The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (431 page)

Von Sternberg made it easy for us to dislike him; his favored tone was one of disdain. He courted enemies just as he went out of his way to make himself unemployable with a serene arrogance. In
The Scarlet Empress
, the John Lodge character, in love with Dietrich but knowing she will humiliate him, is asked to admit a junior officer to the Empress’s bedchamber. As he does so, he smiles sardonically, asks the officer to give Dietrich a message, and then says, no matter, she will understand. So it is that von Sternberg leaves us either to understand or to expose our stupidity. Complicity breathes out of his films, not just in the fatalistic adoration that the camera offers Dietrich and that she answers enigmatically, but in the admission, “Of course, this is a farrago. Utter nonsense. Only the most enlightened can see the beauty within it.” Sternberg cultivated his own elitism, astonishingly survived with it at Paramount for thirteen films, and then tolerated an increasingly bizarre exile.

His youth was divided between Vienna and New York, and in his work he balanced a sense of the Continental femme fatale and the laconic American hero more completely than anyone else: in
The Blue Angel
and
Morocco
, for instance, he bridged the worlds of German humiliation and Hawksian pride. By turns, he worked for the World Film Corporation and served in the American army. After the war, he made his debut as assistant director on
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
(19, Emile Chautard). He worked on
The Highest Bidder
(21, Wallace Worsley) and
By Divine Right
(24, Roy William Neill) on which a “von” was added to his name “without my knowledge.”

The Salvation Hunters
, made very cheaply and in novel locations, was seen as refreshing realism. But Sternberg quickly settled for a private world of light and shade, romance and violence, strong men and mysterious women.
Underworld
and
The Docks of New York
show his erotic imagery coming into being, and
The Last Command
is a rehearsal for the undermining of the inflated, self-pitying Emil Jannings achieved in
The Blue Angel
.

Although he was sparing with dialogue, sound was essential to Sternberg because of his taste for very intimate behavioral realism within a surrealist artifice of plot and setting. No less essential was Dietrich. With the best will in the world, his films without her lack that marvelous, scathing languor. He was not an easy man to be directed by. Many actors—notably Jannings and William Powell—reacted violently to him. Dietrich adored him, and trusted him. That is why their films together have an amazing privacy against which the sensible concerns of Paramount look irrelevant.

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that Lubitsch should have been treasured at Paramount for sophistication, and Sternberg thought of as an unmanageable fantasist. He asserted on celluloid that many images of Dietrich’s face, moving in and out of light and shade, were a better subject for film than any of Lubitsch’s theatrical ploys. He invented art-direction countries for her—North Africa, China, Spain, and Russia—that were authentic only in emotional terms. He made woman the sexual arbiter, the serene observer of an absurd life that offered no other solace than the taking of pleasure. Thus
The Scarlet Empress
is the proof that the sexual image is more lasting and more serious than love, politics, and history. In its final, delirious vindication of Dietrich’s open-mouthed depravity it is American cinema’s triumph of
l’amour fou
and a surrealist masterpiece. Beside it,
Morocco
and
Shanghai Express
are only beautiful celebrations of romance, the insistence on sentimental attachment conquering reason.
Scarlet Empress
has that spirit made splendidly aggressive with Sternberg’s own pessimistic wit. It seems so startling that no one today would dare to make it.

After Dietrich, Sternberg took assignments.
Claudius
broke down because of Merle Oberon’s accident and Laughton’s intransigence, but it is most characteristic of Sternberg as a blighted project. His later work is virtually defined by the obstacles and impediments he created for himself. Thus he had left Paramount under a cloud, fired by Lubitsch, apparently too proud to admit that the “extravagant” crowd scenes in
Scarlet Empress
came from a Lubitsch silent picture,
The Patriot. Shanghai Gesture, Jet Pilot
, and
Macao
are fragmentary films, clearly manhandled by their own production companies, but still offering glimpses of the play of light on a female smile that Sternberg had identified as fundamental cinema.
Macao
, especially, has glorious, hallucinatory images of the lattice of fake moonlight swimming over cardboard sets.

