The Last Command (1928 film)

The Last Command
Directed by	Josef von Sternberg
Written by	John F. Goodrich Lajos Biró (story) Josef von Sternberg (story) Herman J. Mankiewicz (titles)
Produced by	Adolph Zukor Jesse L. Lasky
Starring	Emil Jannings Evelyn Brent William Powell
Production company	Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date	January 22, 1928
Running time	85 minutes
Country	Template:Film US
Languages	silent English intertitles

The Last Command is a 1928 silent film directed by Josef von Sternberg, and written by John F. Goodrich and Herman J. Mankiewicz, from a story by Lajos Biró. Star Emil Jannings won the very first Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performances in this film and The Way of All Flesh, the only year that multiple roles were considered. In 2006, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The supporting cast includes Evelyn Brent and William Powell.

Plot

In 1928 Hollywood, director Leo Andreyev (William Powell) looks through photographs for actors for his next movie. When he comes to the picture of an aged Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings), he pauses, then tells his assistant (Jack Raymond) to cast the man. Sergius shows up at the Eureka Studio with a horde of other extras and is issued a general's uniform. As he is dressing, another actor complains that his continual head twitching is distracting. Sergius apologizes and explains that it is the result of a great shock he once experienced.

The film then flashes back ten years to Czarist Russia, which is in the midst of the Communist Revolution. Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, the Czar's cousin and commander of all his armies, is informed by his adjutant that two actors entertaining the troops have been identified as dangerous "revolutionists" during a routine passport check. He decides to toy with them for his amusement. When one of them, Leo Andreyev, becomes insolent, Sergius whips him across the face and has him jailed.

Leo's companion, the beautiful Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent), is an entirely different matter. She intrigues Sergius. Despite the danger she poses, he takes her along with him. After a week, he gives her a pearl necklace as a token of his feelings for her. She comes to realize that he is at heart a man of great honor who loves Russia as deeply as she does. When she invites him to her room, he spots a partially hidden pistol, but deliberately turns his back to her. She draws the weapon, but cannot fire. Despite their political differences, she has fallen in love with him.

When the Bolsheviks capture the train on which they are traveling, she pretends to despise him. Instead of having him shot out of hand like his officers, she suggests they have him stoke coal into the locomotive all the way to Petrograd, where he will be publicly hanged. When everyone is drunk, however, she helps him escape, giving him back the pearl necklace to finance his way out of the country. Sergius jumps from the train, then watches in horror as it tumbles off a nearby bridge into the icy river below, taking Natalie with it.

Ten years later, Sergius is reduced to poverty, eking out a living as a Hollywood extra. When he and the director finally meet, Sergius recognizes him. Leo, in an ironic act calculated to humiliate him, casts him as a Russian general in a battle scene. He is directed to give a speech to a group of actors playing his dispirited men. When one soldier tries to incite a mutiny, telling the general that "you've given your last command", he whips the man in the face as instructed, just as he had once struck Leo. Slowly losing his grip on reality, he imagines himself genuinely on the battlefield and passionately urges them to fight for Russia. Overstraining himself, he dies, inquiring with his last words if they have won. Moved, Leo tells him they have. The assistant remarks, "That guy was a great actor." Leo replies, "He was more than a great actor - he was a great man."

Cast

• Emil Jannings as Grand Duke Sergius Alexander
• Evelyn Brent as Natalie Dabrova
• William Powell as Leo Andreyev
• Jack Raymond as the Assistant
• Nicholas Soussanin as the Adjutant
• Michael Visaroff as the Bodyguard
• Fritz Feld as A revolutionist. He plays a screaming revolutionary who at one point sneers in Jannings' face.

Inspiration

Ernst Lubitsch told newspaper columnist Gilbert Swan that the story had a real-life inspiration: a general in the Imperial Russian Army named Lodigensky whom Lubitsch had met in Russia, and again in New York, where he had opened a Russian restaurant after fleeing the communist revolution. Lubitsch encountered the ex-general once more, when the latter appeared in full uniform looking for work as an extra at $7.50 a day, the same rate as Sergius. Lubitsch later told Lajos Biró the anecdote. Under the name Theodore Lodi, Lodigensky went on to play a handful of roles between 1929 and 1935, including Grand Duke Michael, a Russian exile who is forced to work as a hotel doorman in the 1932 film Down to Earth.

Home media

In 2010, The Criterion Collection released a DVD set of three von Sternberg films: The Last Command, Underworld and The Docks of New York.

External links

• The Last Command at IMDb
• The Last Command at the TCM Movie Database
• The Last Command at AllMovie
• The Last Command at Virtual History
• Jonah Corne, "Gods and Nobodies: The Extra, The October Jubilee, and Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command" in the Late Hollywood Silent Film Melodrama special issue, Jeffrey Crouse (editor), in Film International, Issue 54, Volume 9, Number 6, 2011, pp. 41-58.