"The Last Command" - Josef von Sternberg (1928)

In 1927 Paramount Pictures had already signed up renowned German actor Emil Jannings to work in Hollywood and also had in their corral the up-and-coming director Josef von Sternberg, fresh off his first box-office hit, Underworld (1927).  So it was natural for them to hook up these two agents of German Expressionism for their next production. This turned out to be The Last Command (1928), which was also a hit with the public.

The basic outline of the story concerns a Russian general who had fled the 1917 Russian Communist Revolution with just the clothes on his back and had managed to get to America.  Ten years later this now poverty-stricken man gets hired for a bit part in a Hollywood movie as a Russian general. This may sound like an extremely contrived plot scheme, but it was apparently inspired by some real circumstances.  Film director Ernst Lubitsch once mentioned that he had met a former general from the Imperial Russian Army, Theodore A. Lodigensky, who had turned up in Hollywood looking for work as a movie extra [1].  Of course this idea of a once-powerful man reduced to self-parody is perfect for the Hollywood grist mill.  But von Sternberg took this basic scheme and crafted something even more darkly romantic and interesting (as he also did in connection with his subsequent film featuring Jannings, The Blue Angel).  As The Last Command unfolds, the viewer is presented with two narrative scenarios – an outer, framing story and an inner flashback story– and each is sufficiently compelling that it could almost stand on its own.  What makes things even more interesting is when we consider the thematic elements of those two scenarios together.

The narrative of The Last Command can be considered to have five acts – acts 1 and 5 belonging to the outer narrative, and acts 2-4 belonging to the inner narrative.

1.  Hollywood, 1928

At the outset Hollywood film director Leo Andreyev (played by William Powell) is looking to hire some people as extras in a film about Russia.  For the poor and unemployed, getting a job as an extra has few requirements, so a job call attracts a mob of the desperate.  Among those applying for work is a middle-aged Russian man, Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings), who claims, to the disbelief of all who listen, that he was once the supreme commander of the Imperial Russian Army.  Andreyev hires him to play the role of a Russian general, and Sergius is shown scrambling with the other, peon-like extras to get his assigned uniform that he will wear on screen.  But Sergius is clearly a shattered and enfeebled person who is barely able to look after himself.  While putting on his makeup, he looks at himself in a mirror and lapses into a flashback revery of what he was doing ten years earlier.

2.  Grand Duke Sergius Alexander

The time is 1917 and Russia is engaged in a devastating war with Germany and also threatened by a revolutionary insurrection from the Communists.  The authoritative, robust, and super-confidant Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, the commander of the entire army and a cousin of Czar Nicholas II, inspects his troops.  In addition to fighting the war, Sergius’s army is in charge of arresting “revolutionists” (the term for communists in this film), and he is informed that two people working as theatrical performers to entertain the troops are suspected of being such revolutionists.  The two suspects are Leo Andreyev (who we know will later become a Hollywood film director) and his companion, Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent), who is said by a staff officer to be “the most dangerous revolutionist in Russia.” When Sergius is shown pictures of the two, he takes an interest in interviewing them and summons them to his office. When they arrive he haughtily dismisses Leo as an unmanly artiste and a coward for not serving in the armed forces. When Leo contemptuously responds that “it doesn’t require courage to send others to battle and death,” Sergius beats him with his whip.  Leo is sent to jail, but Sergius is attracted to Natalie’s beauty and treats her with respect.

3.  Sergius and Natalie
This next and most interesting section of the film shows the growing relationship between Sergius and Natalie.  Sergius is charmed by Natalie and treats her like a princess, inviting her to join him in the staff officers’ quarters, in the face of which Natalie responds with coy smiles.  But we know from earlier shots that she really is a revolutionist, so she must be play-acting here.

At a sumptuous dinner with Natalie and his general staff present, Sergius is interrupted by an order that the Czar wants to see an attack launched the next morning.  To everyone’s amazement Sergius defies the Czar and refuses the order, because his troops are not in condition to stage such an attack.  To do so would just provide “fuel for the revolution,” he says.  His defiance of the Czar impresses Natalie, and he tells her that he acted so strongly, because he loves his country.

Natalie: “Then why do you continue this stupid war?” 

Sergius: “We must have victory! Defeat means revolution and the collapse of Russia!” 

Natalie: “Then you love Russia so much?” 

Sergius: “I would gladly die tonight if it would help Russia.”

