Three von Sternberg Masterworks

When Josef von Sternberg was a guest of the Sydney Film Festival in the mid-1960s he was clearly anxious for audiences to look beyond the films he made with Marlene Dietrich for Paramount in the 1930s, and to appreciate his work in the late silent era such as Underworld, The Last Command and The Docks of New York. He’d even managed to borrow pristine 16mm copies of the films from a private collector for the festival screenings, and the following year arranged for superb 35mm copies to be shown by the National Film Theatre. Those of us who were privileged to see at least some of those screenings thought the veteran director might just have had a point, although some of us still had reservations. (I did not see the great man introduce these works in person. I’m told he was very impressive.)

Of course we were all in love with the Dietrich films: Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express, Dishonored, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress. Most of them had just been screened on commercial television in excellent prints that did full justice to their extraordinary photography and design. We relished the famous use of nets and lattices to break up the light and Sternberg and his cinematographers’ exquisite lighting of the Dietrich face, all of which we read about in the pages of Sight and Sound and later in John Baxter’s groundbreaking book The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. When in the early 1970s I incorporated the director’s work in my courses at Mitchell College the only prints available were of the Dietrich films. These proved endlessly fascinating to my students, not to mention their teacher.

As well as the visual style there was the films’ disguised autobiography. John Baxter was the first to recognise that in many of the Dietrich films there is a character made up to look something like von Sternberg who is either rejected or demeaned: Adolphe Menjou in Morocco, Lionel Atwill in The Devil is a Woman; even William Powell’s Russian director in the pre-Dietrich The Last Command is close to a self-portrait, although the character is anything but humiliated. Reportedly while von Sternberg on the set dominated Dietrich, in their private life he was subservient. Certainly when directing he adopted all the trappings of the continental directors—riding boots, white gloves, sometimes a turban. Dietrich seems to have played this sexual game for all it was worth. In one interview at the time she murmured, “After I fainted from the heat and asked for a glass of water Joe still corrected my grammar.”

But what about the silents that meant so much to the director? For many years the main problem was seeing them at all. Some had been lost—The Case of Lena Smith, Woman of the Sea, The Dragnet. The others were available, if at all, in poor copies. Earlier this year the three silent films von Sternberg brought to Australia were released on DVD in a special edition by Criterion, an American company famous for the quality of its reproductions of classic films. Now they can be viewed in versions that are close to the quality of the prints shown in those legendary screenings in the 1960s. (According to the notes with the DVDs, Underworld was created from a fine-grain positive, The Last Command from a 35mm duplicate negative, and The Docks of New York from a 35mm fine-grain master positive.) 

These works are very different from the great romantic melodramas von Sternberg crafted for Dietrich with their rich ambiguity and ironic distance. Underworld (1927) is virtually the prototype of the American gangster film. It is based on a long short story by ex-Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht, who later won fame as the co-writer of The Front Page on which Howard Hawks’s classic comedy His Girl Friday was based. Hecht liked to use real-life events in his scripts. This time it was the escape of a notorious criminal just before he was to be hanged. The story Hecht sold to Paramount is a mosaic about the gangster, his friend “Weasel” and his girlfriend “Feathers” just after the escape. Von Sternberg, Charles Furthman, Robert N. Lee and an uncredited Howard Hawks used this material to create most of the plot devices that were to be worked and reworked in innumerable gangster movies for the next thirty years. But here it was all done with freshness and originality that was overwhelming to its original audiences—Underworld was the first film for which midnight sessions had to be scheduled during its New York run.

Von Sternberg and his collaborators developed the story of the friendship between “Bull” Weed, the flamboyant gangster, played extravagantly but with great effect by George Bancroft, “Weasel” (changed into “Rolls Royce” Wensel) played by Clive Brook, and “Feathers” (Evelyn Brent), giving their relationship much greater depth. In the film Bull transforms Rolls Royce from a “drunken bum” into his lawyer and adviser. In some superbly played scenes by Brook and Brent we see that when he and Feathers fall in love they can’t bring themselves to take it further because Bull is their best friend. It is all there in the mime before we even get to see the title.

