for the pain he goes through. The "Rosebud" from CITIZEN KANE is perhaps the greatest secret in film history but I think Jannings' nervous head shake has to be the second one. Early on we're told that this head shake is due to some accident and when it's finally revealed what that accident was it comes as a great shock and is an incredibly powerful sequence. The final thirty-minutes of the movie is like an out of control train, which is funny because the majority of the footage takes place on-board a train. As the revolution begins the film starts to pick up energy and drama and it just keeps growing and growing as the thing moves along. It's clear von Sternberg planned it this way because he just keeps pounding the viewer with one twist after another and the suspense just keeps building until that final secret is revealed. The aftermath as the story picks back up in Hollywood is yet another powerful turn and will certainly leave an impact on the viewers. Jannings is marvelous in the main role as he really is playing two characters and he does a terrific job with both of them. I was very moved by his performance as the broken down extra because he tells us everything we need to know the first time we see his face. The eyes can be a very powerful thing for an actor and Jannings tells us so much with the look on his face. The power and emotion in his eyes isn't something they can teach at an acting school and the veteran certainly knows how to use his. Powell's role isn't nearly as flashy but he too is quite good. Brent is even more impressive here than she was in the director's previous film UNDERWORLD. Her character goes through a lot of changes as well and I thought the actress nailed each one of the emotions and manages to have us want to see her dead one second only to then change our opinions on her a split second later. THE LAST COMMAND is certainly one of the most powerful movies from this era with a final thirty-minutes that rank among the best I've ever seen.

Josef Von Sternberg directs this magnificent silent film about silent Hollywood and the former Imperial General to the Czar of Russia who has found himself there. Emil Jannings won a well-deserved Oscar, in part, for his role as the general who ironically is cast in a bit part in a silent picture as a Russian general. The movie flashes back to his days in Russia leading up to the country's fall to revolutionaries. William Powell makes his big screen debut as the Hollywood director who casts Jannings in his film. The film serves as an interesting look at the fall of Russia and at an imitation of behind-the-scenes Tinseltown in the early days. Von Sternberg delivers yet another classic, and one that is filled with the great elements of romance, intrigue, and tragedy.

This is one of the most richly woven tapestries I have discovered on film about film, acting about acting, fictions about fictions. The extra allure here is that it comes to us from the last minutes of the first hours of cinema, at the cusp of silent and sound filmmaking and so just as cinema - then pioneering elaborate theories about the eye animating the world, and so the eye as soul - was about to revert back to the simple machinations of theater. It would re-emerge from these notions in the time of the New Wave; this is New Wave of thirty years before.

The story is so interesting in itself, you should know a rough outline; an exiled Russian general winds up - is karmically reborn - on a Hollywood set as a movie extra to play a Russian general, reliving the past. The framing story is a flashback to his days in Russia, the old Russia about to be torn asunder by revolution, and then we have contemporary time as he struggles to relive the events for the camera.

The story within a story that emerges is connected by the most astonishing panorama of people acting roles. So we have within the flashback, which takes up most of the film; the general acting autocratic from the power of a uniform; troops acting in front of the Czar who inspects them; the revolutionary girl acting coy and in love; then while truly in love - this is a plot point you will just have to swallow - acting like a revolutionary; finally the general acting out his part in the cataclysmic turn of events.

There is more, once we reach out of the film; so we have a European actor coming to America to act in a film about the same, the only surviving film from his time in America; acting again a part he had played in The Last Laugh some years before. As in Murnau's film it is the uniform, and so the fabric of ceremonial occasion, there a hotel porter's uniform, that permits a performance that validates living. And once painfully stripped of it, there is only naked soul.

This is all very potent stuff to see, but it wouldn't be the same without the powerful ending. The general assumes his position on set as himself, and as cameras roll out their re-enactment of a forlorn trench, he becomes completely submerged in the hallucination, memory, essentially the internal narrative running in his mind of the original events. So we have a third layer here, the set as the space of memory and now the eye, the camera, looking inwards to relive.

The motion rippling across the layers is so seductive we may overlook how this ripple is a full cycle.

The one narrative is finally complete in the others, the cycle only possible with this alignment, and so this poignantly reveals both the creative and destructive aspects of art. The various threads and boundaries blurred, are now clear again through an osmosis of the soul. On one side we have the act of a powerful creation; on the other, bitter end, a broken man consumed in the fire of that act.

Sternberg knew what he was doing. Everything here dazzles with artifice, scale of descent, camera magic. The transition inside the flashback and back from it happens through a mirror, the looking glass of fictions that crystallizes illusion. This is the full cycle then; the ending somberly unmasks truth in illusion, heart in mind.

See, if you can find it, from the same year The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, about an anonymous, disposable actor caught in the wheels of the dream factory. I will follow the thread to The Blue Angel.

An extra is called upon to play a general in a movie about the Russian Revolution. However, he is not any ordinary extra. He is Serguis Alexander, former commanding general of the Russia armies who is now being forced to relive the same scene, which he suffered professional and personal tragedy in, to satisfy the director who was once a revolutionist in Russia and was humiliated by Alexander. It can now be the time for this broken man to finally "win" his penultimate battle. This is one powerful movie with meticulous direction by Von Sternberg, providing the greatest irony in Alexander's character in every way he can. Jannings deserved his Oscar for the role with a very moving performance playing the general at his peak and at his deepest valley. Powell lends a sinister support as the revenge minded director and Brent is perfect in her role with her face and movements showing so much expression as Jannings' love. All around brilliance. Rating, 10.

"The Last Command" is a beautiful and extraordinary film in the best tradition of classic story-telling, with German actor Emil Jannings giving an outstanding performance for which he won the first Oscar for "Best Actor" ever. Based on the life of Russian official Theodore Lodijensky, who ran from the Soviet revolution and worked in Hollywood as an extra in silent films, Jannings plays a general who is chosen for a big historical production by a fellow countryman, a theater director who he once persecuted in Russia, for his subversive activities, and who is now in charge of the film's direction. From the first scenes when the military is selected, when he arrives in the studio, dons his costume and makes up, to the scene he impressively plays in the film-within-the-film (containing one of the most eloquent critics to cinema when turned into a cold industry that makes either films as sausages or limousines), "The Last Command" consists of a long flashback of the general's life in Russia, when he incarcerated the theater director and fell in love with a revolutionary actress. Jannings would work again for Sternberg as the protagonist of "The Blue Angel", seduced by the wicked Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich). Highly recommended.