General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Last Command

The Last Command is a 1928 American silent melodrama directed by Josef von Sternberg, in which a former general of the czar's army, eking out a living as a Hollywood extra, is cast as a Russian general in a film-within-the-film about the Russian Revolution, directed by a Soviet émigré he had once known from across the battle lines.¹ Produced by Paramount Famous Lasky Corp. and released on January 21, 1928, it stars Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, and William Powell.² Jannings's performance, together with his role in Victor Fleming's The Way of All Flesh (1927), earned him the first Academy Award for Best Actor.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	January 21, 1928, Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.; running time about 88–90 minutes²^•⁴
Principal cast	Emil Jannings (Grand Duke Sergius Alexander), Evelyn Brent (Natalie), William Powell (the Director)⁴
Key credits	Story by Lajos Bíró; screenplay by John F. Goodrich; titles by Herman J. Mankiewicz; photographed by Bert Glennon; edited by William Shea⁴
Academy Awards	Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar, shared with The Way of All Flesh; Lajos Biró was nominated for Best Writing, Original Story³
Real-life basis	Inspired by a former Russian general working as a Hollywood extra for $7.50 a day, whom Ernst Lubitsch had encountered⁵
Preservation	Added to the National Film Registry in 2006; the only one of Jannings's five-to-six American features to survive complete³^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Jannings plays Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, a former Russian aristocrat whose world collapsed with the czarist government in 1917. After a narrow escape from the Bolsheviks he reaches Los Angeles, where he scrapes by as a studio extra making $7.50 a day.⁵ The Russian-American director Lev Andreyev (William Powell) finds Sergius's photo in a casting file and chooses him to play a Russian general in a historical drama about the Revolution.⁵

The coincidence driving the story is that Lev recognizes Sergius from years before: as a young revolutionary he had been beaten and jailed by the imperial officer, and he remains angry.⁵ Preparing for his role in a dressing room, Sergius gazes into a makeup mirror and sees himself in a czarist uniform like the one he once wore; asked about a persistent nervous tic, he explains it as the result of an awful shock, and a long flashback follows.⁵ In the flashback, Sergius flaunts his imperial power, jails the revolutionary Lev, and falls in love with Lev's companion Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent), known to insiders as "the most dangerous revolutionist" of them all. When Bolsheviks attack him during a train journey she helps him escape, then dies in a crash moments later.⁵ A contemporary TIME review described the protagonist as a cousin of the late Russian Tsar who, after the revolution, found his way to a Hollywood studio, and called the result "indubitably a powerful film."⁷

Production

The working title was The General. In later interviews, Sternberg claimed he wrote the original scenario, basing it on an idea given to him by Ernst Lubitsch; official story credit goes to Lajos Bíró, with an adaptation and screenplay by John F. Goodrich.²^•⁸ A 1929 newspaper account held that the story originated when Lubitsch, who had been at Jannings' directorial helm on multiple films dating to 1917, ran into a former Russian general from his earlier years who was then working as a film extra at $7.50 per day.⁵ According to Anton Kaes, a scholar of German and cinema studies at Berkeley, the film draws on the real story of General Lodijenski, once a tsarist officer who fled to New York as an exile, ran a Russian eatery there, and later moved to Hollywood to take work as an extra.⁶

Sternberg hired a large number of Russian émigrés as extras; the Toronto Film Society's notes record that he populated the crowd scenes with ex-admirals, generals, Cossacks, and other victims of the Bolsheviks, and that after the film was completed studio officials at first refused to release it, citing his harsh depiction of a revolution that had occurred only ten years earlier.⁹^•¹⁰ Set design was by the German-born art director Hans Dreier, who worked on more than five hundred films from 1919 to 1951.⁴

Jannings and Sternberg

The Last Command was conceived first and foremost as a star vehicle for Jannings, the Swiss-born, internationally known actor who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures.⁶ While Sternberg was still relatively unknown in 1928, with only Underworld (1927) behind him as a major film, Jannings, ten years older, had already starred in fifty German films, including Ernst Lubitsch's Passion (1919) and F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924).⁶ Kaes reads the film as a continuation of Jannings's signature theme, the downfall and humiliation of a despotic man, performed with the theatrical intensity he had learned on Max Reinhardt's Berlin stages; Sternberg, rather than restraining this histrionic style, used it to explore the power of performance and filmic illusion.⁶

The collaboration worked well enough that Jannings chose Sternberg to direct him again in The Blue Angel (1930) for Germany's UFA studio, the film that began Sternberg's partnership with Marlene Dietrich.⁵

Reception and legacy

At the first Academy Awards ceremony, held in May 1929 for films released between August 1927 and July 1928, Jannings won Best Actor for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh; he received the award early because he was returning to Europe before the ceremony.³^•¹¹ Lajos Biró was nominated for Best Writing, Original Story.³ The 1929 Film Daily Year Book voted it one of the "Top Best Features" of 1928.² TCM's essay records the anecdote that the canine star Rin Tin Tin received more votes for the first Best Actor honor but was disqualified by Academy officials for not being human.⁵

The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2006.³ Its survival is itself notable: of Jannings's American features, only The Last Command survives complete, the other five being lost except for small fragments and a trailer.⁶ The Library of Congress's survey of silent film survival notes that when the first Academy Awards were presented in 1929, silent film was already in decline, and that The Last Command was among the titles once believed lost before copies resurfaced.¹²

Critics have read the film as Hollywood examining itself. Richard Brody, writing in The New Yorker, describes it as a tale of two revolutions, Communist and cinematic, in which Sternberg is as satirical toward the upstarts of Hollywood as toward the revolutionaries, his analogy between a movie set and a battlefield turning into psychodrama through the make-believe general's real-life recollections.¹ MoMA's founding film curator Iris Barry, who championed the film, wrote that it gives "a fairly accurate idea of the conditions under which films at the time were produced" and is one of the few serious pictures to study life behind the scenes in a studio.¹³ TCM also suggests it may have influenced Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950), in which Erich von Stroheim plays a once-celebrated filmmaker reduced to serving a faded star.⁵

The title was reused in 1955 for a Republic Pictures Western directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Sterling Hayden, about the defense of the Alamo.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1927 to 2012

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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