Director: Josef von Sternberg
Writer: Josef von Sternberg
Stars: George K. Arthur, Georgia Hale and Bruce Guerin
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After precisely no notable new feature films in January 1925, February started off with one from a complete unknown of a director, Josef von Sternberg.
He was Austro-Hungarian, born in Vienna in 1894 and he would become a major filmmaker, often credited for inventing the gangster film, with 1927’s Underworld, and lauded for a string of important films starring Marlene Dietrich, not least The Blue Angel, Morocco and Shanghai Express, the latter two landing him Oscar nods. Talking of Oscar, he’d also direct Emil Jannings in what would become the very first Academy Award-winning performance for Best Actor, in 1928’s The Last Command.
Needless to say, this picture isn’t up to those standards, but it’s an interesting one, notably artistic and feeling much more European than American, though it was made in Hollywood.
It’s a depressing picture but it’s meant to be. The Great Depression didn’t happen until 1929 but times were tough in the twenties and this film makes them seem even tougher. Tellingly, everything is kept vague, none of the locations or characters given names, and stripping their identities helps us to realise not only that they could be anyone anywhere but also that they simply don’t matter to the world at large.
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So we meet The Boy, the Girl and the Child, who aren’t related but all came from the mud, in the grand metaphor of the movie. The Boy can’t find work. The Girl doesn’t even have an opportunity. The Child is an orphan. They’re all Children of the Mud, with little potential to ever escape to become Children of the Sun.
Wherever they are, it’s a harbour, in which nothing much happens except an omnipresent dredger grabbing mud to dump into a barge. It appears in almost every early scene, not as the focus but with its giant claw swinging through the background, reminding us that it’s always been the source of life here.
The Boy likes the Girl but she ignores him. When the Brute, a random dockworker, starts to manhandle the Child, neither of them like it but neither of them do anything about it until the Girl looks at the Boy, muttering “Coward!” That prompts him to action, he saves the Child and they all leave together for a better life in the City. “It must be different somewhere,” is the thought. And if you believe that the City is a happy ending for them, then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
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The film is dedicated to “the derelicts of the earth”; that’s what we saw in the Harbour and it’s what we see in the City, which is populated by paupers, beggars and homeless people. Our intrepid trio do catch a lucky break, some guy offering them a place to live entirely out of the kindness of his heart. “I’ll see that one of you gets a job soon,” he prophecies.
Of course, if you’re catching all the subtext, that means he’s a pimp and he’s intending her to join his stable, which seems to be made up of only one girl at present. She’s the Woman. He’s the Man. In a manner of speaking.
This isn’t much of a story, as it points out as it begins. “Our aim has been to photograph a thought,” it tells us, and so everything is loose throughout. The worst aspect for me was right at the beginning, because the intertitles keep interrupting the imagery, as if von Sternberg was writing a book rather than photographing a thought. The best aspect is that that does go away reasonably soon and we can focus on the imagery, which is worthy, if not always flash.
Early on, what struck me weren’t particular shots but the general mindset of the film, like that omnipresent dredge representing a cruel god, giving life but not life worth living.
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One exception was a scene with two men on a pier. Initially they just stand there, but then one throws a bottle into the water and off they go. What makes it special is that it was shot in silhouette, the camera pointed entirely at the water. We see their wavy silhouettes, only for them to be broken by the bottle, then coalesce and move apart. It’s a lovely scene.
There’s another that’s worth mentioning in the City. It frames the Man between the horns of a bull on the wall of what I presume is the room he lets the Woman use in return for her selling her body for his financial gain. It’s an impressive shot that makes him seem all the more demonic, but it returns too often for my tastes. Once was enough. We got the message.
A third arrives very late in the countryside, after a primitive fight sequence that serves as the Boy finding the Faith he needs to survive in this dystopian wasteland. Faith seems like a particularly odd word. Confidence feels like a more appropriate one, though it’s awkward to arise out of violence. Is von Sternberg telling us that violence solves everything and that, if he hadn’t run away from the Brute early in the picture and punched him out instead, then the three of them could have become Children of the Sun immediately? That’s all it took for the Boy to become a Man, however awkward that label seems in this context.
However we take that philosophically, the shot I’m calling out is of the Boy punching the Man into submission behind a real estate sign telegraphed for us already, that reads, rather ironically, “HERE. Your Dreams Come True.” A firm feeling of Faith in himself acquired, the Boy tosses the Man into his car and the three of them walk off into the sunset, now Children of the Sun without a care in the world.
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It’s an odd ending for me, given that they’re still without money or jobs and are now surely without anywhere to live. They literally have nothing but the shirts on their backs and that supposedly feels like a happy ending.
Even if I have a few pressing doubts about the film’s message, it did an impressive job of keeping my attention and my sympathy on a set of people who have no relationship except for a shared bond, no names and no histories, except that they all came from nothing. That they finally forge what appears to be a family is the happy ending for me, even if they have a daunting journey ahead of them that could be grounds for a sequel. Spoiler: it wasn’t.
That humanist mindset is what got the new director noticed, especially as the budget was insanely small, a mere $4,800, compared with the $20,000 United Artists paid to distribute it. Charlie Chaplin was a huge fan, as was Mary Pickford, who hired von Sternberg to direct her next picture, though she later cancelled it as much too experimental.
This is a capable and interesting film, but it serves in hindsight firmly as a beginning.
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