playwright and filmmaker Preston Sturges declared The Last Command "perhaps the only perfect picture he had ever seen." Despite its "commercial failure" the movie garnered a nomination for Best Original story, and Emil Jannings took the Oscar for Best Performance at the 1st Academy Awards. Author and film critic Leonard Maltin awarded The Last Command four out of four stars, calling it "A fascinating story laced with keen perceptions of life and work in Hollywood. Theme The themes presented in The Last Command reflect Sternberg’s obsession as a film poet, exhibiting “a continuous stream of emotional autobiography” and “ most strikingly defines the importance for Sternberg of the intertwined themes of desire, power and instability of identity.” Jannings’ General Sergius Alexander, an imperious member of the Russian Czar's royal family, is punished for his arrogance – not once, but twice: first stripped of prestige and power by the Bolshevik Revolution, and then reduced to a Hollywood extra performing a burlesque of his former stature. Flashback sequences reveal his precipitous descent, a fate that provided Jannings with the opportunity to exhibit “the extremes of his talent.” In this “saga of decline and fall” – the most "Pirandellian" of Sternberg's films – the characters engage in a “desperate struggle for psychic survival [which] grants them a measure of heroic stature and stoic calm.” In a “performance of remarkable depth”, Evylen Brent's Bolshevik Revolutionary Natacha Dabrova develops “a relationship with Jannings as complex as anything in modern cinema.” On Sternberg's handling of Brent's Natacha, Film historian Andrew Sarris wrote: “[She], like all Sternbergian women, remains enigmatic beyond the demands of the plot. Her perverse nature operates beyond good and evil, beyond the convenient categories of virgins and vamps. What is unusual about Sternberg’s direction is that…he seeks to control performances not for the sake of simplicity, but for the sake of complexity.” Sarris concludes his thematic analysis with this paradox: Home media In 2010, The Criterion Collection released a DVD set titled, "3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg" containing The Last Command, Underworld and The Docks of New York. The film's copyright was renewed, and therefore will not fall into the public domain until January 1, 2024. References Footnotes Sources Baxter, John. 1971. The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. The International Film Guide Series. A.S Barners & Company, New York. Baxter, Peter, 1993. Just Watch! Paramount, Sternberg and America. British Film Institute,