The Last Command (1928) The inaugural Best Actor Oscar Award Winner (Review)

By the time Josef von Sternberg made The Last Command in 1928, his lead actor had become such an institution in Germany that an entire genre was named after him. The Jannings-Film was used to describe any movie where Emil Jannings, the bearish icon of German silent cinema, played a man who either came from a high station in life or aspired to one, but went through troubles and humiliation over the course of the narrative. The second type of Jannings-Film is exemplified by The Last Man, his groundbreaking collaboration with FW Murnau. Anyone looking for an archetypal example of the first kind of Jannings-Film could do a lot worse than pick up Eureka Masters of Cinema’s new reissue of The Last Command.

Despite its titular echo of The Last Man, von Sternberg’s film is very different to Murnau’s. It’s also, in this reviewer’s opinion, a lot better. Despite being a card-carrying fan of Murnau I’ve never felt The Last Man deserves its place among Murnau’s masterpieces. Its story feels too inconsequential to support its visual ambition, which is not a charge you could level at the vast trans-continental epic von Sternberg offers. Murnau’s famous determination to tell a story without the title captions silent movies relied on is laudable – but The Last Command has witty, quotable title captions written by a pre-Citizen Kane Herman J. Mankiewicz, so von Sternberg wins that round as well.

The Last Command is inspired by an anecdote Ernst Lubitsch told the film’s co-writer Lajos Bíró, about a Russian general deposed in the Bolsheveik revolution who made his way over to Hollywood and found work as an extra, sending out photos of himself in full uniform to casting agents. Von Sternberg, Jannings and the team of writers use the Hollywood material to bookend a poignant story of the general being overtaken by history in his native country.

Jannings, of course, became notorious in later life for taking part in a number of Nazi propaganda films, which soured his relationships with both the Jewish von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, who co-starred with Jannings in von Sternberg’s next (and most famous) film The Blue Angel. While a Nazi and a Jew collaborating on a film about the Russian Revolution might sound like the set-up for the most tasteless joke ever, The Last Command keeps its focus on the tragic reversals of fortune that make up a Jannings-Film, rather than any wider political points. Von Sternberg takes the story’s narrow focus literally, filming even the most spectacular scenes through windows, mirrors, corridors, tunnels and other devices that squeeze his Academy-ratio frame even thinner.

For a director who became synonymous with excess over the course of his collaborations with Dietrich, von Sternberg is careful to ensure that The Last Command’s visual flash and lavish production values serve the story. The best moment, on this count, comes when the villainous revolutionary Natalie Dabrova finds herself unable to go through with an assassination because she sees herself in a mirror and has a painful moment of clarity. Von Sternberg covers both sides of the room in one snappy whip-pan, but the real focus is the performance of Evelyn Brent, who von Sternberg had already collaborated with on his fascinating proto-noir Underworld. More than anything else in The Last Command, she points the way forward to the Dietrich-era films, giving a delightfully unhinged performance of fetishistic cruelty.

And then, of course, there’s Jannings. If Brent’s performance is big, unsubtle and tremendously enjoyable, Jannings’s lead is big, actually subtle and also tremendously enjoyable. The pain in his eyes and his gait always seem to be building up to some kind of violent outburst or breakdown, but Jannings carefully rations these moments, allowing the viewer to appreciate the sheer amount of suppressed agony he carries around with him. The only contemporary actor who’s doing this kind of work is Daniel Day-Lewis, so it’s appropriate to end with a note about the Oscars. Jannings won the inaugural Best Actor award for his role here, but he nearly didn’t. According to the author Susan Orlean, the Academy initially wanted to give the award to Rin-Tin-Tin, but were worried people wouldn’t take them seriously if they gave Best Actor to a dog.

And so instead of giving the Oscar to a German shepherd, they gave it to a German genius, and The Last Command attained its other place in history; as the first and possibly last film good enough to persuade the Academy from making an incredibly stupid decision.

Thanks for reading our review of The Last Command

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