Stubs - The Last Command

The Last Command (1928) Starring Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell. Directed by Josef von Sternberg; Screenplay by John Goodrich. Presented by Adolph Zukor, Jesse L. Lasky. Black and White. USA Run time: 88 minutes. Silent, Melodrama.

Once considered by the Library of Congress American Silent Feature Film Survival Database to be extant, the rumors of its demise have been overly exaggerated. The Last Command is a noteworthy work mostly because of its prominence in Academy Awards history. The lead actor, Emil Jannings would be the first actor to win for his work. Back then, the award wasn’t for one film, but for a body of work for the year, so Jannings won for this film, as well as his performance in The Way of All Flesh.

Originally called The General, the title was changed. Director Josef von Sternberg claims to have written the original scenario, though the film’s nomination for Best Writing (Original Story) went to Lajos Bíró. However, there is general agreement that it is based on an idea by Ernst Lubitsch.  According to an interview Lubitsch gave to newspaper columnist Gilbert Swan, the story is based, in part, on a General in the Imperial Russian Army named Theodore A. Lodigensky.

Lubitsch had met him in Russia prior to the revolution, and later, again, when the former general was opening a Russian restaurant after fleeing the communist takeover. Lubitsch encountered the ex-general a third time, when Lodigensky, in full uniform, came looking for work as an extra at $7.50 a day. Apparently, Lubitsch later told Bíró 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 Down to Earth (1932).

Russian film director Leo Andreyev (William Powell).

The film opens in 1928 Hollywood. Russian film director Leo Andreyev (William Powell) wants to cast Russians in his new film and is looking through photographs of possible actors for his next movie. When he comes to the picture of an aged Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings), he pauses, then tells his Assistant Director (Jack Raymond) to cast the man. Wardrobe is instructed to dress him as a general. On the back of the photo, with the contact information is a note that Sergius claims to have been the commanding general in the Russian Army and the cousin of the Czar and that he would work for $7.50 a day, the same amount Lodigensky would work for, it should be noted.

Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings) goes to answer the call.

Sergius lives in a boarding house and is called to the communal phone when the call comes in. He is told to report to the Eureka Studio front gate at 6 AM the next morning. One of his notable attributes is a persistent twitch.

In what may have been typical for extras at the time, Sergius shows up at the Eureka Studio with a horde of others. It is a real cattle call as he moves from window to window, picking up the appropriate costume, boots, hat, and weapon for the role. 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.

Another extra notices the medal that Sergius is so proud of.

He applies to his costume a medal he had worn as a Russian general. When asked by another extra, he tells him that it was a gift from the Czar. The extra thinks he’s making that up and takes the medal from him and tries to humiliate him in front of the others in the dressing room. With some effort, Sergius manages to get the medal back and does put it back on his costume.

As Sergius is applying makeup, he has a flashback ten years to Czarist Russia. World War I is raging and the prospects of a Revolution are building. Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, the Czar's cousin and commander of all his armies, has come to inspect the troops and everyone gives way to him.

Two actors entertaining the troops, Natalie Dobrova (Evelyn Brent) and younger Leo, are watching the military maneuvers out on the street below. They are revolutionists and are certain that change is coming. Into their apartment steps a soldier, who orders them to come to headquarters the next morning for a passport check.

Leo and fellow actor Natalie Dobrova (Evelyn Brent) are found to be revolutionaries.

The next morning, Sergius is informed by his Adjutant (Nicholas Soussanin) that the two actors have been identified as dangerous "revolutionists", with the woman being identified as the most dangerous person in Russia. Sergius decides to toy with them for his amusement. When Leo becomes insolent, Sergius whips him across the face and has him jailed.

Sergius finds that he has fallen for Natalie.

The beautiful Natalie 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. When Sergius is ordered to put on an offensive the next day for the benefit of the Czar, he refuses, not wanting to needlessly endanger his men.

Natalie had planned to kill Sergius, but can't bring herself to do it.

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, the plan is to assassinate him. Sergius even spots the 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, too.

Natalie lets her true colors show as she helps lead the revolutionaries.

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. Sergius, who is beaten by the crowd, is confused by Natalie’s change and is forced to stoke the fire of the train while everyone else gets drunk on vodka.

But that turns out to be a ruse, as Natalie does love Sergius.

But this turns out to be a ruse to keep him alive. When everyone on board is drunk, she gives him back the pearl necklace, telling him that it should finance his escape from the country. While she looks on, he knocks out the train engineer and jumps off the train into a bank of snow. Lying there, he watches as the train tumbles off a nearby bridge into the icy river below, taking Natalie with it. This moment is when Sergius develops his head twitch.

Ten years later, Sergius is back as the extra. The assistant director takes a certain pride in his work, but when Sergius corrects him about the placement of a medal, the man doesn’t believe him, telling him he’s made 12 Russian pictures, so he knows what he’s doing.

Leo makes sure Sergius is dressed just like he used to be.

When he and the director finally meet, Sergius recognizes him. Leo puts the medal back where Sergius had put it on the uniform. While he doesn’t come out and say it, Leo has calculated to humiliate Sergius. Leo tells him that the troops are dispirited and directs him to give a speech. When one soldier tries to incite a mutiny, telling the general that "you've given your last command", Leo instructs him to whip the man in the face, adding that Sergius already knows how to use a whip.

Sergius delivers a very passionate speech to the "troops".

Fantasy and reality blur in Sergius’ mind and he imagines that he’s not on studio set, but on a real battlefield being besieged by approaching enemy troops. Sergius delivers a very passionate speech urging his men to fight for Russia.

