After the surprising success of Underworld, Paramount rewarded Josef von Sternberg with Emil Jannings (then considered the world's finest film actor) for The Last Command. Jannings plays an immigrant, ex-Czarist general who finds himself reduced to working as an extra in a Hollywood film directed by yet another Russian emigré, his very enemy from the Revolutionary days. Sternberg re-invents the general's grandeur and downfall in Russia, but only to emphasize the status of the Hollywood extra in the film factories where, not unlike the Czar's army, power-hungry moguls act on glorious fantasies to create real-life tragedy. Sternberg brilliantly achieves the reflection of one world (Hollywood) in another (Russia) totally alien to it. And The Last Command is doubly interesting for its layers of irony and near-Pirandellian self-consciousness; here, characters and actors alike seem to skate willingly between absurd fiction and even more absurd reality.