The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

Betty Compson and George Bancroft in The Docks of New York

Cast: George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova, Clyde Cook, Mitchell Lewis, Gustav von Seyffertitz. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, based on a story by John Monk Saunders; titles: Julian Johnson. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Film editing: Helen Lewis. 

Josef von Sternberg is mostly remembered today for his fetishization of Marlene Dietrich in romances with glamorous settings like Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932), but The Docks of New York shows that Sternberg could handle grit as well as glamour. If it's not as well known as the Dietrich films, it's partly because it was largely overlooked at the time of its release because of the flurry of interest in talkies -- it's one of the last important silent movies. But it's as strikingly visual in its way as the more opulent Sternberg movies, with the collaboration of director, cinematographer Harold Rosson, and art director Hans Dreier giving a solid story by Jules Furthman -- who also wrote Morocco and Shanghai Express -- the right flavor. Bill Roberts (George Bancroft), the burly stoker on a tramp steamer, goes ashore for a one-night leave in New York, after being warned by the engineer, Andy (Mitchell Lewis), not to come back drunk. Not one to follow his own advice, Andy then goes to a waterfront dive called the Sandbar where he is surprised to meet his wife, Lou (Olga Baclanova), whom he has abandoned. Meanwhile, Bill rescues a suicidal prostitute named Mae (Betty Compson), when she tries to drown herself, and takes the unconscious woman to a room above the Sandbar. Lou comes to the room to aid in reviving Mae while Bill goes to find some clothes for her. He steals them from a closed pawn shop and returns to find a revived Mae, who turns out to be quite pretty. They go down to the bar, where Andy puts the moves on Mae and gets into a fight with Bill, which Andy loses. Two lost souls, Mae and Bill are attracted to each other, and in a kind of what the hell way, he proposes marriage. They talk wistfully about his giving up the life at sea, and she accepts. A waterfront missionary (Gustav von Seyffertitz) performs the ceremony in the bar. But the next morning Bill has second thoughts and leaves for the ship while Mae is still asleep. Andy, however, still smarting from the beating Bill gave him, goes to the room, where Mae has discovered Bill has left her. She refuses Andy's advances and he tries to rape her, only to be shot by Lou, who has arrived just in time. Seeing the commotion outside the Sandbar, Bill returns to the scene, where he and Mae say their farewell. But when the ship sails, Bill thinks better of it, jumps overboard and swims to shore, where he finds that Mae has been arrested for stealing the clothes from the pawn shop. He confesses to the crime and is sentenced to jail, promising to Mae that he'll return once he serves his sentence. This is solid melodrama stuff, elevated by the performances, which establish the essential loneliness that unites Bill and Mae, and by the fine production values.   

Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, 1931)

Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored

Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Victor McLaglen, Warner Oland, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Lew Cody, Barry Norton. Screenplay: Josef von Sternberg, Daniel Nathan Rubin. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Costume design: Travis Banton. Film editing: Josef von Sternberg. Music: Karl Hajos, Herman Hand. 

Of the seven films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich, Dishonored is probably the weakest. Dietrich is not to blame: Photographed by Lee Garmes and dressed by Travis Banton, she looks as good as she ever did, and the movie gives her a chance to show her talent for comedy for the first time, when she pretends to be a rather bumptious girl from the country. But the story concocted by Sternberg and co-scripted with Daniel Nathan Rubin, a not particularly distinguished playwright, lacks wit and tension. Sternberg's direction allows the pace of the film to go slack, and his decision to edit the film himself doesn't help: His lap dissolves, for example, linger too long on the old scene as the new one fades in, causing visual confusion. Moreover, Dishonored features Victor McLaglen, of all actors, as the romantic lead. McLaglen was skilled as a heavy or a clumsy goof, and John Ford directed him to an Oscar for The Informer (1935), but he's out of place as the Russian spy who gets entangled with Dietrich's Austrian spy. For some reason, he spends a lot of the film flashing a rictus-like grin. Sternberg's story is based on the career of Mata Hari, about whom MGM made a competing movie starring Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro the same year. Dietrich plays a war widow who has turned prostitute to survive, and is recruited for the Austrian Secret Service by its chief (Gustav von Seyffertitz) when she proclaims, "I've had an inglorious life. It may become my good fortune to have a glorious death." Through her career as Agent X-27 she is accompanied by a cat who is so faithful -- she even carries it in the open cockpit of an airplane -- that it suggests a witch's familiar. She's also a pianist, who encodes secrets in musical notation. (Not that she's a good pianist: At one point she plays the usually quietly serene opening of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata as if it were the "Appassionata.") Dishonored is no sillier than most of the Sternberg-Dietrich movies, but it doesn't wear its silliness with style the way the best of them do. 

