The Last Command (1927-28)

 

The Last Command is really a long flashback within a movie about the making of a movie. William Powell plays a Russian director who’s casting a film about the Russian Revolution of 1917 (or, at least, that what it appears to be about). He finds a photo of an older Russian actor who claims to be the former Grand Duke and cousin to the czar (tsar?), and he’s played by Emil Jannings, who won the first Academy Award for Best Actor for this role and another role in a movie that has sadly been mostly lost, The Way of All Flesh. Grand Duke Sergius Alexander shows up for casting and gets his costume in a delightfully funny sequence about how appallingly extras were treated in Hollywood at the time, but then he has a flashback when someone asks him to stop shaking his head so much, a tic he says he developed after something bad happened to him in his past. During the Revolution, he was a very powerful leader, and he uses his position to, in essence, imprison a woman who is considered to be a revolutionist (the beautiful Evelyn Brent as Natalie Dobrova). She’s friends with Powell’s Leo Andreyev, so now we know why the director was so anxious to cast Alexander in the role of a general. Much of the flashback then follows the relationship between the Grand Duke and Natalie, as she slowly begins to fall in love with him, or perhaps she’s falling in love with the power that he holds or the many expensive gifts he can obtain for her. That’s never quite clear, but I suppose you can criticize the imperialist waste of money until someone gives you a strand of pearls, and then maybe you reconsider. By the time they’re on a train that gets hijacked by the revolutionists, she lies (or says she lies) to protect him and allow him to escape. He does so just before the train crashes and, presumably, kills everyone on board. When we return to the present day, the Grand Duke is treated more delicately by Andreyev than you might have imagined, but he’s clearly not over Natalie even though a decade has passed. He walks around in a bit of a stupor for much of his time at the studio. Recreating a battle sequence for the camera triggers some aspect of the Grand Duke’s memory of his past and he either goes mad or gives the greatest performance ever on screen… right before he dies. Either way, Jannings gets quite the extended death scene as Alexander, and we’re left wondering if revisiting his past was too much for him. It’s an oddly touching movie considering that the subject is a domineering Russian tsarist/czarist who forces a woman to be his lover. The primary appeal is watching Jannings’ Oscar-winning performance, of course, but Brent is so intriguing to watch that you have to wonder why she wasn’t considered for Best Actress, especially when you remember that she also played “Feathers” in the Oscar-winning Underworld the same year. Interesting side note: Both of those films were directed by the great Josef von Sternberg, who was one of the great visual stylists of the early film era.

Oscar Win: Best Actor (Emil Jannings)

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Writing / Original Story