Synopsis
The Last Command (1928) is Josef von Sternberg's silent drama, ready to watch online on iFILM. Its hero is a former Imperial Russian general reduced to standing in a Hollywood crowd scene for a few dollars a day.
Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, cousin to the Czar, once commanded armies and had nothing but contempt for revolutionaries. The revolution flipped his whole world. Now he's a broken old man with a trembling head, hired to play a general in someone else's movie. The cruel twist: the picture is being directed by Leo Andreyev, the very revolutionary he once threw in prison, now sitting in the director's chair. Sternberg unspools it as a flashback, cutting from the studio soundstage to the collapse of an empire, until the role and the man's real past blur into one.
Emil Jannings took home the very first Academy Award ever given for a leading male performance, partly for this. A young William Powell turns up in support. It's a film for anyone who loves silent-era acting at full force and isn't put off by a tragedy with no soft landing. Stream The Last Command (1928) online on iFILM.
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