Nabokov/von Sternberg/Appel, Jr.

“…car­ried away by his re-creation of the past…” From von Sternberg’s The Last Command 

Surrender (1927) rep­res­ents the only American appear­ance of the fam­ous Russian act­or Ivan Mosjoukine (né Mozzhukin, 1989–1939) whose romantic swash­buck­ler roles were much admired by adoles­cent Nabokov (1912016). Mosjoukine made his own miraged appear­ance in the first stage of young Nabokov’s life as exile. After the Revolution his fam­ily moved to the Crimea, where Nabokov seni­or became Minister of Justice in the hope­ful Regional Government. One morn­ing in the sum­mer of 1918, with real battles raging in thenorth (the Civil War), Nabokov sud­denly met on a moun­tain trail

a strange cava­lier, clad in a Circassian cos­tume, with a tense, per­spir­ing face painted a fanta­s­itc yel­low. He kept fero­ciously tug­ging at his horse, which, without heed­ing him, pro­ceeded down the steep path at a curi­ously pur­pose­ful walk, like that of an offen­ded per­son leav­ing a party. I had seen run­away horses, but I had nev­er seen a walkaway one before, and my aston­ish­ment was giv­en a still more pleas­ur­able edge when I recog­nized the unfor­tu­nate rider as Mozzhuhin, whom Tamara [his first love, the mod­el for Mary—A.A.] and I had so often admired on screen. The film Haji Murad (after Tolstoy’s tale of that gal­lant, rough-riding moun­tain chief0 was being rehearsed on the moun­tain pas­tures of that range. “Stop that brute [Derzhite prok­ly­a­toe zhivot­noe]” he said through his teeth as he saw me, but at the same moment, with a mighty sound of crunch­ing and crash­ing stones, two authen­t­ic Tatars came run­ning down to the res­cue, and I trudged on, with my but­ter­fly net, toward the upper crags where the Euxine race of the Hippolyte Grayling was expect­ing me (Speak Memory, p. 247).

All rehears­als con­cluded, both act­or and care­free lepid­op­ter­ist would soon become per­man­ent emigrés; Surrender starred Mosjoukine as a White Army officer who losed everything in the CIvil War that had provided a back­drop for the act­or’s unreal meet­ing with Nabokov. A pub­li­city pho­to­graph poses Mosjoukine with Edward Sloman, Surrender’s dir­ect­or, and some of those dazed Russian emigré extras “whose only hope and pro­fes­sion was their past.” The theme is mem­or­ably orches­trated in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command, (1928), in which Emil Jannings plays an ex-tsarist gen­er­al who, now a poor old man in Hollywood, applies for work as and extra and is cast to replay his former self in the film-within-the-film. The cruel, dizzy­ing com­mis­sion and that film’s Communist dir­ect­or (William Powell) com­bine to drive Jannings insane. (Sternberg’s scen­ario was inspired by a “true story” rather than, say, Pirandello’s play Henry IV, 1922.) Still pho­tos often fail to com­mu­nic­ate the essence of a tra­gic per­form­ance or, even worse, freeze what seems to be an over­blown expres­sion (always a pos­sib­il­ity in the con­text of the more styl­ized “the­at­ric­al” action of the silent cinema). 

The haunt­ing qual­ity of The Last Command, how­ever, is pre­served in sev­er­al stills: Jannings about to don his “cos­tume” in the extras’ com­mon dress­ing room; Jannings being inspec­ted like a young recruit by the assist­ant dir­ect­or and prop man, ready with a box of authen­t­ic medals; or the spec­tacle of Grand Duke Jannings, imprisoned by mir­rors and car­ried away by his re-creation of the past as he bravely con­fronts a mob of revolu­tion­ar­ies or arrog­antly reviews the troops of his last com­mand, many of them played by actu­al Russian emigrés. “I had for­ti­fied my image of the Russian Revolution by includ­ing in my cast of extra play­ers an assort­ment of Russian ex-admirals and gen­er­als, a dozen Cossacks, and two former mem­bers of the Duma, all vic­tims of the Bolsheviks, and, in par­tic­u­lar, an expert on borscht by the name of Koblianski. These men, espe­cially one Cossack gen­er­al who insisted on keep­ing my car spot­less, viewed Jannings’ effort to be Russian with such dis­dain that I had to order them to con­ceal it,” writes Field Marshal von Sternberg in his auto­bi­o­graphy, Fun In A Chinese Laundry (1965).

—Alfred Appel, Jr., from Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, Oxford University Press, 1974 

The DVD event of the week, or rather the month, or quite prob­ably the whole year, is Criterion’s Three Silent Classics By Josef von Sternberg, which col­lects the sem­in­al films Underworld, The Docks of New York, and the above-discussed Last Command. (Incidentally, while I could not find the pub­li­city still from Surrender described in the above pas­sage, on the left here is a shot of the act­or Mosjoukine.) Mr. Dave Kehr, in his superb assess­ment of the set and the movies therein for The New York Times, gets down to cases and nails them right away: “In a sense, Sternberg was an avant-garde film­maker who found him­self, by fluke and only for a short while, at the con­trols of the Hollywood machine, then oper­at­ing at the peak of its oth­er­worldly arti­fi­ci­al­ity.” I should hope to per­haps elab­or­ate on this idea on this blog some time soon. In the mean­time, I am hop­ing that the here­after, where some believe the good Professor Appel (whose work moved and inspired me in so many ways) trav­elled to in May of last year, has a very good home theat­er system.