Criterion makes the case for Von Sternberg
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2010 7:17 am
3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg: Review
I don’t think there’s any major filmmaker I’ve had more trouble with than von Sternberg. And he’s certainly a major filmmaker, with a distinct style of which he was the undeniable master at a very early point (arguably in his debut, the mostly terrible but unquestionably in command of its own terribleness The Salvation Hunters).
The problem is that I really don’t care for his two main preoccupations. One is the desirability, to the point of madness and self-destruction, of Marlene Dietrich. I probably saw The Blue Angel three or four times and dutifully accepted its masterpiece status before I finally thought, phooey, no respected professor would crack up like that over a nightclub floozy. At least, not that way, it’s just too too. And the American sound films with Dietrich that follow I have mostly found overheated and boring— well, except for the last two. The Scarlet Empress is an hilarious example of a genre it largely has to itself— Screwball Gothic— and The Devil is a Woman is, to my mind, one of the unsung films of the 1930s, a sardonic sendup of The Blue Angel with a surprisingly modern take on the mindset of the powerful man who has, ultimately, no more idea than a horny teenager what makes woman tick.
The other problem is a devotion to 19th century propriety and class structure that just offends my Warner Brothers-bred egalitarian instincts. Von Sternberg may send up class and the notion of moral disgrace, he may exploit the latter salaciously, but he also seems to accept implicitly the right of fusty notions of propriety to have determinative power over us— as in The Last Command, in which (mild spoiler ahoy) William Powell, who’s been at the end of Emil Jannings’ whip in the old country, nonetheless grants him in America all the nobility his long-lost title demands.
Kevin Brownlow had trouble with the fact that Powell hadn’t actually had a chance to observe Jannings’ nobility in the film, but my problem is that we the audience haven’t really either, unless you believe that love of Mother Russia trumps all. In a real sense, von Sternberg’s class determinativeness is un-American, especially in Hollywood, where reinvention is the core principle of life. (As it was, for instance, for a Jewish son of a lacemaker named Jonas Sternberg who took the “von” his people were denied in Europe, and played the part of an aristocratic martinet ever after.)
Criterion’s release of von Sternberg’s three surviving studio silents gives him the best chance at winning converts out of skeptics like me that he’s likely to have. All three are late silents with the surehanded command of the medium of the very best films of 1927-8; the copies that survive range from very good to stunning, and the films present a variety of dramatic situations, none of which involve somebody mooning over Marlene Dietrich while she poses for light to hit her cheekbones.
I assume Ben Hecht had no way of knowing his story for Underworld would wind up in the hands of the director of The Salvation Hunters, and he reportedly hated the romanticized result; but whatever Paramount executive connected the two deserved every penny of his salary for the insight. Like The Salvation Hunters, Underworld’s characters are few and iconic in their natures and relationships; but instead of moping around contemplating life’s hopelessness, they crackle with the erotic energy of a gangster love triangle, and that makes all the difference in the world. Visually clean, sharply observed in a sardonically adult way (note the cigarette held by a woman flitting around Fred Kohler’s face in his first closeup, which says all you need to know about who he is), as tightly controlled as a game of chess, this is one of Hollywood’s great genre entertainments, as accomplished as Rear Window or The Godfather.
The print material on Underworld looks a little grainier than my last memory of a theatrical showing, and is soft at times (of course, some of that is intentional), but contrast is generally very good; the full romanticism of the cinematography comes through. There are two scores, by The Alloy Orchestra and by Robert Israel; the design of the menus meant that when I tried to select Alloy, I wound up with Israel instead thinking it was Alloy, but decided about ten minutes in that it had to be Israel because of its resemblance to his Keaton scores. (Darkening a choice means you’ve selected it, though it looks more like “off” than “on.”)
I started over with the Alloy score— and it transformed the film. I know Alloy is a love-to-hate group for many silent fans, but everybody must have something that’s the right film for them, and where Israel’s peppy roaring 20s sound turned Underworld into Chicago, Alloy’s sinister, sinuous Weill-influenced score brought out the starkness of von Sternberg’s modernist visuals and underlined certain meaningful shots that had just gone by unnoticed before with Israel’s jaunty jazz. There’s no question in my mind that this is the right score, maybe even the definitive score, for this particular film.
Not counting things he worked on but didn’t get credit for (It, Duel in the Sun), The Last Command is about the most conventional drama he worked on, and bringing this story to a fine Paramount gloss makes you wish he could have fit a little better into the studio system, doing the usual game of “one for them and one for me,” where the one for them often winds up wearing better 70 years later than the personal projects.
