Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,830

This is the grave of Josef von Sternberg.

Born in Vienna in 1894, Jonas Sternberg grew up in a very poor Orthodox Jewish family. In 1897, his father followed many Jews out of Europe to the United States, in his case more for economic reasons than to escape anti-Semitism, which often drove Jews out of Russia but was less of a concern at that time in German speaking lands. In 1901, the family joined him in New York. The father was awful, a total tyrant and probably abusive toward his wife, he was also very hard on the kids and forced them to undergo intense religious education at the expense of just about everything else. At one point, he went with his mother back to Europe, things were so bad.

Sternberg and his mother returned to the United States in 1908. He briefly went to high school, but dropped out to work. Now going by Josef, he got a job in 1911 at the World Film Company in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He stayed there and rose through the company ranks. By 1917, he was the cinematographer for World War I Army training films. After the war, he left the company and traveled around both the U.S. and Europe, getting jobs at various film companies, learning the art, and seeing the world. He got his first major credit, as assistant director, on Emile Chautard’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, in 1919.

Sternberg got to Hollywood in 1924 and quickly made a little cheapie called The Salvation Hunters, a realist film influenced heavily by Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, which impressed the studio heads and led Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to distribute the film at United Artists. UA gave him a contract, but it didn’t really go anywhere. An early attempt to direct Mary Pickford led to mutual dissatisfaction. He was released from the contract but immediately signed at MGM. But that didn’t go well either. Sternberg thought of himself as an artist, MGM execs thought of film as nothing but product. He was released from his contract quickly. Then Chaplin hired him to make a vehicle for Edna Purviance, but they also broke over the film. At some point around here too, he started using “von” in front of his name, presumably to make him seem more aristocratic German and perhaps less Jewish.

Things weren’t looking great for Sternberg, as he had burned several bridges in Hollywood. He went back to Europe for awhile. Finally, Paramount made him an offer, but not as a director. He was hired as technical advisor for lighting and photography. But what the job really entailed was trying to salvage a terrible movie where they had fired the director. This was Children of Divorce, with Clara Bow, and he did fix it up enough that it was a box office success. So Paramount had him direct an adaptation of Ben Hecht’s story about Chicago gangsters. This became Underworld. In this, Sternberg basically invented the gangster film. There are earlier examples of gangsters in films (see The Black Hand, from 1906). But functionally, Sternberg deserves credit for the concept as it developed into its first peak era. It was a combination of hard nosed street scenes and complete fantasy that was so close to surrealism that this became Luis Buñuel’s favorite movie, which says a hell of a lot. It was high art–and it was a huge blockbuster hit.

The next several years saw Sternberg at the peak of his powers. This was the very end of the silent era and the ability of first-rate directors to tell great stories through this media had advanced in astounding ways over the years. My favorite of the films he did in these years in 1928’s The Docks of New York, starring George Bancroft and Betty Compson. It follows a coal stoker who rescues a drowning prostitute while his ship is docked over in New York and the various contretemps that follow over a rough evening. It’s a fine example of working class melodrama from the time and it a very mature silent film.

Among Sternberg’s other good to excellent films from this era include The Last Command, from 1928, The Drag Net, also from 1928 and which is lost, and The Case of Lena Smith, from 1929 and of which only four minutes exist today. None of these films were big blockbusters, but they were generally so well made that Sternberg became a top director for Paramount. The question soon became whether he could transfer his talents to talkies. By the way, it was nice of the studios to destroy these films for tax purposes after World War II. Good call all around. The only reason the 4 minutes of Lena Smith exists is that someone found a fragment in Manchuria in the early 2000s.

In any case, I’d say Sternberg did just fine in transferring his ideas to sound. His first feature, Thunderbolt, got George Bancroft a Best Actor nomination at the Academy Awards, though it also didn’t do that well commercially. But then Sternberg went back to Europe to work for Paramount’s company over there and the film he made was The Blue Angel, with Marlene Dietrich and which is one of the all-time classics. The problem on the film was that Sternberg could not stop hitting on Dietrich and he was gross about it but the film is great anyway. Eventually, they did start having an affair. Dietrich then went back to Hollywood with Sternberg and they worked together for several years, including 1932’s Shanghai Express, 1934’s Scarlet Empress, and 1935’s The Devil is a Woman. The affair between he and Dietrich did not end when they returned to Hollywood and it led to his wife leaving him and a high-profile divorce case.

Paramount went bankrupt in 1934 and Sternberg went to Columbia for a disastrous version of Crime and Punishment. A very wealthy Sternberg decided to travel in southeast Asia to scout locations rather than make more bad movies, but he nearly died and ended up in a long convalescence in London. He made I, Claudius while there, but the production was a legendary disaster and it was never released. And really, Sternberg never recovered. He did a bunch of hacky 40s crime pictures, a World War II documentary for the Office of War Information called The Town, and ended up at RKO in the 50s making what he could under a lot more restrictions than he was used to. Later, he taught at UCLA and more or less retired from filmmaking. He wrote a memoir titled Fun in a Chinese Laundry in 1965 that evidently is pretty bitter about how he was forgotten.

Sternberg died in 1969. He was 75 years old.

Josef von Sternberg is buried in Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit other silent film directors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Buster Keaton is in Hollywood and D.W. Griffith is in Crestwood, Kentucky. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.