Synopsis
A middle-aged magician is in love with his beautiful young assistant. She, on the other hand, is in love with the magician's young protege, who turns out to be a bum and a thief.
The Last Performance
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Theatrical
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USA
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USA
13 Oct 1929
- Theatrical
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1st Pál Fejős
A compact piece of psychosexual angst that feels like a good double bill with The Unknown; both are about older men finding their grip on the young women they love weakening by the presence of a cocky younger man. Both obsessions result in violence on stage and the exposure of their own ego. Veidt's Erik, however, is a far more likeable character than Alonzo, a gentleman whose love of Mary Philbin contains none of the disturbing sexual overtones of Chaney. When he does realise the chips are against him, he stands aside but cannot quite get rid of his anger. You get the sense that there's always been a bubbling well of rage behind his eyes that…
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The magnetic presence of Conrad Veidt anchors this tale of a stage hypnotist who hankers after his assistant. Mary Philbin was hankered after by quite a few unhinged antiheroes in her day - see also The Phantom of the Opera and The Man Who Laughs. Paul Fejos directs with a similarly mesmeric camera - mobile and inventively hyperactive but able to stop and fix its subject with a long hard intense stare.
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It's sort of like The Prestige but ninety years ago. A very solid thriller with a magician love triangle starring the infamous Conrad Veidt and Mary Philbin from The Man Who Laughs.
The Last Performance mixes German Expressionism with a lavish 1920's American setting for lots of rich visuals.
It's a bit of a shame that the added "talkie" scenes have been lost, but the story is still completely in tact; its well-paced drama eventually leads to a courtroom scene with a clever final reveal.
Fejös seems to be entirely missing from conversations of the silent era as it approached its end, but he holds about the same solid technical execution and dramatic storytelling prowess as his peers.
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About two to three months ago, I had a look at Paul Fejos' Lonesome, a rousing part-talkie that was incredibly inventive in its visuals, surprisingly moving in its simplicity of love, and managed to be one of my favorite silent films I still think about from time to time. While most people's journeys through Fejos' filmography would stop there on account of the difficulty and, in some cases, impossibility in finding his other work, two supplemental films were included in his 20's Coney Island romantic fable as a little peek into where his career in Hollywood took him, both released in 1929, the year after Lonesome and the year before Universal Studios would screw him out of two relatively important…
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☆"This is a strange story of hypnotism, sorcery, and a trunk and 12 sharp swords."☆
Very fortunate to have the Criterion Collection Blu-ray from louferrigno of the splendid Pál Fejős film Lonesome, which contains two more of his features, each from 1929. One of those is The Last Performance – also known as Erik the Great after its main character – a horror-ish vehicle for Conrad Veidt that's not bad because it knows its place.
(What's on the disc is actually not the part-talkie version many audiences saw in 1929. That was lost. What remains is a Danish version of the silent film, released as De tolv klinger ["The Twelve Swords"], restored with a lovely score from Donald Sosin.)
That…
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Tragic tale of unbuyable love that features yet another wonderful (if a little overacted at times) Conrad Veidt performance. The piano score is classic but also a bit boring and basic.
Legendary cinematographer Hal Mohr gets the most out of most scenes and delivers some impressive sequences with the most memorable examples being when Veidt's shadow approaches the young couple at the wedding or the dinner tracking shot right after. While for 1929 standards not fully innovative or revolutionary there are certainly worse ways to spend an hour than watching this. -
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I enjoyed the hell out of this. The ending was great but I was hoping to see one final twist but oh well.
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Backstage melodrama with eerie intimations of horror. Fejos direction feels Sternbergian, but it is hard to be sure given the rough state of the surviving copy. Conrad Veidt is very good as well.
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Further evidence that Conrad Veidt's eyeballs were some of the best performers of silent cinema.
This was a really fun macabre revenge movie but I was really distracted by seeing the "Phantom Stage" Opera set used in yet another film and being butthurt that Universal tore down one of the oldest sound stages in existence and the oldest standing film set PERIOD (they claimed they put it in storage but who knows) to make room for their fucking Mario Kart ride. Stage 28 should have been designed a historic landmark but it was completely torn down in 2014.
I mean go off Mario but now we got zoomers shooting koopa shells on the bones of the original Phantom of the Opera set and it keeps me awake at night