The Last Command **** (1928, Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell) – Classic Movie Review 7641

Emil Jannings and William Powell star in the 1928 Oscar-winning silent classic The Last Command as two men who used to be political as well as personal adversaries in revolutionary Russia, who are forced by international politics to work together in Hollywood.

Director Josef Von Sternberg’s 1928 The Last Command is a fine Hollywood silent-film showcase for the great German silent star Emil Jannings, who won the first Best Actor Oscar as the former White Russian emigré, the Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, who was a Czarist General but is reduced to poverty after the collapse of Imperial Russia and becomes a Hollywood movie extra. But William Powell is also excellent as the film director Lev Andreyev, who hires him to re-enact the revolution which deposed him.

The sophisticated flashback reconstruction of the events in Russia, John F Goodrich and Herman J Mankiewicz’s excellent screenplay from a story by Lajos Bíró, the innovative black and white camerawork by Bert Glennon and Von Sternberg’s stylish direction all won much deserved critical acclaim.

Also in the cast are Evelyn Brent, Nicholas Soussanin, Michael Visaroff, Fritz Feld, Harry Semels and Jack Raymond.

The Last Command is directed by Josef Von Sternberg, runs 95 minutes, is made and released by Paramount Pictures, is written by John F Goodrich (writer) and Herman J Mankiewicz (titles), from a story by Lajos Bíró, is shot in black and white by Bert Glennon, is produced by Joseph Bachman and B P Schulberg and is designed by Hans Dreier.

Jannings’s Best Actor Oscar was also for The Way of All Flesh, now a lost film containing the only Academy Award-winning performance with no known complete copy of the film preserved. It was the only year when acting Oscars were awarded for multiple performances.

Those were the days – Jannings received his award early because he was going home to Europe before the ceremony. Back in Germany, he made The Blue Angel [Der blaue Engel] (1930) with Marlene Dietrich, also directed by Von Sternberg.

The Last Command was judged culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant by the United States Library of Congress in 2006 and selected for the National Film Registry.

The Last Command is a fictionalised true story, based on the life of General Lodijensky, an ex-general in Czar Nicholas’s Russian army, who fled to America from Russia after the 1917 Communist revolution and worked as a movie extra in Hollywood for some time.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7641

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