A second viewing increased my appreciation of THE LAST COMMAND and boosted it into my favorite movies list. The motif of performance is so sophisticated; it goes beyond the movie's main hook of an exiled Russian aristocrat forced to slum it as a Hollywood extra, playing what he used to be in reality: a decorated general of the czar's armies. The playacting is just as prominent in the movie's extended 1917 flashback: being an aristocrat is packed with performance, having to adopt certain gestures, having to make the exhausted troops seem more storybook-like for the benefit of the deluded czar, the bolshevik spy pretending to fall in love with the general and then pretending to be a devout bolshevik when she falls in love with the general for real and must save him from her former comrades.
It is easy to fault the film for its lapses into wild melodrama (I love a good melodrama, but the love story here just barely works and often in spite of itself) or its rather naive view of the Russian Revolution. But this isn't a film about political ideology: it's about identity, how we construct our identity, and how we react when that identity is ripped from us by outside forces.
The protagonist Sergius defines his personhood wholly in his role as a general for the czar, but when the czar is deposed and the social elite lose all power, he has nothing. In the US, he is unable to redefine himself and remains a shell of a man. It literally takes being put into a general's costume and playing the role in a movie that allows him to regain his old dignity and fire, and then the moment his part ends, he dies, almost as though unwilling to return to the limbo of non-identity.
It's a brilliant film, no doubt-- the camerawork and acting all pull it together, making it one of the finest moments of the late silent era.
It is easy to fault the film for its lapses into wild melodrama (I love a good melodrama, but the love story here just barely works and often in spite of itself) or its rather naive view of the Russian Revolution. But this isn't a film about political ideology: it's about identity, how we construct our identity, and how we react when that identity is ripped from us by outside forces.
The protagonist Sergius defines his personhood wholly in his role as a general for the czar, but when the czar is deposed and the social elite lose all power, he has nothing. In the US, he is unable to redefine himself and remains a shell of a man. It literally takes being put into a general's costume and playing the role in a movie that allows him to regain his old dignity and fire, and then the moment his part ends, he dies, almost as though unwilling to return to the limbo of non-identity.
It's a brilliant film, no doubt-- the camerawork and acting all pull it together, making it one of the finest moments of the late silent era.