THE LAST COMMAND

Tsarist general (just before the revolution): "The show will be over in a minute"--THE LAST COMMAND

This morning I was going to go on another Walking Meetup at Sunnyside Park.  But once again, I was late!  And I was going to go to a Karaoke Meetup in the evening, but Jonah the organizer couldn't make it and it was cancelled.

Moira came home today, accompanied by Margaret and her children who are in Toronto to see a Taylor Swift concert.  But we haven't seen much of them so far.

I rented the DVD of THE LAST COMMAND, a silent movie directed by that madman Josef Von Sternberg.  It starts Emil Jannings, a German who was one of the finest actors of '20s cinema.  He specialized in playing humiliated characters, like the demoted hotel doorman in THE LAST LAUGH and Marlene Dietrich's swain in THE BLUE ANGEL.  His performance here, along with THE WAY OF ALL FLESH, won him the first Best Actor Oscar.

In this movie Jannings plays a Russian prince commanding the imperial armies in World War I just before the Russian Revolution breaks out.  He gets involved with a woman who's dedicated to the revolution but also attracted to him.  In the last part he's a broken refugee in Hollywood, playing an extra in a movie set in the earlier time, directed by a former revolutionary (William Powell) whom he'd once arrested.