At this, Natalie becomes warmer to Sergius and invites him up to her room.  But this is quickly seen as a pretence, inasmuch as prior to his entry to her quarters, she prepares a gun to use to kill him.  When Sergius arrives, they kiss.  He soon spots the gun under her quilt, though, but pretends not to notice and turns his back on her so that she can shoot him.  There is an interesting camera pan which (a) starts with Natalie in frame drawing her gun to shoot and then (b) pans over to Sergius with his back to her, but fatalistically watching her in the mirror as she is taking her aim. 

But she doesn’t shoot.  She collapses and drops her gun (presumably now expecting that she will be executed).  He asks her why she didn’t shoot, and she says,

“I suppose it was because I couldn’t kill anyone who loves Russia as much as you do.”

They then embrace in mutual confession of their love for each other.  So Natalie had been play-acting about being charmed by Sergius, but gradually she started really falling in love with him.

4.  The Revolution

With Sergius, accompanied by Natalie, heading out on a train to supervise the troops at the war front, the Russian Revolution is coming to a head.  Leon Trotsky is shown preparing for the takeover, and a signal event will be the capture of the train Sergius and his officer staff are on. At a stop along the way, the train is duly overrun by an angry revolutionary mob, and all the officers are dragged out.  The mob looks like they will tear Sergius to pieces, but Natalie jumps out and becomes a fiery revolutionist again. She grabs a revolutionary flag, mocks Sergius in front of the crowd, and tells them that it would be best first to subject him to extreme humiliation before killing him. So she convinces them to make him stoke the locomotive engine all the way to Petrograd before he is to be executed there.

The train sets out with Sergius stoking the engine.  Along the way, Natalie sneaks to the engine cabin and tells him that she still loves him – she only called him out to save his life at that moment.  She gives to him the pearl necklace he had earlier given to her so that now he can use it to bribe his way out of Russia. Then Sergius jumps from the train and watches from the ground as it steams away from him.  But in the distance, he sees the train crossing a railway bridge that collapses, killing all on board, including his beloved Natalie.

5.  The Hollywood Film Shoot

Sergius’s flashback is over, and we return to the present on the film stage.  The director Leo Andreyev is inspecting his army-costumed extras just as haughtily as Sergius used to do. When Sergius sees Andreyev, he finally recognizes him for the first time.  Now it’s Leo’s turn to lord it over Sergius.  A studio scene has been setup to show a Russian army charge to be led by Sergius.  Leo establishes the atmosphere for the shoot by having the Russian national anthem played (remember this is a silent film, so this is to inspire Sergius), turning on the wind machine, and having the stage dramatically lit. This atmosphere turns out to be too real for the mentally scarred Sergius, and he starts believing that this is a real battle. With the cameras rolling, his passion and fire come back to him, and he dramatically leads what he believes is a real charge. The strain, though, is too much for him, and he collapses and dies of a heart attack. The assistant director, amazed at Sergius’s performance, notes sadly that he was a great actor. Leo responds reflectively by saying he was more than that, he was a great man.

Von Sternberg cinematically tells the story of The Last Command with his expressionistic techniques.  These include many dramatically lit, in-depth camera compositions that establish the desired context and mood.  Almost everything takes place at night, when shadows loom. Further colouring the proceedings was the use of cigarette smoke. The main characters, particularly Powell and Jannings, are almost constantly shown puffing on cigarettes and enshrouding themselves in billowing smoke. These often smoky, in-depth establishing shots were punctuated with dramatic closeups that conveyed the characterological developments. Although Jannings was a veteran of conventional silent screen aesthetics and liked to make exaggerated dramatic gestures, von Sternberg kept these relatively under control and got more out of the moody, expressive closeups of both Jannings and Evelyn Brent.

With these expressive techniques, von Sternberg essentially wove together two stories, each with its own theme:

• The outer story of Sergius’s fall from power and his “last command” in Hollywood.  This story is basically told in acts 1, 2, a piece of 4, and 5.  The theme for this narrative is basically dignity.
• The inner story of Sergius and Natalie.  This story is told in acts 3 and 4.  Here the theme is love.

Sergius’s Fall

The outer story is the one people usually talk about in connection with this film and is about Sergius’s loss of status and reduction to an impoverished state.  But in the final scene he is thought to have achieved some sort of redemption. The underlying theme for this scenario may be referred to here as dignity, although that particular term is fraught with misunderstandings. I basically agree with Arthur Schopenhauer, who correctly dismissed the notion of dignity as “the shibboleth of all perplexed and empty-headed moralists” [2]. In fact this fabricated pseudo-concept (I say “pseudo” because there is no common agreement on what it means) is, rather than a human right, often evoked simply to justify violent acts of vengeance that obliterate human rights, particularly in the Middle East and in Asia. Unfortunately, the idea of dignity was explicitly championed by Kant and was later enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights [3], so it does retain some currency today.  Samuel Moyn offers some further useful commentary on this troublesome notion in his article, “Dignity’s Due” [4]. Anyway, although I do not believe that dignity is at all a human right, we might agree that, on the basis of a person’s folk-psychological self-conception, someone might (a) believe that they inherently have dignity or (b) be thought to have it. And in some societies across the ocean from America, maintaining one’s dignity is all-important.  So in the outer story Sergius is shown to have lost his dignity, but (perhaps) to have regained it at the end.