Macao (Josef von Sternberg, 1952)

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in Macao

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Thomas Gomez, Gloria Grahame, Brad Dexter, Edward Ashley, Philip Ahn, Vladimir Sokoloff, Don Zelaya. Screenplay: Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Stanley Rubin, Robert Creighton Williams. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Samuel E. Beetley, Robert Golden. Music: Anthony Collins.

Macao has the makings of a much better movie: two enormously potent and well-matched stars, a solid supporting cast, a legendary director, an exotic setting, and a twisty, noirish plot. What it doesn't have is dialogue worthy of speaking. The actors give the right twists to their lines, but too often they fall flat. "You don't want that junk," Brad Dexter's Halloran says to his mistress, Margie (Gloria Grahame), about the jewel she's flashing. "Diamonds would only cheapen you." "Yeah," she replies, "but what a way to be cheapened." At another point, Robert Mitchum's Nick Cochran tells Margie, "You know, you remind me of an old Egyptian girlfriend of mine: the Sphinx." She retorts, "Are you partial to females made of stone?" This is tin-eared repartee at best, delivered by the actors as if they were the witty work of better screenwriters like Jules Furthman or Ben Hecht. Still, the opportunity to see Mitchum paired with Jane Russell, one of the few actresses capable of putting him in his place, is irresistible. She plays Julie Benson, an itinerant night club singer who meets Cochran on board the ship on which they're making their way from Hong Kong to Macao. He's a soldier of fortune, on the lam from some sort of misdeed in New York. She picks his pocket, keeps the dough, and tosses his wallet, which contains his passport, overboard. They cross paths again in Macao, where she goes to work for club owner Halloran, who has his own problems with the police. He knows that a detective is coming to Macao to try to nab him, and when Cochran shows up to try to get his money back from Julie, Halloran mistakes him for the detective. In fact, the detective turns out to be in disguise as a traveling salesman called Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), whom Julie and Cochran met earlier on the ship. What follows is much ado about a diamond necklace that Halloran left in a safe deposit box in Hong Kong which Trumble is using to try to lure Halloran across the three-mile limit outside Macao so the police can arrest him. Some double-crosses and chase scenes and a few murders ensue before Cochran and Julie can embrace in the final scene. There's enough good stuff to overcome the misfired dialogue, despite the film's reputation as a troubled shoot in which the actors fought constantly with Sternberg, then at the end of his career. Nicholas Ray completed the film after Sternberg left the shoot, which started in 1950 -- RKO owner Howard Hughes held it from release as he tried to build Russell's  career, which he had launched with hype and controversy over The Outlaw (1943). The delay also explains why Gloria Grahame feels miscast in such a small role in Macao: Her career had taken off while the film was on the shelf.

The Devil Is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)

Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman

Concha Perez: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Don Pasqual "Pasqualito" Costelar: Lionel Atwill
Antonio Galvan: Cesar Romero
Gov. Don Paquito "Paquitito": Edward Everett Horton
Señora Perez: Alison Skipworth
Morenito: Don Alvarado
Tuerta: Tempe Pigott
Alphonso: Francisco Moreno

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: John Dos Passos, Sam Winston, David Hertz, Oran Schee
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Josef von Sternberg
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Josef von Sternberg
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: John Leipold, Hans Roemheld

