The first of von Sternberg’s American masterpieces, The Last Command relates the story of a Czarist general defeated in the Russian revolution who finds himself down and out in Hollywood, where he works as an extra in a film about the very political upheaval that stripped him of power. Perfectly cast, the film features a gripping, Oscar-winning performance by the celebrated German actor Emil Jannings (two years prior to his work with von Sternberg in The Blue Angel). Like all of von Sternberg’s films, this glittering, sophisticated work, as critic Tony Rayns has noted, is "expertly poised between satire and ‘absurd’ melodrama." American director Preston Sturges once referred to it as about the only perfect film he had ever seen.