Sergius’s and Natalie’s Love

However, it is the inner story about the improbable relationship between Sergius and Natalie that elevates the film to a high level and shows off von Sternberg at his best. There are clearly paradoxes about this relationship.  How could Natalie fall in love with Sergius, and so quickly? Does she only love him because he loves Russia? Does Sergius have faith in her, or is he fatalistic, when he turns his back on her, knowing that she intends to shoot him?  These questions probably have no answers.  All we can say is that for von Sternberg, love is not rational; true love invariably involves complete surrender to the beloved (and this notion is repeated in many of his greatest films).

Crucial to this narrative theme is the performance of Evelyn Brent, who had earlier starred in Underworld but is even more dramatically alluring here.  To me, she embodies the unique, animated glamour characteristic of the 1920s – a special kind of allure that has only been retained by French women today. She is seen to move from play-acting to authenticity and back with bewildering precipitancy, but she has her heart in it all the way. 

Their love sheds light on what was the real admirable virtue of Sergius. And this is the ultimate romantic message that von Sternberg delivers. Sergius was not a man who loved both Russia and Natalie just for reasons that could be argued logically. He loved them without rational justification or qualification. And whenever he felt he was in a position to do good (even in his final delusional state), he took action with passion.  For this reason he really was a “great man”, although I don’t think Leo Andreyev understood it that way.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Anton Kaes, “Illusions and Delusions”, 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, (2010), The Criterion Collection.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality, (1837/2005), Dover Classics, p. 51.
3. “United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights”, (1948), The United Nations
4. Samuel Moyn, “Dignity’s Due”, (2013), The Nation, November 4, 2013.

"The Last Laugh" - F. W. Murnau (1924)

Carl Mayer, the outstanding German script writer whose first triumph was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), had planned The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924) to be the third part of a trilogy he had been working on with the director Lupu Pick. A disagreement between the two brought in F. W. Murnau as the director, a circumstance which proved to be historic.

With the illustrious Karl Freund at the camera, Murnau fashioned one of the great cinematographic achievements of the silent era. The film, shot entirely without titles, was an extremely Germanic Existentialist tragedy, though not clearly an Expressionistic one. It recounts the social destruction of a doorman, who, upon losing his uniform, loses his being-in-the-world. Having grown too old to carry luggage, the doorman must exchange his braided coat for a simple white jacket and be the attendant in a men’s lavatory. The resulting dishonor ruins the old man, played by Emil Jannings, (he also starred in The Blue Angel, 1930) as well as his entire family. The full tragic implications of a film like this can only be understood in a country where uniform is king. The film abounds in skilful use of symbols, which are so well integrated to the action that they need not be noticed to appreciate the film. In particular, the revolving door, whose movements the doorman is so proud of controlling, becomes a symbol for the swirl of life itself.

The Last Laugh is a showcase of camera technique. Lupu Pick claimed to be the first to use the moving camera in 1922 and Wegener’s cinematographer, Boese, insisted he used it for The Golem (1920). But for Murnau, the camera moving on a dolly was no longer enough: he tied it to his cameraman’s chest and had him follow Jannings step by step with each camera angle chosen for perfect expressive and pictoral composition. Freund’s camera plays with beams of the nightwatchman’s torch, moving to and fro in a fashion characteristic of the German filmmaker’s fondness for light play on surfaces. Yet each shot is well motivated.

The inclusion of Expressionist style in a film depicting psychological developments in a middle-class atmosphere seems impossible, but Murnau does it with the exquisite drunken dream sequence, wherein the daily torture of the doorman comes out in all its horror. The panels of the revolving door, now gigantic and Expressionistically distorted, collide with the sleeping man’s brain and split it in two: a precise image of the schizoid nature of all dreams.

The concern for details slows the pace down and occasionally disconcerts modern audiences who are unaccustomed to viewing films in which the psychological development is conditioned by each meaningful but minute detail. The freedom of the mobile camera and the title-free narrative enables Murnau to explore the characters in great depth. In fact Eisner (The Haunted Screen) asserts that the ponderous pace of the film is essential to this investigation into the Germanic world and gives it the ultimate meaning [1].

