Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

THE LAST COMMAND (1928)

Even in an era loaded with classic films, the late-silents of Josef von Sternberg stand out. This famous film, the only survivor of the six films German actor Emil Jannings made in Hollywood*, is a masterpiece of mood, melodrama & masochism. He plays a once great general of the Czar’s Imperial Army, now a shabby movie extra, grateful for a day’s work as a make-believe general in a costume. He doesn’t know that his director (William Powell) knew him from those revolutionary days of 1917, or that he’s out for revenge. In the long flashback that takes up most of the film, we see how they first crossed paths. And we meet the beautiful, morally indifferent woman who was fated never to leave Russia (Evelyn Brent). Sternberg’s distinctive way with studio artifice creates a dreamlike vision of Russia, WWI and the Revolution in Bert Glennon’s ravishing b&w lensing, carefully reproduced on the current Criterion DVD which includes an unusually interesting visual essay in Tag Gallagher’s overview of Sternberg’s silent film career. Of the two musical scores on the disc, the fuller symphonic one arranged by Robert Israel is preferable until the final sequence, back in Hollywood, where the Alloy Orchestra track bests it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Here are Emil Jannings’ missing Hollywood films:

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH/’27 - directed by Victor Fleming - LOST

STREET OF SIN/’28 - Mauritz Stiller; co-starring Fay Wray - LOST

THE PATRIOT/’28 - Ernst Lubitsch - LOST

SINS OF THE FATHERS/’28 - Ludwig Berger; co-starring Ruth Chatterton & Jean Arthur - LOST

BETRAYAL/’29 - Lewis Milestone; co-starring Gary Cooper - LOST

No comments: