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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 opportunities 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, Scarface. 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 opportunity 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 cigarette smoke and a kerchief. Or not showing a gun 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
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