Sternberg’s fascination with tales of mortification and disgrace made him a natural choice to direct celebrated German actor Emil Jannings, whose most famous roles, such as the humiliated doorman in Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), captured the anguished fall from grace and respectability of vain men too attached to their social position. Set in Hollywood, The Last Command offers a powerful allegory about celebrity, history and cinema with Jannings delivering a brilliant performance as an exiled Russian military officer turned actor and given the role of a Czarist general caught in his last desperate downward spiral. The Last Command reaches a fever pitch of psychosexual degradation that is carefully balanced by the film’s cruelly sumptuous elegance. Jannings was so pleased with the result that he recommended Sternberg for the job of directing The Blue Angel.