Product Description
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Vienna-born, New York–raised Josef von Sternberg (Shanghai
Express, Morocco) directed some of the most influential,
extraordinarily stylish dramas ever to come out of Hollywood.
Though best known for his star-making collaborations with Marlene
Dietrich, Sternberg began his movie career during the final years
of the silent era, dazzling audiences and critics with his films’
dark visions and innovative cinematography. The titles in this
collection, made on the cusp of the sound age, are three of
Sternberg’s greatest works, gritty evocations of gangster life
(Underworld), the Russian Revolution (The Last Command), and
working-class desperation (The Docks of New York) made into
shadowy movie spectacle. Criterion is proud to present these long
unavailable classics of American cinema, each with two musical
scores. UNDERWORLD Sternberg’s riveting breakthrough is widely
considered the film that launched the American gangster genre; it
earned legendary scribe Ben Hecht a best original story O the
first year the awards were given. 1927 • 81 minutes • Black &
White • Silent with stereo scores • 1.33:1 aspect ratio THE LAST
COMMAND Emil Jannings won the first best actor Academy Award for
his performance as an exiled Russian officer turned
Hollywood actor, whose latest part—a czarist general—brings about
his emotional downfall. 1928 • 88 minutes • Black & White •
Silent with stereo scores • 1.33:1 aspect ratio THE DOCKS OF NEW
YORK A roughneck stoker falls hard for a wise and weary dance
hall girl in this expressionistic portrait of lower-class
waterfront folk, one of the most exquisitely crafted films of its
era. 1928 • 75 minutes • Black & White • Silent with stereo
scores • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
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We toss the term great director around casually, but a handful
of people truly merit the title and Josef von Sternberg is among
them. His films are at once exotic, extravagant, and rigorously
controlled. Sternberg was the visual stylist supreme, his
compositions filled with such extraordinary texture and lighting
that space comes alive, takes on depth and electricity. And the
characters and performances that inhabit those spaces, the
emotional and ethical dramas they grapple with, are sometimes
shocking in their modernity even as they clearly come to us from
another era. Individually and as a collective body of work,
Sternberg's films are mesmerizing. Yet of our greatest directors,
he's the one whose work probably is least well known today, and
has been least well served on video and DVD. So all hail
Criterion for releasing three exemplary Sternberg pictures,
handsomely restored. The fact that they're silent productions
makes them all the rarer, with rtunities to see them in later
years mostly limited to festival and museum showings.
Underworld (1927), Sternberg's first great popular success, is
often credited with initiating the craze for gangster pictures.
There's some truth in that; the genre had been around for years,
but Underworld elevated it in class and laid crucial groundwork
for such early-talkie milestones as Little Caesar and, most
strikingly, face. Ex-Chicago crime reporter Ben Hecht, who
won the first Academy Award given for original story, chipped in
a lot of street-smart color but snickered at what Sternberg did
with it. That's understandable. Sternberg really isn't interested
in gangsters. He just appreciates the rtunity presented by a
gangland ball he can strew with grotesque revelers, and so choke
with streamers and confetti that crossing the room becomes a
slog. Or the dramatic and poetic possibilities of muting and
intensifying violence in the same stroke, by having a hoodlum
draw and then doubly conceal his revolver behind a cloud of
smoke and a kerchief. Or not showing a at all, but
having the force and smoke from its blast set a curtain to
flapping. But the most Sternbergian image in the film is the
moment a gangster's moll named Feathers appears at the top of the
stairs leading to a cellar saloon, and a single filament of her
signature costume drifts down through the air. This is observed
by a camera movement all its own, by two men who will become
rivals for Feathers's heart, by the crowd gathered in the saloon,
and by a movie audience awestruck at such visual audacity and
delicacy. The romantic triangle of Feathers (Evelyn Brent), her
mobster lover "Bull" Weed (George Bancroft), and "Rolls-Royce"
(Clive Brook), the lawyer-turned-drunken bum Bull sentimentally
rescues, is the real focus of the kind of action Sternberg cares
about. The evolution of their characters and their relationships
is conveyed with a subtlety light-years away from conventional
silent-movie acting. This film was such a hit that the New York
exhibitor went to a round-the-clock schedule to accommodate the
crowds, and its three leading players all became major stars.
Instead of an urban battleground for mobsters, The Last Command
(1928) takes place in two exotic realms: Russia on the brink of
the 1917 revolution and 1928 Hollywood. In the latter, a movie
director (William Powell) is preparing to shoot an epic set in
the former. Linking the two eras is a down-on-his-luck Hollywood
extra (Emil Jannings) assigned to play a Russian general--which,
unbeknownst to anyone else, he once was. After establishing this
framework the movie shifts into the Russian past, where the
general--who's also a grand duke--must interrupt his waging of an
increasingly pointless Great War to deal with a captured pair of
revolutionaries. One is an actress (Evelyn Brent), with whom the
general falls in love. The other is, hmmm, the man (William
Powell) who 11 years later will be that Hollywood director.
Sternberg s a fine frenzy in the pre-revolutionary Russian
scenes and sets up ironic contrasts between the film's two
worlds--say, a martial parade with the general at the height of
his power, visually echoed in the cattle-call procession of
Hollywood extras hoping for a day's work. Emil Jannings won the
first Academy Award for best actor, and he would top this work
the following year in Sternberg's German-made The Blue Angel; but
it's Powell and the wonderfully low-key performance of Brent that
signal where Sternberg's direction of actors was headed.
Sternberg's other 1928 film, The Docks of New York, stands with
Murnau's Sunrise and Borzage's Street Angel as the peak of visual
artistry and expressiveness in late-silent-era Hollywood. Story,
narrative, linear cause-and-effect logic is never a major factor
in Sternbergian filmmaking, and Docks affords the most
definitive, and triumphant, demonstration of this. It all
transpires in a day, most of which feels like night and in any
event is contained within a seedy waterfront bar. George Bancroft
(the mobster-hero of Underworld) plays a ship's stoker who,
during a rare release from the smoky underworld in which he works
and lives, becomes involved with two women--a would-be suicide
(Betty Compson) and a hardened B-girl (Olga Baclanova). The
abortive act of suicide is visually portrayed in shimmering
reflection on the harbor's surface, and a later act of murder
will involve an uncanny, nearly vertical in which the earth
under people's feet seems to be water. This is a film you don't
remember so much as find yourself haunted by.
DVD extras add useful historical and interpretive context for
appreciating the three movies. UCLA film professor Janet
Bergstrom and indeigable connoisseur of directorial artistry
Tag Gallagher supply pointed visual essays--Bergstrom being
especially good on tracing Sternberg's origins, Gallagher zeroing
in on Sternberg's stylistic selections and his "transformative
direction of Evelyn Brent" just a year or so before his epic
seven-film collaboration with Marlene Dietrich set in. Sternberg
himself is heard from in a 40-minute documentary-interview done
for Swedish television in 1968, a year before the director died;
his voice and delivery are most distinctive. Somewhere in the
course of these extras a Sternberg credo is quoted: "Art is the
compression of infinite spiritual power into a confined space."
Yes, that says it. And he did it. --Richard T. Jameson