The Last Performance

Erik the Great, a magician, loves his assistant; she loves his young protégé, who is a thief; so Erik stages the sword-cabinet trick so that the boy will hang for a murder, then cannot go through with it at the trial. Conrad Veidt gives the magician the stillness of a man who has already decided, and Paul Fejos, after Lonesome, moves the camera through theatres and dressing rooms with the freedom he had found the year before. Mary Philbin is the assistant. Released silent and part-talking; the surviving print came from Denmark. Universal, 1929, sixty minutes.