Von Sternberg had a terrible reputation with actors. Clive Brook, one of the few stars who actually liked him, once stormed off the set in a fury. William Powell, reputedly the most co-operative of performers, had it written into his contract that he would never have to work with von Sternberg again. Evelyn Brent once threw a shoe at him. Nevertheless, particularly in the silents, there is some extraordinary acting. Clive Brook gave one of his most sensitive and expressive performances in Underworld. (He was nearly as good as the icily controlled British officer in von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express six years later.) Evelyn Brent admitted the director goaded her into some of the best work of her long career. George Bancroft never went on the record about the director to whom he owed so much, but clearly von Sternberg encouraged him to invest Bull with the warmth and vulnerability that help make the character a tragic hero.

In his later years von Sternberg affected to despise the plots of his films but here he more than equals the achievements of masters of narrative cinema such as Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh. Underworld has loads of fast-paced action, a shoot-out, not to mention a splendidly staged robbery that more or less opens the film. But above all it is the story of a friendship which, when you think about it, may have been the real reason for its success in 1927. 

The difficulty with the leading actress in Underworld was nothing to the problems von Sternberg had with the famous German star Emil Jannings, when he was making The Last Command a few months later. The booklet with the DVD set includes a very funny account excerpted from von Sternberg’s autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry of his experiences working with the German actor. According to the director, Jannings would demand von Sternberg’s undivided attention. “No one seemed to pay closer attention to his director.” But whenever von Sternberg’s attention was elsewhere he’d find that Jannings had been redirecting the other performers. The situation was made worse by the fact that The Last Command was essentially an Emil Jannings film built around the actor’s ability to portray scenes of degradation and humiliation. He had first appeared in this kind of role in F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh. In this story of a hotel commissionaire deprived of his uniform and demoted to lavatory attendant Jannings had scored one of his greatest successes. Undoubtedly this was in von Sternberg’s mind when he crafted his story of a former Tsarist general who works as a Hollywood extra for a Russian director who had been his enemy during the events leading to the revolution.

The story was not as far-fetched as it might seem. It was based on the experiences of General Lodijenski, a former Russian general who worked for a time as an extra in Hollywood. (The story had been mentioned to von Sternberg by Ernst Lubitsch.) Even the idea of a Russian director working in America was not implausible. Two years later S.M. Eisenstein visited Hollywood; and in the 1930s Richard Boleslawski, a Pole who had worked at the Moscow Arts Theatre, was directing at MGM. Among his most famous films was Rasputin and the Empress.

Although von Sternberg claimed to have imagined the exotic settings for his films and created them in the studio, his portrayal of the “cattle call” of extras and the hierarchies on the sets of the period is sharply realistic. The general’s photograph is recognised by a director; “Have him report tomorrow and put him in a general’s uniform,” the title reads. A frail old man is called to the phone in his rooming house. Next we see him swept into the studio in the crowd of extras at the studio gates and as he makes up there is a flashback to ten years earlier when the extra was Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, commander of the Russian armies and cousin to the Tsar. Although he is a responsible commander—he insists on inspecting the troops to see if there are any deficiencies—Grand Duke Sergius relishes the trappings of his authority, the cigarettes lit for him by his aide and above all his fur-collared greatcoat. Like the uniform in The Last Laugh it is the symbol of the character’s power. Two actors who have been entertaining the troops are brought before him—Andreyev (William Powell) already seen as the director in the opening sequence, and Natacha (Evelyn Brent). Goading Andreyev with an accusation of cowardice the general receives an even more scathing reply and slashes the actor across the face with his riding crop. Natacha is reserved for the Grand Duke’s personal attention. She intends to kill him. But then she sees him refuse to order a suicidal attack. After some brilliantly played sexual fencing—the byplay with cigarettes makes one wish it could be used now—she gets the chance to shoot him but cannot bring herself to fulfil her mission. “Why did you not shoot me?” he asks. “I could not kill anyone who loves Russia so much.” Natacha becomes Sergius’s “prisoner of love”.

