The Last Command is a 1928 American silent romantic drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg, and written by John F. Goodrich and Herman J. Mankiewicz from a story by Lajos Bíró.

Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, the Czar's cousin and commander of all his armies, is informed by his adjutant that two actors entertaining the troops have been identified as dangerous "revolutionists" during a routine passport check.

Losing his grip on reality, he imagines himself genuinely on the battlefield, besieged by enemies, and passionately urges his men to fight for Russia.

[11] Under the name Theodore Lodi, Lodijensky went on to play a handful of roles between 1929 and 1935, including Grand Duke Michael, a Russian exile who is forced to work as a hotel doorman in the 1932 film Down to Earth.

[12] In 1927, Paramount’s sister film company in Germany, Ufa, yielded its foremost actor Emil Jannings and producer Erich Pommer to make a number of movies in Hollywood.

[13][14] Jannings starred in director Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot and in Victor Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh, but his performance in The Last Command surpassed these two productions.

Paramount attributed the original story entitled “The General” to screenwriter Lajos Bíró, the scenario to John S. Goodrich, and the titles to Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Nevertheless, Sternberg's significant additions and alterations to the plot are “incontestable” and form the basis of his claim to “ultimate authorship” of this cinematic "masterpiece.

[19] The release of The Last Command was stalled when Paramount executives reviewed the film and discovered that Sternberg had inserted material portraying Hollywood as heartless and cynical.

"[23] 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.

[24][25] 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.

[27] 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.” [29] 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.”[30] 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.”[31] 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.” [30] 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.

We are left with no moral, no message, but only a partially resolved melodrama of pride and punishment, a work of art rich in overtones but pitched at too many different keys of interpretation.