The Russian film director Leo Anrdreyev (William Powell) is going through a stack of photos looking for extras for his new Hollywood film. He comes across a photo of an extra that claims to be an exiled relative of the czar and head of the czar's army when he was in Russia. Andreyev instructs his assistant to have him show up tomorrow and to put him in a general's uniform. When the extra Sergius (Emil Jannings) arrives on the set the atmosphere has him reminiscing about his time leading the Russian army during WWI at the time of the revolution and reveals "the great shock" he received then that has rendered him a broken man.
Evelyn Brent has an important role as a revolutionary who is captured by Sergius, and she is truly wonderful here, just as she has been in other silent films I have seen. She is unfortunately an example of an actress whose career was killed off by talking films in spite of the fact that she had a perfectly fine voice. Her problem was her flat delivery of lines in that perfectly fine voice.
I don't know if this film would have been translatable into sound film. It is very effective with very little dialogue and lots of stirring imagery as Sternberg does his usual magic with the camera. It was inspired by the true story of General Lodijenski, a Russian aristocrat who arrived penniless in the US after the 1917 Revolution and who supported himself by playing movie bit parts.
This film was one of two films that won Emil Jannings the first Academy Award for Best Actor, the other being a film, "The Way of All Flesh", that Paramount managed to lose. There would be a bit of a reversal of fortune for Emil Jannings and WIlliam Powell in life just as there was in this film. At the time Jannings won the Best Actor award he had already gone back to Germany as he correctly guessed he would have a hard time of it in talking English language films with his thick German accent. William Powell, however, gained great acclaim and leading man status as a direct result of the advent of sound film. But even though he spent about ten years at Paramount, once he left in 1931 he never did another film there although he did films at all of the other major studios over the next two decades. I wonder if there is a story there?
Evelyn Brent has an important role as a revolutionary who is captured by Sergius, and she is truly wonderful here, just as she has been in other silent films I have seen. She is unfortunately an example of an actress whose career was killed off by talking films in spite of the fact that she had a perfectly fine voice. Her problem was her flat delivery of lines in that perfectly fine voice.
I don't know if this film would have been translatable into sound film. It is very effective with very little dialogue and lots of stirring imagery as Sternberg does his usual magic with the camera. It was inspired by the true story of General Lodijenski, a Russian aristocrat who arrived penniless in the US after the 1917 Revolution and who supported himself by playing movie bit parts.
This film was one of two films that won Emil Jannings the first Academy Award for Best Actor, the other being a film, "The Way of All Flesh", that Paramount managed to lose. There would be a bit of a reversal of fortune for Emil Jannings and WIlliam Powell in life just as there was in this film. At the time Jannings won the Best Actor award he had already gone back to Germany as he correctly guessed he would have a hard time of it in talking English language films with his thick German accent. William Powell, however, gained great acclaim and leading man status as a direct result of the advent of sound film. But even though he spent about ten years at Paramount, once he left in 1931 he never did another film there although he did films at all of the other major studios over the next two decades. I wonder if there is a story there?