The Devil Is in the Details

It goes without saying that he couldn’t exist today, when directors depend on actors to create characters, and when actors routinely boast of resenting and refusing direction. For that matter, he should not have existed in the studio era either. And yet he did. The miracle of Josef von Sternberg is that for eight years, from 1927 to 1935, from the climax of the silent era through the evolution of sound, he had carte blanche (despite the restrictions of censorship and budget) to make pictures so demonstrably the work of a visionary artist that the most frequent objections focus on his aestheticism. He made movies as though they were a fine art, and they made lots of money. Until they didn’t, at which point his studio, Paramount, hustled him out the door. Even visionaries must be team players, and von Sternberg was a team of one. Still, however much we bristle at his arrogance, his films justify the worst of it, because there is nothing else like them in all of cinema—particularly the six pictures he made with Dietrich on Hollywood soundstages: erotic fairy tales where sex and love square off against infidelity and suspicion, and prostitution of one kind or another is pervasive (as who would know better than a film director). These films assault the senses and tease the brain. They are ageless works of art improbably produced during the Depression. Each generation discovers them anew because they continue to startle; they are tenaciously modern.  

Which is not to say that they thrive on consensus. Consider comments from two books that coincidentally made their American paperback debuts in the same year, 1983. In Cinema, the Magic Vehicle, Adam Garbicz and Jacek Klinowski declare The Blue Angel, von Sternberg’s first film with Dietrich, made in Germany, “the highest peak of his creative career, without a doubt,” and dismiss their Hollywood work as “run-of-the-mill spy films,” in which von Sternberg “frittered his talent away.” In American Directors, Jean-Pierre Coursodon assesses The Blue Angel as the “most marginal of Sternberg’s major films,” plodding and ponderous and a regression from “everything the director had done before or would do later.” Coursodon champions Morocco (the contrast is “complete”) for discarding the Ufa film’s “heavy-breathing symbolism” and “superficial naturalism.” In 1983, both views seemed to me overbaked; in some respects, they still do. The Blue Angel’s hot breath is superbly leavened with wit, ruffled underpants, sublime Weimar melodies, ingenious staging, and a subversive warning about repression. It is a classic of its kind. Morocco, however, and the five pictures that followed—Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil Is a Woman—were not classics of any known kind. They reinvent cinema as they reinvent place and time. Von Sternberg’s Germany was a real country; his Morocco, Vienna, Shanghai, New Orleans, Saint Petersburg, and Spain are dreamscapes made with crepe and spit, conjured from flimsy stereotypes filtered through poetic license. For me, they get better as von Sternberg grows bolder and shrugs off every kind of orthodoxy, rejecting narrative coherence in favor of emotional truths.

Jonas Sternberg was born in Vienna in 1894, to a punitively strict Orthodox Jewish family, whose patriarch left for America when Jo was two, bringing the family over five years later. They returned to Vienna for a few years but settled for good in the United States (Queens, New York) in 1908, by which time Jo was a confirmed autodidact, teaching himself the nuances of English and pursuing the arts; he prided himself on a certain erudition regarding painting, music, and literature. At seventeen, he left home, changed his name to Josef (defying anglicization and taking the first step toward a European persona), and found a job repairing film stock, which led to editing, projecting, and assistant directing, mostly with a company in New Jersey. During the war, he joined the Signal Corps and made training films; after the war, he apprenticed with the director Emile Chautard, who would later appear in small roles in his films. Following brief sojourns in Vienna and London, he landed in Hollywood in 1923. The Salvation Hunters (1925) proved his resourcefulness and pomposity (“Our aim has been to photograph a Thought”), but in the next three years he created three glorious triumphs of the vanishing silent era, Underworld, The Last Command, and The Docks of New York, the second starring Germany’s celebrated Emil Jannings, with whom he quarreled. Nevertheless, Jannings insisted that only von Sternberg could direct his first talking film, and so the director crossed the Atlantic with the understanding that he would choose the material and cast and brook no interference. His first and most consequential task was to find an actress who could stand up to the imposing Jannings.