Mayer and Murnau were forced by their producers to have a happy ending. They did so ingeniously, without sacrificing the film’s artistic merit, by taking on a facetious ending, an epilogue, essentially, which is even more biting in its commentary than the original ending and is, indeed, the last laugh.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (1974), University of California Press.

"The Blue Angel" - Josef von Sternberg (1930)

Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel, 1930), was not his first sound film (Thunderbolt was, in 1929), but it was the first German sound film. Though shot prior to the filming of Morocco (1930), The Blue Angel was released in the United States just afterwards. Unlike some of the awkward early efforts in using the new cumbersome sound technology, The Blue Angel still stands today as one of the stellar expressions in film history. The story charts the tragic downfall of an older German professor as a result of his ruinous infatuation with a lower class cabaret singer. The novel on which the script is based, Professor Unrat, by Heinrich Mann, was said to be a pointed attack on the hypocrisy of German society and politics in the pre-World War I period. But von Sternberg altered this story to focus on one of his signal themes: the fatal, all-consuming power of romantic love. In the story, Professor Rath (Emil Jannings) is a professor, a respected man of high stature in his local German city, and his position commands respect from his peers and fear from his pupils -- for him, it defines who he is. When he falls for Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich), the cabaret singer/dancer, he forsakes his position in society and enters into a free-fall plunge that can only end in his own destruction. The narrative can be partitioned into four thematic acts, although the boundaries are not sharply defined:

1. Introduction (30 minutes). Professor Rath is shown to be a rather pompous and self-regimented characters who teaches at the local gymnasium (note that the final-year gymnasium students would correspond to first-year college students today). While having his breakfast in his quarters, he is somewhat disturbed to see that his pet canary has died, and this perhaps is an unwanted reminder of our own inevitable vulnerability to natural forces. This will later be contrasted by the observation of the singing caged canary in Lola-Lola's room. Later in the professor’s classroom, he catches some of his more impudent students passing around photos of the singer, Lola-Lola, who is performing at the local cabaret, The Blue Angel. He decides to visit this venue and see if he can put a stop to his students' frequenting this den of corruption. But while trying to collar some students he has spied at the cabaret, he stumbles into Lola-Lola’s dressing room, where he finds himself put off balance by the beautiful and confidently unaffected singer. He is nonetheless indignant with the sinful surroundings and angrily storms out to his own abode.
2. Seduction (39 minutes). The next day the professor returns to the cabaret in order to recover his forgotten hat and to return Lola-Lola’s undergarment that had been secreted into his pocket during that first visit by his cheeky student. On this occasion he is charmed by Lola’s earthy openness and manner, in which she treats him not as a pillar of society, but as a man and as an equal. Soon she is being quite flirtatious, and the professor ultimately spends the night with her. For Lola, this is probably a common occurrence, but for the professor, it has changed his world. He tardily rushes back to his morning class, but the word is out about the professor’s nocturnal escapade, and his unruly and abusive students call him “Unrat”, meaning “rubbish”. He loses his position, but now blindly in love, he offers his hand to Lola-Lola in marriage. Perhaps seizing an unexpected opportunity for respectability, Lola accepts his proposal.
3. The decline (7 minutes). With Rath now unemployed, Lola must continue to work as a singer, and Rath accompanies her as she travels with her performing company to other locales. Very rapidly we see that his role has been reduced to that of a servant, and all the formerly received respect has disappeared. But after five years of degeneration and denigration on the road, he is alarmed to learn that a further indignity awaits: the troupe is scheduled to revisit the Blue Angel, where his presence on stage as a clown is expected to attract a packed house of mocking former students and colleagues.
4. The final debasement (26 minutes). Back in the old town at the Blue Angel, Rath is subjected to utter humiliation in front of the crowd, while he is cuckolded off stage by his wife, who is now attracted to a performing “strong man” that she has just met. Rath ultimately goes berserk and finally makes his way back to his old desk at the gymnasium, where he slumps forward and dies.

Here is some earlier commentary of mine that provides additional background on this subject:

Josef von Sternberg, one of the few internationally admired American directors, achieved his greatest success with his one German film. Sternberg emigrated to the U.S. from Austria in 1908, and after a decade of apprenticeship in the film industry during which the “von” was added to his name by an image-minded producer, he gained wide critical acclaim with his first directorial effort, The Salvation Hunters (1925). Thereafter came a string of silent screen successes, including The Last Command (1928), starring Emil Jannings, who, like many of countrymen, had been imported by Hollywood after the international box office smashes of films like The Last Laugh (Der Letze Mann, 1924) and Variety (1925). The sound film was often an artistic stumbling block for established silent directors, but von Sternberg’s first effort with sound, Thunderbolt (1929), was a convincing realization of the medium.

