One of Josef von Sternberg's most successful films, The Last Command, based on a real-life story, starred Emil Jannings (then considered the world's finest film actor) as an immigrant Czarist general who finds himself reduced to work as an extra in a Hollywood film directed by yet another Russian immigrant, his very enemy of revolutionary days. Though von Sternberg cuts back to the general's grandeur and downfall in Russia, it is 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. This savage criticism of the Hollywood machine, made so early in von Sternberg's career, was filled with truth to the point that studio executives at first refused to have the film released, claiming that it was untruthful and cruel, and, more to the point, alienating to the public and potential investors. The Last Command, reportedly considered by Preston Sturges the only perfect film ever made, is doubly interesting for its layers of self-consciousness, in which the characters in the film-within-a-film confuse cinema with reality; but the characters within the film proper seem somehow aware that they are but participants in an absurd fiction. (JB)