Josef von Sternberg wanted to give The Devil Is a Woman the title of the music by Rimsky-Korsakov on which the film's score is based, Capriccio Espagnol, but studio head Ernst Lubitsch overruled him. The decision probably helped the movie a little at the box office -- though it was a flop that ended Sternberg's career at Paramount as well as helping Dietrich get stigmatized as "box office poison" in an infamous complaint by a distributor. But The Devil Is a Woman really is a "Spanish caprice," a film that has about as much to do with its ostensible setting, Spain, as the earlier Sternberg-Dietrich films Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), and The Scarlet Empress (1934) had to do with North Africa, China, and Russia. They are products of Steinberg's fevered imagination, with baroque settings designed by Hans Dreier in which Marlene Dietrich could wear impossible gowns by Travis Banton. The 1930s moviegoing public may have tired of Sternberg's idiosyncratic melodramas, but they have stood the test of time as consummate expressions of what the Hollywood studio system could do if it gave free rein to one man's tastes and obsessions. Like Sternberg's first film starring Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), The Devil Is a Woman is about masochism, though the same could be said about all of the other films he made with her. In this one, she's Concha Perez, who leads a Spanish officer she calls Pasqualito on a merry-go-round of erotic entanglements, snaring him and deserting him repeatedly. And though Don Pasqual seems to have come to his senses enough to tell his story as a warning to a young political fugitive, Antonio Galvan, who has fallen for her, Concha returns to play with them again. None of this is remotely credible in any realistic context, which is why the Sternberg-Dreier-Banton concoction of a fantastic Spain is essential. The film thus becomes both silly and sublime and, with Sternberg in charge of everything but its title, one of the purest expressions of a director's sensibility available.

Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus 

Helen Faraday: Marlene Dietrich
Ned Faraday: Herbert Marshall
Nick Townsend: Cary Grant
Johnny Faraday: Dickie Moore
Ben Smith: Gene Morgan
Taxi Belle Hooper: Rita La Roy
Dan O'Connor: Robert Emmett O'Connor
Detective Wilson: Sidney Toler
Dr. Pierce: Morgan Wallace
Joe, a Hiker: Sterling Holloway
Cora: Hattie McDaniel

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman, S.K. Lauren, Josef von Sternberg
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Wiard Ihnen
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold, Paul Marquardt, Oscar Potoker

At once fascinating and perfectly ridiculous, Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus is a domestic melodrama with music and a bit of road movie thrown in. For most viewers it's chiefly of interest as an opportunity to see Cary Grant before the familiar "Cary Grant" persona had fully developed. He's a little rough around the edges still, slipping from an attempt at a fully American accent back into whatever his particular blend of British and American accent is, and his gift for looking faintly amused at absurd or difficult situations -- with which he's often confronted in Blond Venus -- hasn't quite emerged yet. At this stage of his career, he was little more than a useful leading man -- or second lead, in this film -- on the order of a John Lodge or a John Boles, there to show off the real star of the film, like Mae West in I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933) or Loretta Young in Born to Be Bad (Lowell Sherman, 1934) or Jean Harlow in Suzy (George Fitzmaurice, 1936). Or, of course, Marlene Dietrich, who is the reason Blonde Venus was made at all. Sternberg's obsession with Dietrich is on full display here as he crafts another story about a man willing to sacrifice his own love to make a woman in love with another man happy -- the role played by Adolphe Menjou in Morocco (1930) and here played by Grant, whose Nick Townsend, a rich playboy (he's identified as a "politician" in the screenplay, but we never see him either run for office or perform the duties of one), who gives up Dietrich's Helen Faraday twice: both times to let her return to her husband, played a little stodgily by Herbert Marshall. Of course, the real man in Helen's life is her son, Johnny, played by the terminally cute Dickie Moore. I like the way Sternberg both exploits and undercuts Moore's cuteness, as in the scene in which Johnny wears a hideous Halloween mask on the side of his head that's usually facing the camera. But then the whole film is full of Sternbergian tricks, such as the two amazing narrative jump cuts. The film opens with the meeting of Helen and Ned as he and some other hikers come upon her as she's swimming nude in a pond with her fellow chorus girls. She sends him away, though he discovers where she's performing before he goes. Cut from the girls splashing in the pond to Johnny splashing in a tub as Helen bathes him. Sternberg and his screenwriters omit what might have been a movie in itself: the second encounter of Helen and Ned, their courtship and marriage. Similarly, after much ado has reduced Helen to poverty and implied prostitution, there's a scene in which she gives a fellow derelict the $1500 Ned has paid her off with and goes off to, we assume, commit suicide -- or "make a hole in the water," as she has put it. Cut to a shot of an expanse of water, but then to a montage which tells us that Helen has resumed her career as a cabaret performer and has become the toast of Paris. Again, stuff that might have been almost an entire movie on its own has been (fortunately) elided. If Sternberg's tricks had been applied to a story that made more sense to start with, Blonde Venus might have been something of a classic. Instead, it's an extraordinary but often entertaining mess.

Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco

Tom Brown: Gary Cooper
Amy Jolly: Marlene Dietrich
La Bessiere: Adolphe Menjou
Caesar: Ullrich Haupt
Mme. Caesar: Eve Southern
Sgt. Tatoche: Francis McDonald
Lo Tinto: Paul Porcasi

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a play by Benno Vigny
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Karl Hajos

At one point in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco, Tom Brown literally sweeps Amy Jolly off her feet and then tries to guess her weight. She scoffs at his estimate of 120 pounds and says his low estimate must be because he's so strong. In fact, Marlene Dietrich had slimmed down noticeably since she made The Blue Angel for Sternberg only a few months earlier in Germany, though she's still not quite as svelte as she would become after his transformation of her into a Hollywood icon was complete. The pounds are gone in her first American film, as are the realistically tawdry cabaret costumes Lola Lola wears in the German film, replaced by a wardrobe designed by Travis Banton. She is also filmed lovingly by Lee Garmes, who helped her locate the key light whenever the camera is on, a lesson she never forgot long after Sternberg's star-making was over. Morocco was a sensation, earning Dietrich her only Oscar nomination, though it's hardly her best performance or even a very good film. Sternberg still maintains the slightly halting pace of a director making a transition from silent films to talkies, chopping up Jules Furthman's dialogue by pausing too long between lines, losing the snap that would be present when Sternberg and Furthman worked together two years later on Shanghai Express. What action there is in the story, such as the attack by thugs outside Amy's apartment or the taking out of the machine gun nest, is tossed off casually, all in service of romance. And even the celebrated ending, with Amy kicking off her shoes to join the camp-followers into the desert, is more likely to elicit laughs today. As handsome as Gary Cooper's legionnaire is, it doesn't seem likely that a tough cookie like Amy, once capable of tearing up La Bessiere's card into small pieces while he's watching, would be such a careless lovesick sap. Still, Morocco is worth sitting through for its legendary moments, including the celebrated appearance of Dietrich's Amy in men's evening wear, taking a flower from a woman whom she kisses on the mouth and then tossing it to Cooper's wryly amused Tom, who tucks it behind his ear. It's an entertaining flirtation with what the Production Code would, in just a few years, and for several dreary decades, egregiously label "sex perversion."

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel

Prof. Immanuel Rath: Emil Jannings
Lola Lola: Marlene Dietrich
Kiepert, the Magician: Kurt Gerron
Guste Kiepert: Rosa Valetti
Mazeppa, the Strongman: Hans Albers
The Clown: Reinhold Bernt
Director of the School: Eduard von Winterstein
School Caretaker: Hans Roth
Angst, a Student: Rolf Müller
Lohmann, a Student: Roland Varno
Erztum, a Student: Carl Balhaus
Goldstaub, a Student: Robert Klein-Lörk
Innkeeper: Károly Huszár
Rath's Maid: Ilse Fürstenberg

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, Robert Liebmann
Based on a novel by Heinrich Mann
Cinematography: Günther Rittau
Art direction: Otto Hunte
Film editing: Sam Winston
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel still has some of the earmarks of a film made during the transition from silence to synchronized sound, namely the tendency to hold a shot a beat or two longer than is actually necessary, so the narrative doesn't always move along at the speed we anticipate. But Sternberg is clearly ready for sound, as the final scene shows. The camera tracks back from the dead professor, clutching his old desk so tightly that the caretaker who found his body has been unable to loosen his grip. Meanwhile, we hear the clock striking midnight, with the twelfth stroke barely audible as the screen fades to black. It's a touching moment, made possible by the several shots and sounds of the clock* that occur through the film as a kind of indicator of Rath's decline from precise and punctual to dissipated and tardy. Otherwise the sound on the film is sometimes a little harsh to the ear, which makes Sternberg's relatively sparing use of it welcome. Many scenes are staged in near-silence, letting the action rather than the dialogue carry the story.  Marlene Dietrich's baritone recorded well, which is one reason her career took off when sound was introduced, but early in the film she's allowed to sing in an upper key which is more than a little off-putting. Fortunately, by the time we get to Lola Lola's big number, Friedrich Hollaender's "Ich bin von Kopf zu Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" (the subtitles use the English language version, "Falling in Love Again" instead of a literal translation), Dietrich is back in the correct register. The Blue Angel thrives on Dietrich's performance, which eclipses Emil Jannings's overacting, though he does provide some genuine pathos toward the end of the film. I don't quite believe the ease with which the professor falls from grace, but I'm not sure whether the fault lies entirely with Jannings or with the screenplay.