Bolsheviks ambush the Duke’s train on its way to the front. Sergius Alexander tries to reason with them. “People of Russia, you are being led by traitors.” The Grand Duke’s valet strips the coat he had always coveted from the general’s shoulders and the mob tries to tear him to pieces. Natacha seems to join in. “Make him sweat as we have sweated. Make him stoke the train to Petrograd!” she yells. Later she makes her way to the locomotive. Stunned at her apparent betrayal, Sergius at first rejects her. “It was the only way I could save your life,” she says, giving him the pearls that were his first present to her to buy his way to safety. In an extraordinary sequence Natacha pretends to make love to one of the stokers so Sergius can kill the other. The visuals are broken by a title, “I love you, I love you”, ostensibly to the other stoker but really directed at Sergius. Such is the intensity of Jannings and Brent’s playing and von Sternberg’s mastery of his medium that audiences believe they can actually hear her words. Sergius drops from the locomotive only to see the train crash through a bridge and into an ice-packed river. The shock of losing the woman he loves and his country is too much and Sergius’s head begins to shake from side to side.

At the studio Andreyev first seems intent on getting his revenge on his old enemy. But when he gives him command of a troop of extras in a battle scene and one of the soldiers shouts, “What’s the difference who wins this war, you’ve given your last command,” Sergius sees only the mob at the railway station and delivers the speech he wanted to give then. At the end he collapses and Andreyev rushes to cradle his old enemy in his arms. “Have we won?” the old man asks. “Yes, Your Imperial Highness, you have won,” Andreyev replies, convinced by what he has seen of the general’s sincerity. The artifice of the film within the film has revealed the truth.

Seeing The Last Command again in something like its original form, it is easy to understand why many scholars believe the film is one of the greatest of the silents. Once again von Sternberg has created a strong narrative. But The Last Command is also a rich, multi-layered work about authority, patriotism, humiliation and artifice. After over eighty years the film remains profoundly moving. Jannings, who came from the theatre, could overact outrageously, as he did two years before when he played Mephistopheles in F.W. Murnau’s Faust. Von Sternberg somehow controlled the actor’s excesses so that big moments are always believable. In the process he made the Grand Duke one of American cinema’s great tragic heroes.

The film historian Kevin Brownlow believes The Docks of New York, the last film in the DVD set, is von Sternberg’s greatest film: “He achieves a feeling of warmth and humanity—he seems to care about his characters, instead as in some of his sound films using them to form patterns of light and shade.” I believe you can make the same observation about The Last Command, but The Docks of New York is undoubtedly one of the great silents. The plot is deceptively simple. During a night ashore, a tough stoker (Bancroft again) from the days, in the words of one of the titles, before oil-fired burners “made stoking a ladies’ job”, rescues a girl from drowning. The girl (a luminous Betty Compson) is bitter; she was trying to kill herself. The stoker offers to show her a good time. Later, half drunk after a night of carousing, he marries her. The girl tries to keep him but, he tells her, “No power on earth can keep me ashore.” The plot devices that cause him to change his mind are somewhat creaky but von Sternberg makes it all work.

Stories like this were quite familiar in the late silent period—Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, for example, were both fine works. But working with Jules Furthman (later to become one of his regular scriptwriters) von Sternberg treats this familiar subject matter with a psychological complexity and an unsentimental realism that transcend the rather obvious plotting. It is clear the girl is almost a prostitute and the stoker her only hope for any kind of life. Fogs and shadows surround them, not to mention one of the director’s famous fish nets.

In later life von Sternberg claimed the performances in his films were created by the lighting and montage, but in these early works he gives his performers the camera and evokes some wonderfully sensitive characterisations. Bancroft is much more controlled here than in Underworld, suggesting an integrity and sensitivity beneath the tough-guy exterior, while Betty Compson’s character may have given way to despair but she still has a strength that makes the final resolution far more believable than the sentimental “happy endings” of so many of the melodramas of the period. The Docks of New York and The Last Command are among the greatest achievements of the late silent era. We are fortunate that thanks to Criterion we are at last able to view these works as their creators intended.

Neil McDonald acknowledges the assistance of the Title Music Film Books Fashion shop of Crows Nest in obtaining his copy of the von Sternberg DVD set.The Kevin Brownlow quotations are from his classic history of silent pictures, The Parade’s Gone By.

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