Rent The Last Command (1928)
4.0 of 5 from 66 ratings
1h 28min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- An exiled Russian general turned Hollywood extra (Emil Jannings) is chosen by a former adversary (William Powell) to play a role that resembles his former self and gradually loses his grip on reality. Equally a sharp witted satire of the Hollywood machine and a heartbreaking drama about one man's emotional downfall, Josef von Sternberg's 'The Last Command' (his second major Hollywood picture) is one of the finest and most significant films of its era.
- Actors:
- Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell, Jack Raymond, Nicholas Soussanin, Michael Visaroff, Fritz Feld, Robert Wilber, Harry Cording, Shep Houghton, Alexander Ikonnikov, Nicholas Kobliansky, Guy Oliver, Sam Savitsky, Harry Semels
- Directors:
- Josef Von Sternberg
- Producers:
- Jesse L. Lasky, Adolph Zukor
- Writers:
- Lajos Biró, John F. Goodrich, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Josef Von Sternberg
- Others:
- Lajos Biró
- Studio:
- Eureka
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama
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- Awards:
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 16/05/2016
- Run Time:
- 88 minutes
- Languages:
- English LPCM Mono, Silent
- Subtitles:
- None
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.33:1 / 4:3
- Colour:
- B & W
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
- Bonus:
- New video interview with critic Tony Rayns
- Sternberg Till '29, a video essay by scholar Tag Gallagher
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Reviews (2) of The Last Command
Silent Melodrama. - The Last Command review by Steve
Von Sternberg could be counted on to make his films a gallery of striking images but didn't always tell the story with as much skill. The Last Command does relate an interesting flashback set during the Russian revolution. But what makes the film so compelling is the framing device which places an ex-Russian General in a Hollywood studio as an extra playing... a Russian General in a film directed by the former revolutionary he had once jailed! This was supposedly based on an actual incident in Hollywood folklore.
So it's a typical Emil Jannings story of a once proud man who is suffering the humiliation of reduced circumstances. Jannings won his Oscar for this, and he really brings the film to combustion in a thrilling climax when he lives his part as an extra as if it was really happening inside his fragile psyche. It's also enjoyable to see such an early part for William Powell as the director/Bolshevik. He is quite charismatic, and his passivity contrasts with Jannings' histrionics!
Von Sternberg adds another layer of interest by making the producer and director of the film in production as dictatorial and indulged as the Tsar and the Russian aristocracy and likens the abused extras to the Russian peasants. The insight into the making of a contemporary film in Hollywood is what is best about The Last Command.
There is plenty of the pathos we expect in Janning's performance, though it is hard to sympathise much with a General serving the Tsar. There are witty titles composed by Herman Mankiewicz (who co-authored Citizen Kane), a contribution to silent cinema usually overlooked. There are many of the beautiful images so typical of von Sternberg but allied to an interesting and clever story they make this his best film.
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Reaching for the Gun - The Last Command review by CH
When did the Modern begin? The question comes to mind again with von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) which was six years after that fabled year of 1922 which saw the appearance, in full, of Ulysses and The Waste Land. There is, though, something to be said for silent film as a progenitor of new styles of narrative in prose -for all that cinema had to rely upon intertitles for everything that could not be conveyed in a look or even a stare.
Written by Lajos Biro, from an anecdote apparently relayed to him by Lubitsch, this film - these films, rather - turn around the production in Hollywood of a tale set amidst the Russian Revolution which, naturally, requires quite a cast of extras who chance to include a man - Emil Jannings - who had fetched up on the West Coast after his earlier life as a General in St. Petersburg: which is the very subject of the film about to be made by director William Powell (as suave voiceless as he was to be in the overlapping banter of The Thin Man) who, what’s more, had been one of the revolutionaries who last saw Jannings before he was bundled off the train - to apparent death - which forms a large part of the Russian section of the tale.
Amidst all this, of course, there is a beautiful woman (Evelyn Brent), her feelings caught between revolution and sympathy (and more) for the portly Jannings. Here, then, is a double narrative which could sound implausible but, from the start, one is drawn into it as von Sternberg takes all the emergent tropes of cinema - close-ups on cigarettes are prominent, so are mirrors - and makes as much use of light as he does shade (from grandeur to trench), so much so that the viewer forgets that there would now be a third perspective: a film about “the making of” a film about making a film.
For anybody who dismisses silent film as either slapstick or lumbering, catch The Last Command to enjoy something which matches anything produced, in any medium, in that heady decade.
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