The Docks of New York

Roughneck stoker Bill Roberts (George Bancroft) gets into all sorts of trouble during a brief shore leave when he falls hard for Mae (Betty Compson), a wise and weary dance-hall girl, in Josef von Sternberg’s evocative portrait of working-class waterfront folk. Fog-enshrouded cinematography by Harold Rosson (The Wizard of Oz), expressionist set design by Hans Dreier (Sunset Boulevard), and sensual performances by Bancroft and Compson make this one of the legendary director’s finest works, and one of the most exquisitely crafted films of the era.

United States
1928
75 minutes
Black & White
1.33:1
Silent
Spine #531

Available In

Collector's Set

3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$69.95

Cast & Credits

Cast

George Bancroft: The Stoker
Clyde Cook: His pal
Betty Compson: A girl
Mitchell Lewis: The third engineer
Olga Baclanova: His wife
Gustav von Seyffertitz: Hymn-book Harry

Credits

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Photographed by: Harold Rosson
Story and screenplay by: Jules Furthman
Suggested by: John Monk Saunders's "The Dock Walloper"
Titles by: Julian Johnson
Edited by: Helen Lewis

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Explore

Hans Dreier

Art Director

One of the most prolific film artists in Hollywood history, the German-born art director Hans Dreier worked on more than five hundred films from 1919 to 1951, amassing twenty-three Academy Award nominations and three Oscars. A student of engineering and architecture, Dreier began his career as an architect for the German government before being hired to design sets for UFA, the home of the German film industry, during the silent era. Like many of his moviemaking countrymen, Dreier eventually moved to Los Angeles, bringing with him all the expressionist tools of his trade—dramatically exaggerated spaces and chiaroscuro—and working closely with cinematographers like Victor Milner and such directors as Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch to create vivid visual experiences. Dreier’s astonishingly vast and varied body of work extends from the intense, romantic shadows of early von Sternberg to the psychological grit of Anthony Mann’s American West, with many lighthearted pit stops in between, from Lubitsch's Ruritanian comic-musical landscapes to Preston Sturges’ just-off-center, whacked-out Americana.