The tale of how the cultured Jewish Pygmalion discovered his flighty Galatea is often told but never the same way twice. In later years, Dietrich, who was twenty-seven at the time, described herself as a mere schoolgirl corralled by von Sternberg after he ran out of professional candidates to play The Blue Angel’s Lola Lola, the chanteuse/whore who reduces Jannings’s schoolmaster to a cackling rooster. In fact, she had appeared in several silent films and was appearing nightly in the popular revue Zwei Krawatten (Two Neckties), where von Sternberg saw her and summoned her for an audition; according to her daughter and biographer, Maria Riva, she had the part as soon as he laid eyes on her. Before The Blue Angel premiered, he and his “discovery” were bound for America and Paramount Pictures. 

Von Sternberg favors and carefully prepares long takes, which are broken up by three kinds of movement: long lateral shots from side to side; omniscient shots as the camera floats on a boom; and shots where movement is directed toward or away from the static camera, used often in Morocco and The Scarlet Empress. One of von Sternberg’s favorite verbs in explaining his method was emotionalize. His celebrated technique for achieving emotionalization was a combination of fastidious lighting, which emphasizes shadows, and a background inextricable from the foreground, surrounding the action in bric-a-brac, veils, masks, statues, streamers, confetti, animals, crowds. He frames his shots and edits them to indicate the illusion of life beyond the frame. 

In all the von Sternberg–Dietrich Hollywood films, she manipulates men and ultimately does something you don’t expect. Why fling herself into the desert; or give up her life in Dishonored; or sacrifice herself to a rapist in Shanghai Express; or do most of the things she does in Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil Is a Woman? The answers are the films themselves, and how we experience them, but they are complicated, after the first, by von Sternberg’s decision never again to challenge her with a major Hollywood male star like Gary Cooper.

Blonde Venus and The Scarlet Empress are the entries that most frequently drop jaws. In the former, Dietrich’s Helen enters the frame as a naked Lorelei disporting in a lake, voyeuristically pursued by Ned (Herbert Marshall). He’s the good guy—or at least the object of sympathy when, having become his New York hausfrau and the mother of their son, she leases herself out to show business (always a sexually mercantile industry in von Sternberg’s cosmos) and particularly to Nick (a tough-guy Cary Grant, long before he became “Cary Grant”) to pay for her now gravely ill husband’s treatment, for which he must go to Europe. That’s for starters, and you can predict how it will end, even as she declares her love for Nick before returning to the hearth. (Note that in her first departure from family, she kisses her husband on the cheek and her son on the lips.) What you cannot anticipate is her utter degeneration in southern flop joints, more feverish than anything in Tennessee Williams. Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes (in Crime and Punishment), “In poverty you can still preserve the nobility of your innate feelings, while in destitution you never do and no one does.” Von Sternberg goes the distance in defining that distinction, and only pretends to cheat in the denouement, a happy ending that makes no one happy, especially not audiences. Blonde Venus was a fantasy too far; its failure marked the beginning of the end for von Sternberg–Dietrich. 

The Scarlet Empress, a box-office disaster loosely and irreverently based on the life of Catherine the Great, is a film conceived in hysteria, basted in humiliation, fraught with sexual horror, and unfolded in narrative rebellion. Not since the silent era had an epic relied on so many title cards; remarkably, most of the action that would animate a conventional history film is relegated to those cards, while the movie action is taken up with discrete anecdotes that are relatively petty, private, terrifying, and populated by more gargoyles (small ones clutching candles, large ones clutching their heads) than the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Even the marriage ceremony is treated not as a royal wedding but as a chamber piece, composed of isolated faces rapt with anticipation. And even when the mood suggests comedy, laughs are strangled in their crib; try to laugh when your jaw drops—as, for example, when young Princess Sophia (Maria Riva) imagines a montage of torture the likes of which would not be seen again until Roger Corman filmed The Pit and the Pendulum in 1961, or when a doctor puts his head under the dress of the adult Sophia, renamed Catherine (Dietrich), to certify her intactness and emerges without his wig. The film is resolutely anti-Russian (unfairly so in depicting Catherine), but it feels strangely contemporary. Can it be because the grand duke is played by the great Sam Jaffe as a grinning moron, head pecking jerkily like that of a hungry bird, marooned in a permanent adolescence of toy soldiers and the care of a stormy guardian-mistress; or because when his mother dies and he rises to the throne, he issues greedy, power-mad proclamations that read like tweets; or because he is executed in a coup arranged by his triumphant wife in a white pantsuit? 