It needed the ridiculous impossibility of
Anatahan
to end his filmmaking career. A wild plot—about Japanese sailors and one woman marooned on an island not knowing the war is over—shot under the simplest conditions. The island was made out of paper, cellophane, and light. Sternberg himself photographed the film, reveling in such pure artificiality, regretting only that he had to use real water. Very rarely seen,
Anatahan
is a masterpiece, to rank with the Dietrich films. For total absorption in style, remorseless interest in sexual existence, subtle conviction of hopelessness and amorality, Sternberg now stands clear as one of the greatest directors and the first poet of underground cinema.

After
Anatahan
, he lectured on cinema and wrote his outrageous compendium of bitter joy and concealed confessions,
Fun in a Chinese Laundry
. The chapter there on Dietrich is a major contribution to film literature, and a great, mordant love story.

Erich von Stroheim
(Erich Oswald Stroheim) (1885–1957), b. Vienna
1918:
Blind Husbands
. 1919:
The Devil’s Passkey
. 1921:
Foolish Wives
. 1922:
Merry-Go-Round
(begun by Stroheim; he was replaced by Rupert Julian). 1925:
Greed; The Merry Widow
. 1928:
The Wedding March; Queen Kelly
. 1933:
Walking Down Broadway
(never released; reworked and released as
Hello Sister
).

Stroheim’s is generally known as the most blighted of cinema careers, and yet it is hardly sensible to think of him as a victim. Much easier to see “the Von,” the director of
Greed
, the greatest of all “lost” films, and “the man you love to hate,” as the most fulfilling invention of Erich Oswald, the Viennese son of a German Jewish merchant and a mother who came from Prague.

In later years, it suited Stroheim to claim aristocratic origins and a notable military career. But his undoubted style and persuasiveness were more the product of artistic aspiration than of any great familiarity with Austro-Hungarian high life. After brief military service, he emigrated to the United States in 1906 and went through the dark years of obscurity before reappearing in 1914 as a Hollywood hustler. For the next few years, he strove to be indispensable in the Griffith—John Emerson empire, playing bit parts in
Birth of a Nation, Intolerance
, and
Hearts of the World;
assisting Griffith whenever he could; acting as military advisor on Emerson’s
Old Heidelberg
(15); and getting his first credits as an art director. In 1917, in Wesley Ruggles’s
Old France
, he established the role of the Prussian officer so central to his image.

Stroheim’s ambition was to direct, and in 1918 he persuaded Carl Laemmle at Universal to let him make his own original screenplay, “The Pinnacle”: the result was
Blind Husbands
, in which Stroheim himself played Lt. Erich von Steuben, the fastidious, ironic, and heartless military superman. This was followed by
The Devil’s Passkey
(19) and
Foolish Wives
(21), both for Universal. The latter again starred Stroheim as an officer cad and swindler at large in a Continental playground. A prestigious success, it was a financial failure despite or because of Universal’s insistence that it should be substantially cut. He was taken off his next film,
Merry-Go-Round
(22), largely because of the intervention of Irving Thalberg, then Laemmle’s caretaker at Universal.

Stroheim moved to the Goldwyn Company and in 1923 shot
Greed
from Frank Norris’s novel,
McTeague
. It was perhaps the most injudiciously ambitious film ever made: did Stroheim dream that his ten-hour version would be released? Or did he draw trouble upon himself? He could not have invented a more bitter stroke of fate than the way that, as he worked on
Greed
, the Goldwyn Company became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Thalberg as one of its heads. Successive cuts reduced
Greed
until a final release version, in 1925, of ten reels—perhaps a quarter of the original conception.

Stroheim retaliated with a great commercial success for MGM,
The Merry Widow
, starring John Gilbert and Mae Murray. But in 1926–28, he was in trouble again with Paramount over
The Wedding March
, a two-part project in which he also acted—as Prince Nicki von Wildliebe-Rauffenberg. Part One, “The Wedding March,” was released much as intended. But Part Two, “The Honeymoon,” was taken out of Stroheim’s hands and given to several others, including von Sternberg, to edit down. It appeared only briefly in Europe as
Mariage de Prince
. In 1928, Stroheim joined in unlikely partnership with Gloria Swanson and Joseph Kennedy to make
Queen Kelly
. His partners’ unhappiness with Stroheim’s arrogance and extravagance took effect when sound interrupted the shooting. Yet again, the release version was a shrunken image of its director’s plans.