Leo and his Assistant Director (Jack Raymond) comfort a dying Sergius.

However, the strain on Sergius is too great and he collapses after delivering the speech. The set empties and Leo and his assistant come to his aid. In Sergius’ last words, he asks if they had won. Leo tells him that they have and Sergius dies. He then places the flag of Russia over the dead man’s body.

The assistant remarks, "That guy was a great actor." Leo replies, "He was more than a great actor - he was a great man."

Somehow, that last bit seems forced to me. If the director had wanted to get his revenge by humiliating Sergius by making him relive his last command, so to speak, it seems odd that he would now see him as a great man just because he died. Rather, I would have suspected Leo to think it was just desserts for a Czarist. But that probably wouldn’t have been the ending Paramount wanted for the film. Sergius was supposed to be seen as sympathetic and Leo as a changed man.

Following the commercial success of his film Underworld (1927), director Josef von Sternberg was being given large budgets to work with on films he was making at Paramount. However, that didn’t stop the studio from holding up the release of The Last Command. When Paramount executives reviewed the film, they discovered that Sternberg had inserted material portraying Hollywood as heartless and cynical. They further complained that he had historically misrepresented the Russian Revolution, including "recognizable portraits of Trotsky and the young Stalin". Only under duress from a wealthy Paramount stockholder did the studio relent and distribute the film as is.

Despite the studio’s high expectations, The Last Command was not a commercial success. The reviews seemed to be generally positive though, with Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times calling it “one of the most satisfactory of shadow stories.” He even singles out the ending, writing, “The motion picture end of this feature is wonderfully good, even to the selection of the players.”

The film did receive a couple of nominations at the first Academy Awards ceremony, including Lajos Bíró’s nomination, as mentioned above. The other one was the win for lead actor Emil Jannings. 

There is a sort of Hollywood folklore surrounding Jannings’ win. Supposedly, canine actor Rin Tin Tin received the most votes before the fledging Academy recalculated and decided that only human actors could win. The story seems to go back to Darryl Zanuck, then working as a writer at Warner Bros. Zanuck was recruited by screenwriter Frank Woods to help move the Academy Awards project along. However, Zanuck didn’t particularly like the idea of the Awards and when given a sample ballot wrote in Rin Tin Tin for Best Actor, the studio’s biggest star at the time.

However, there were no recorded votes for Rin Tin Tin. According to a story on thewrap.com, “Those 1928 ballots lie in a storage box in the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. Jack Warner’s is there — they were signed, not secret, in the first year — along with stacks of others, not a single one of them mentioning a dog. Zanuck, probably because he still regarded voting for Academy Awards as wasted effort, seems not to have submitted a ballot.”

Jannings does give a memorable performance in The Last Command. At the time of the film, Jannings was one of the most popular actors in the world. A major star in Germany, his popularity enabled Jannings to sign an agreement with Paramount Pictures and eventually follow his acting colleagues Lubitsch and Pola Negri to Hollywood. Not only is he the first Best Actor award winner, he was both the first to hold the award, having been given it three months prior to the awards ceremony, but also the first winner not to attend the ceremony, having returned to Europe.

The coming of talkies would limit Jannings in Hollywood because of his thick German accent. That didn’t mean Jannings stopped acting in Germany. However, he became involved with the rise of Hitler in that country, starring in several films which were intended to promote Nazism.

The shooting of his last film Wo ist Herr Belling? was aborted when troops of the Allied Powers entered Germany in Spring 1945. Jannings reportedly carried his Oscar statuette with him as proof of his former association with Hollywood. However, his active role in Nazi propaganda meant that he was subject to denazification, effectively ending his career.

Evelyn Brent is striking as Natalie Dabrova in the film. Brent had been in films since 1914’s A Gentleman from Mississippi. Most of early films are unfortunately now considered lost. Her career got a major boost in 1923 when she was chosen as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars. She successfully made the transition to sound appearing with William Powell in Interference (1928), Paramount’s first feature-length all-talking film. By the mid-1930s, she was playing more secondary roles in films. In the 1940s, she was no longer in demand by the majors and continued her career acting at smaller, low-budget studios. She retired in 1950 and worked for several years as an actor’s agent.

Hall noted in his review that, “William Powell gives a sterling portrait of a motion picture director and also as one of the ringleaders of the infuriated mob.” It’s hard to think of a role that Powell wasn’t good in. No telling if he might have been nominated as Supporting Actor if that category existed at the time. His acting chops really don’t come in until the last act of the film. Most of the time, his character is in prison and out of the story, however he plays a very major role in the bookends of the film.

When Sergius makes such a big deal about the medal the Czar gave him, I kept looking for it during the flashback. It is a prominent piece on his uniform. And despite his being beaten by the mob and the destruction of his uniform, that medal still stays with him. It had to be something he was very proud of  and something that reminded him of better times.

While I wasn’t a big fan of the ending of the film, the sequence leading up to it is one of the film’s highlights. I’ll give credit to the director, Josef von Sternberg. The movie set is both a real location and one that exists only in the mind of Sergius. He is less acting as an extra and more a Russian general fighting phantom soldiers.

While there were better films released at year, including Wings and Sunrise, I will admit that I really enjoyed the film overall. This is another good example of how far silent films had come in their storytelling technique. I was a bit apprehensive before watching the film, not sure of what to expect or how well it would have aged, but I was pleasantly surprised.