A thoroughly spectacular film, The Scarlet Empress doomed the famous team. Von Sternberg owed another film to Paramount, and, thankfully, the studio allowed him to go to hell in a handbasket of his own devising. The Devil Is a Woman was underappreciated by almost everyone other than Dietrich, who loved the way she looked, especially in her first appearance, gorgeously assured, gamely flirting behind a scrim of balloons that von Sternberg himself exploded with BBs, and subsequently sporting an unrivaled variety of spit curls. If The Scarlet Empress is a black-and-white film showing black-and-white costumes and decor, The Devil is a work plotted in shades of gray, set in a “Spain” so outlandish (significantly, the score is Russian, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Spanish Caprice) that Spain tried to prevent its distribution there. The carnival scene is a chiaroscuro marvel, crafted with streamers and confetti and so cluttered there are moments when it suggests a movable Jackson Pollock. 

The film is obstinately innovative. Six years before Orson Welles fused flashbacks and unreliable narration in Citizen Kane, launching an avalanche of flashbacks within flashbacks culminating in the contrary witnesses of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), von Sternberg was on the beat. Flashbacks had appeared in films almost from the beginning—and a few years later, in 1939, were adapted as the primary storytelling ploy by William Wyler in Wuthering Heights and Marcel Carné in Le jour se lève—but von Sternberg was the first to imbue them with the complexity displayed in The Devil Is a Woman. Half the film is given to Pasqual (Lionel Atwill) as he recalls to his young friend Antonio (Cesar Romero) his tribulations at the hands of the mesmerizing tart Concha (Dietrich). The film jumps back and forth from memory to the present with beautifully abrupt edits (no dissolves this time). Like Antonio, we believe Pasqual; like Antonio, we are surprised to learn that his story was intended to keep his rival at bay. We don’t know what we can believe of the repetitive tale, wherein she takes his money with a promised kiss, ruins his career and reputation, and lures him back again and again for more of the same. 

Reviewers noted an unmistakable resemblance between Atwill and von Sternberg, but it was a prescient resemblance, which would become more explicit as von Sternberg aged and grayed. Dietrich alone disputed this: “What? That ugly man who played the policeman is supposed to be Jo? What are these people talking about?” she asked Riva. “Can I sue these people?” she fulminated. “These little people, who know nothing, get paid and think they are professors . . .” She also resented the casting of Romero, an openly gay dancer she considered a lightweight, hired as a last-minute replacement for Joel McCrea, who rebelled against the von Sternberg autocracy. In this she is not alone; indeed, it might have been a stronger drama with, say, Tyrone Power or Gilbert Roland in the part, or even someone with the bearish authority of Victor McLaglen. But von Sternberg clearly wanted to play Antonio’s avid puerility against Atwill’s effete maturity. 

Who wrote this delicious farrago of sexual flagellation? We don’t really know. John Dos Passos gets credit for the adaptation, while several others are mentioned in relation to continuity. Some of it sounds like von Sternberg:

Concha: Have you ever seen him fight?
Pasqual: No, but I’ve read the reviews.
Concha: Oh, critics don’t value genius.

The story is based on Pierre Louÿs’s short novel The Woman and the Puppet, a fin de siècle Lolita, far more salacious than the film and not just because the latter casts the thirty-three-year-old Dietrich as Louÿs’s fifteen-year-old Conchita, who gives herself to the man she tortures naked but for a canvas chastity belt; she can be seduced neither by money nor marriage—only by ruthless beatings, to which the poor fellow has to be driven. Von Sternberg’s Conchita shows no inclination for the masochism she breeds in her suitors. She finally gives in to Pasqual, when his adoration is spent. 

After The Devil Is a Woman, the von Sternberg and Dietrich association was also spent. They never worked together again, and never agreed on how to document their story, professional or private. Why bother? It’s all there in the films.