*I don't think there's ever an establishing shot of the tower where this clock resides, only closeups of its face and the procession of figures below as the hour strikes. Is it perhaps on the town hall, the Rathaus, in which case there's a kind of submerged pun at work?

The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934)

Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress

Princess Sophia Frederica/Catherine II: Marlene Dietrich
Count Alexei: John Lodge
Grand Duke Peter: Sam Jaffe
Empress Elizabeth Petrovna: Louise Dresser
Prince August: C. Aubrey Smith
Capt. Grigori Orloff: Gavin Gordon
Sophia as a Child: Maria Riva

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Manuel Komroff, Eleanor McGeary
Based on a diary of Catherine II of Russia
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg, Sam Winston
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold

The Scarlet Empress may be the silliest movie ever made, and never sillier than when Marlene Dietrich, her hair done up all in curls, pretends to be innocent and naive by opening her eyes wide beneath her penciled-in eyebrows. Now mind you, I have nothing against silliness; some of of my favorite movies are silly, like Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), which may be the silliest great movie ever made. (Or the greatest silly movie, depending on which way you come at it.) So I love The Scarlet Empress, for all its outrageous camping-up of 18th-century Russia with cartoon icons and ubiquitous gargoyles -- the greatest of which is Sam Jaffe's grinning idiot of a grand duke. But we all know that Catherine II didn't earn the sobriquet "Great" just by sleeping with her soldiers (and perhaps some of the horses we see clattering up the palace staircases in the movie). So you really have to suspend a lot of disbelief and accept Josef von Sternberg's film for what it is: an outrageous parody of the historical epic, the sort of thing that people were expected to take seriously when, for example, Norma Shearer played Marie Antoinette for W.S. Van Dyke four years later. If The Scarlet Empress was a box office failure at the time it was because audiences weren't keyed in to the joke. Now we are, so we can revel in Hans Dreier's febrile vision of a Russian palace and the music arrangers' delirious pastiche of Tchaikovsky mingled with Mendelssohn and laced with a bit of Wagner's Valkyries (for when those horses are galloping through the halls). 

Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express

Shanghai Lily: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Donald Harvey: Clive Brook
Hui Fei: Anna May Wong
Henry Chang: Warner Oland
Sam Salt: Eugene Pallette
Carmichael: Lawrence Grant
Mrs. Haggerty: Louise Closser Hale
Eric Baum: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Maj. Lenard: Emile Chautard

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a story by Harry Hervey
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Music: W. Franke Harling

There's something claustrophobic about Shanghai Express: Its characters are always enclosed -- in train cabins, in interrogation rooms, even in crowds of other people. Even the titular train gets itself into a tight spot, navigating the narrow passage through the streets of what the film calls "Peking." Which makes it all the better for Lee Garmes's camera, tasked as it is with making the most of Marlene Dietrich's face. Garmes (with director Josef von Sternberg looking over his shoulder) always finds ways to frame that face with veils and feathers and furs, with the actress's own hands, with misted windows, and when nothing else will do, a simple shaft of light caressing those eyelids, cheekbones, and lips. Fortunately, the movie is more than glamorous poses: There's a good deal of snappy dialogue and some wily character acting from the likes of Eugene Pallette, Louise Closser Hale, and -- in a role that seems to have been a kind of audition for his most famous one, Charlie Chan -- Warner Oland. I only wish that a leading man more attractive, or less plummily British, than Clive Brook had been provided for Dietrich. The story is nonsense, of course, and it verges dangerously on colonialist poppycock in its treatment of the Chinese, though even there it pulls back somewhat by turning Anna May Wong's Hui Fei from a stereotypical dragon lady into a genuinely heroic figure. It must also be said that Shanghai Express was made at the right time: A couple of years later, the sexual adventurism of its women would have been taboo under the Production Code and Hui Fei would have been made to pay for murdering her rapist.