Stroheim directed only once again:
Walking Down Broadway
. But producer Sol Wurtzel quarreled with executive Winfield Sheehan and eventually a reshot version appeared:
Hello Sister
.

The rest of Stroheim’s career is as a traveling writer and actor. In America, he appeared in, among others, James Cruze’s
The Great Gabbo
(29); with Garbo in
As You Desire Me
(32, George Fitzmaurice), and in
The Crime of Dr. Crespi
(35, John Auer). He also worked as military advisor or dialogue writer on Garbo’s
Anna Karenina
(35, Clarence Brown),
San Francisco
(36, W. S. Van Dyke), and Tod Browning’s
The Devil Doll
(36).

In 1936, he went to France and played Von Rauffenstein, the crippled airman, in Renoir’s
La Grande Illusion
(37), as well as in
Marthe Richard
(37, Raymond Bernard) and two Christian-Jaque movies:
Les Pirates du Rail
(38) and
Les Disparus de Saint-Agil
(38). He had hoped to direct again,
La Dame Blanche
, with Renoir’s collaboration, but war canceled the film and Stroheim returned to America.

He appeared on Broadway in 1941–43 in
Arsenic and Old Lace
and had several exotic film parts to catch the war spirit:
I Was an Adventuress
(40, Gregory Ratoff); in
So Ends Our Night
(41, John Cromwell); as Rommel in Billy Wilder’s
Five Graves to Cairo
(43); in Milestone’s
The North Star
(43); as
The Great Flamarion
(45, Anthony Mann); and in
The Mask of Dijon
(46, Lew Landers) opposite Denise Vernac, his future wife.

In 1946, he went back to France but made only one film,
La Danse de Mort
(47, Marcel Cravenne), based on the Strindberg play, of any interest. In 1950 he returned to Hollywood to play Max von Mayerling, the butler, ex-director, and ex-husband in Billy Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevard
. That film is by turns a deliberate humiliation of Stroheim and one of Hollywood’s most confused pieces of self-adulation. Complete with a clip from
Queen Kelly
and a care for sets atypical of Wilder,
Sunset Boulevard
is the acid ending to a cynic’s vision as Stroheim directs the crazy Norma Desmond—Gloria Swanson for the press photographers. (But what an influence Stroheim had on Wilder as a warning against refusal to compromise.) After that, Stroheim appeared in his only German film,
Alraune
(52, Arthur Maria Rabenalt) and a few more French pictures before his death.

It is hard now to see even what the studios chose to make available of Stroheim’s work. But once seen,
Greed, The Wedding March
, and
Queen Kelly
—no matter how palely they reflect originals—are never forgotten. They contain the essential contradictions in Stroheim’s work: between melodrama and naturalism; romanticism and cynicism; psychological detail and epic perspectives. Like all the great silent directors he knew how necessary it was to abandon taste for obsession. His reckless enlargement of situations was a form of improvisation, even if it entailed crazy expense and delay. Left to himself, Stroheim might never have finished a film, so chronic was the fever for detail. For all that he explored realism of character and delighted in location work, nonetheless he was capable of sudden, exquisite insights—usually into perversion, lust, malice, or pride. His films amassed detail relentlessly, but never lost sight of character or structure. Thalberg’s famous verdict—that Stroheim was a footage fetishist—was truer than the producer knew, for Stroheim was as precise as he was expansive. Despite all the hindrance, Stroheim made utterly personal films, apparently enduring insult, disappointment, and reverse with a stoicism that recognized how every betrayal enhanced the identity and reputation of the Von. The sad nobility that gazes out of
La Grande Illusion
and
Sunset Boulevard
was as much a part of his oeuvre as the Death Valley end game of
Greed
.