The Last Command isn’t really all that unusual as a drama of overheated Russian revolutionary intrigue, but it could hardly be a better made one, intense and lightning-paced. It has several dynamic setpieces which would make a lesser movie (the long-take vision of Hell as a studio costume department, the capture of Jannings by the revolutionaries, surely the movies’ best portrayal of how a mob finds its power), and it’s full of sardonically smart bits of observation of the sort that would become rarer in his films as they became all about Marlene. Most of all it has that fine Bavarian ham Emil Jannings, whose command of the screen convinces you utterly of his character’s command of an army by sheer force of will. Everything he does is too much, and yet just right, thrilling even.
Print quality is softer than the other two, but contrast is good, and it gives a good representation of this lavish-looking, handsomely art-directed production. The choice of scores is again between Alloy and Robert Israel; after Underworld I feel that Alloy’s slinky, slightly dirty jazz sound is pretty much the exact musical representation of von Sternberg’s sardonic tone, but I found the Philip Glass-plays-jazz score itself repetitive (it would be a dull listen on its own) and only moderately well attuned to what’s on screen. Israel’s score is much more of a period one, but its combination of melodramatic bombast and mock-Russian artifice is a perfect match for von Sternberg’s backlot Russia and reduction of the Russian Revolution to romance, and in this case, I think Israel wins.
The Docks of New York seems to occupy the exact artistic midpoint of von Sternberg’s oeuvre. It’s the closest to a remake of The Salvation Hunters, with its waterfront setting and obvious cinematographic love for cracked plaster and grimy muscles; blonde Betty Compson is the obvious visual archetype for the seven Dietrich vehicles about to follow; and as a languorous depiction of dead-end characters in what is said to be about as low a place as you can be, it looks forward to von Sternberg’s most self-parodically pointless film, The Shanghai Gesture.
The difference is that we care about the characters; the Salvation Hunters were mopey kids who just needed to pull their socks up, the gargoyles of Shanghai Gesture are from another planet entirely, but the leads of The Docks of New York are the kind of hardbitten, scuffed up by life but resilient types we might meet, and love, in a Warner Brothers pre-Code. And so even when the film loses some narrative steam in the middle— as in Shanghai Gesture, there’s no dramatic moment that von Sternberg won’t put on hold to allow a loving tracking shot through his finely-detailed set— we’re wrapped up in the tender yet frankly carnal progress of stoker and big lug George Bancroft and unspecifically soiled good time gal (“I’ve had enough good times”) Betty Compson toward actual love and devotion to one another. (For much of this, one should surely thank screenwriter Jules Furthman, though Compson’s un-Dietrich-like sensitivity and tenderness underneath a tough exterior are also key assets.)
Compson and Bancroft’s romance is tentative, but the film has another that is full-blown: the great love affair between von Sternberg and his visuals. This is undoubtedly his visual masterpiece— only the more outré Scarlet Empress rivals it— and the waterfront sets as designed by Hans Dreier and lovingly photographed in smoke and silhouette by Harold Rosson (The Asphalt Jungle) are one of those gloriously romantic movie-fake environments like the jungle on Skull Island, the airport in Only Angels Have Wings, Paris in The Girl on the Bridge.
The print is beautiful, marred only by some wear toward the end of a few reels and by a running scratch in one scene which I’m surprised Criterion didn’t remove digitally. It’s easily one of the premiere showpiece DVDs for the visual qualities of silent film.
There are two scores, an orchestral one by Robert Israel and a piano one by Donald Sosin. Both were, to my taste, a little too heavy on Gay Nineties tinkly pianos (the film is actually a period piece, though it’s easy to forget that as you watch it). Israel’s score is well done, if a bit upbeat and chipper for a film which was meant to be about the dregs of humanity, after all. After watching it with Israel’s score, I spot-checked Sosin’s— startled to discover that it opens with a singer belting out a pastiche of the kind of goonily cheerful title song that was often written for films back then— but overall, I suspect that his more melancholy Gershwin-slash-cocktail-lounge-at-3-am feel better suits this film about two lonely people. Next time, I will try it with his score.
* * *
This is an exemplary set, a major slice of film history and a problematic director at his very peak of skill and observation before his work turned decadent and self-parodic, presented in the best possible fashion with beautiful print material, an intelligent variety of scores, and some interesting-looking supplementary material ranging from a visual essay by Tag Gallagher to the text of Hecht’s original treatment for Underworld. It is hard to imagine that there is anyone who will actually read this who would not find it worth every penny.