Meanwhile, Jannings, unable to master English, had returned to Germany, and, at his request, von Sternberg was sent for to assist the star in his transition to sound films, despite personality differences between the two during the filming of The Last Command. They decided to make a film based on the novel Professor Unrat, a violent attack on Imperial Germany, written in 1905 by Heinrich Mann (brother of Thomas Mann). Von Sternberg was to make vast alterations translating the novel, which had been an old abandoned project of G. W. Pabst, to the screen, including the elimination of the last third of the novel. Later when there was public criticism for those changes (in Germany) and when, for complex political reason, Ufa tried to dissociate its film from the radical leftist, Mann, the author replied simply, “Had I been more mature (when I wrote it), I would have developed the character of Professor Unrath more humanly, as in the film.”

There was disagreement in the production company as to the female lead opposite Jannings. Legend has it that von Sternberg finally chose the obscure musical comedy actress, Marlene Dietrich, after hearing her utter her one and only line in a stage show: “Hurray for the gentleman who has won the Grand Prize.”

The result of all this was The Blue Angel, which was released in German and English language versions and which ranks with the greatest films of all time. The film marked a transition for von Sternberg from his earlier harsh realism to his subsequent Baudelairian obsession with feminine ambiguity and erotic visual imagery. What causes this film to transcend the trivial genre of bourgeois male corrupted by bohemian female is the subtly conceived role of Lola-Lola.. The directness of Dietrich, contrasting well with the elaborateness of Jannings, established the ground for her magnetic appeal. Her impassive, even sometimes sympathetic, innocence renders the fate of the Professor into true tragedy.

Critical comment on the film is frequently divided between its so-called dream-like nature and its sordid realism. What is actually achieved is a brilliant synthesis of expressionism and artistic detail to bring about a realism of the imagination of memory. The expressive power arising from von Sternberg’s control of the cinematic environment to its last detail results in effects even more strongly felt than those of Pabst. Siegfried Kracauer, commenting on The Blue Angel, observed that von Sternberg was the “master of the art of rendering milieus.” As in Carl Mayer’s postwar films, the persistent interference of mute objects reveals the whole milieu (of The Blue Angel) as a scene of loosened instincts.

Von Sternberg, with The Blue Angel, had elevated Expressionism to the sound film and opened up new possibilities for its presentation. However, only von Sternberg, and later Orson Welles, had the technical virtuosity and artistic integrity to continue the Expressionist tradition successfully.

There are some wonderful features to this film that deserve further mention:

• Both Jannings and Dietrich give superb performances. Jannings’s highly gestural presentation, derived from his silent movie experience, leads effectively to the dramatic gestures of the clown in the final scenes. Dietrich’s performance, by contrast, is a brilliantly natural presentation of the reflexively amoral and passionate aesthete. He embodies the neuroses of civilisation; she represents the innocence of the pagan. There is nothing cruel about Lola-Lola, but she can’t help being who she is and she embodies her own signature song: “Falling in Love Again”. This first sound-film performance of Dietrich was never surpassed for its mixture of uncompromising and unfathomable femininity. Overall, the dialogue and character attitudes are, despite the expressionistic tones in the film, very natural – they reflect an openness in the filmmaking of those days that would soon be curtailed by the Hays Code.
• The strong man who seduces Lola-Lola at the end is an example of the mindlessly arrogant and rudely masculine lothario who would frequent many of von Sternberg’s later pictures. This person was always the animalistic counterweight to the romantic dreams implicit in von Sternberg’s aesthetic.
• The expressionistic, shadow-laden environments are beautifully atmospheric, especially the decadent atmosphere of the cabaret stage and dressing rooms. These are meticulously crafted frames that achieve visual depth by shooting highlighted and backlit subjects through shadowy foreground scenery. The expressionist visuals are so dramatically well presented that the film can be pretty well understood without any semantic input from the sound track. In fact it may be better to watch the film without subtitles enabled.
• Von Sternberg employs some stunning narrative "glissandos" as the plot moves along quickly. One example is the scene in which Rath asserts that he will not allow pictures of Lola-Lola to be sold, which slides smoothly into the next one in which Rath is, himself, hawking the same photos to her spectators.

What von Sternberg, Jannings, and Dietrich achieved in this work is one of the great monuments of doomed romantic passion. Von Sternberg would make other great films, but none better.
★★★★