Bruce Loeb on Piano After the surprising success of Underworld (1927), Paramount rewarded Josef von Sternberg with Emil Jannings-then considered to be the world's finest film actor-for The Last Command. Jannings plays an ex-Czarist general who finds himself reduced to working as an extra in a Hollywood film directed by yet another Russian emigre, his very enemy from the Revolutionary days. Sternberg re-invents the general's grandeur and downfall in Russia, 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. 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. The preserved Eastman House print we present tonight is particularly lovely.