“In the four years preceding Paramount’s gift of about 90 feature films to [the American Film Institute], they had scrapped about 70 silent pictures,” the AFI’s associate archvist David Shepard said in a 1970 interview. “In November 1968, Paramount gave the Library of Congress 90 [silent features],” he continued, but “between November and April when the films were finally shipped, 13 of them were deterioriated.”
In 1971, after the American Film Institute asked to borrow the last known print of James Cruze’s “The City Gone Wild” (1927) from Paramount, the copy was pulled from storage and an inspection showed deterioration in one reel. The print was placed in a barrel of water and carted off by a salvage expert while the AFI archivist was driving over to pick it up.
— David Pierce, “The Legion of the Condemned — Why American Silent Films Perished,” Film History magazine, 1997
Paramount’s legendary mishandling of its vast silent library, going back to the studio’s founding nearly a century ago, is among the most tragic stories of film preservation. It’s why we’ll likely never see more than scraps that survive from tantalizing-sounding films like Herbert Brenon’s first screen version of “The Great Gatsby” (1926), Victor Fleming’s “The Rough Riders” (1927) and so many more.
Under the circumstances, it’s positively miraculous that the three films in “3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg” have survived in beautiful condition — and a genuine cause for celebration that these three hard-to-see movies, exquisitely mastered and licensed from Paramount, are available today in a deluxe DVD set from The Criterion Collection. Because they are all wonderful.
Vienna-born, Brooklyn-raised Sternberg (the von was added by a studio press agent) is of course best known for the six visually intoxicating films he made with his muse and sometimes lover Marlene Dietrich, beginning with the early talkie “The Blue Angel” (1929).
But Sternberg, whose given name was Jonas, had begun his directing career in 1925 with an arty independent production, “The Salvation Hunters” that brought him to the studios’ attention. He was taken on by both MGM and United Artists, but projects were either cancelled, taken out of his hands — or, in one case, he walked off the picture. Producer Charlie Chaplin refused to let the one picture Sternberg actually completed be shown without giving a reason; it’s unclear whether any prints survive.
In late 1926, he arrived at Paramount Pictures as an uncredited film doctor and salvaged a couple of films directed by others. The studio was so impressed that Stenberg was entrusted with the direction of “Underworld” (1927), a seminal (if modestly budgeted) gangster movie — and the first written by former crime reporter Ben Hecht, who won an Oscar and went on to a long career as one of Hollywood’s most highly-paid screenwriters.
Many of the conventions of gangster films were indeed invented by Hecht and Sternberg for the fast-moving, exciting “Underworld,” which heavily influenced the Hecht-written “Scarface” (1932) as well as the Warner Bros. classics “The Public Enemy” and “Little Caeser” and seem like cliches today.
George Bancroft, a barrel-chested actor that Sternberg (not the most reliable of witnesses) later claimed to have discovered in a Paramount shower stall, has a star-making role as the perpetually grinning Chicago gangland boss Bull Weed. He’s got a sexy moll named Feathers (Evelyn Brent) who is developing an attraction to Rolls Royce (top-billed Clive Brook), a formerly drunken lawyer who Bull has rescued from the gutter and installed as his factotum.
The film — arguably Sternberg’s most enertaining — is full of eye-catching set pieces, including a drunken semi-orgy in a nighclub, Bull’s assassination of a rival gangster, one of the best prison escape sequences ever shot — and a stunning climactic shootout.
“Underworld” was a suprise hit, and Paramount gave Sternberg a bigger budget for his second masterpiece, “The Last Command” (1928). Still one of the finest pictures ever made about Hollywood or the Russian Revolution, it was a vehicle for the prestigious Swiss-born actor Emil Jannings, whose long career in German films was interrupted by six he did for Paramount.
He won the first Best Actor Oscar for both “The Last Command” and Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Patriot” before returning to Germany. We can only weep that “The Last Command” along with all of Jannings’s other Hollywood silents, including Fleming’s “The Way of All Flesh,” do not survive intact.
Jannings, who also worked with Sternberg on “The Blue Angel,” is immensely moving as a former Russian general, a cousin to the czar, who has been reduced to working as an extra in 1927 Hollywood. One day a director (William Powell) notices his face in a stack of photos and picks the ailing old man to play a version of himself in an upcoming movie.
As he applies makeup with a palsied hand, we see lengthy series of flashbacks to Russia of a decade earlier, where the haughty general interviews a pair of revolutionaries — the man who would become the Hollywood director and his beautiful companion, played again by Brent.
He whips the future director and makes the woman his mistress. A remarkable, riveting and tragic series of events unfolds as the general travels across Russia on a train.
The film concludes in 1927 Hollywood, where the vengeful director has the old man reenact a scene from his life — with entirely unforeseen consequences. It’s one of the most powerful movie endings I have ever seen.
Bancroft returns for the relatively spare but highly atmospheric “Docks of New York” (1928), released in the waning days of the silent era. He plays a rough-hewn ship’s stoker who rescues a suicidal woman (Evelyn Brent) from drowning and marries her during a night of drunken revelry. But what about the next morning?
Written by Sternberg’s future collaborator Jules Furthman (“Shanghai Express”) from a story by John Monk Saunders (“Wings”), this is a highly intimate and poetic film, gorgeously photographed in black-and-white by Hal Rosson. The shadowy expressionistic style clearly shows the influences of both Sternberg’s idol Erich Von Stroheim and the German director F.W. Murnau.
Each of the three films comes with a pair of new scores that enhances their visual beauty and storytelling power. (“Underworld” and “The Last Command” were issued on murky videotapes by Paramount to celebrate its 75th birthday in 1987).
Criterion has pulled out all the stops in a full suite of extras to complement the films. There are two half-hour video essays on Von Sternberg, a Swedish TV interview from the director from 1968 and a 96-page booklet that includes not only essays on the films, but Ben Hecht’s original treatment for “Underworld” and an lengthy excerpt from von Stenberg’s autobiography dealing with Jannings.
Coming attractions: Criterion has announced a Nov. 23 release date for “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story” a six-disc set on DVD and Blu-ray that reportedly was originally going to be released by rights holder Sony.
It collects all seven influential Columbia releases from the legendary production company that changed Hollywood forever in the late ’60s and early ’70s: Bob Rafelson’s “Head,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “The King of Marvin Gardens,” Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider,” Jack Nicholson’s “Drive He Said,” Henry Jaglom’s “A Safe Place” and Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show.”
According to an interview with James Cameron that ran in The Post on Sunday, the DVD special edition of “Avatar” coming in December will add an additional seven minutes of footage, in additional the extra eight or so minutes in the special edition hitting theaters on Friday (which, incidentally, is not being screened in advance for critics). The second DVD release, which does not yet have an official release date, reportedly will also include an audio track aimed at families that removes the swear words.
