Background

Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg on May 29, 1894, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Maurice Sternberg, a businessman, and Serafine Singer.

In 1897, his father immigrated to the United States, and Josef and his mother followed four years later. The father took his family back to Vienna in 1904, but four years later the family returned to New York City.

Education

The young Sternberg's sporadic education included a period at Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, but he dropped out in 1909 to work in the garment industry.

Career

In 1911, Sternberg became a film patcher, occasionally working as a projectionist. Later he found employment at the World Film Corporation in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and in time became the chief assistant to the company's president. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Sternberg became involved in the production of army training films and subsequently served in the Signal Corps and the Medical Corps.

After the war, he briefly returned to his job in New Jersey before undertaking what he described as his "apprenticeship" working as a cutter, editor, title writer, and assistant director in New Jersey, New York, Austria, and England. In 1922, Sternberg, who was usually called Jo, adapted into English the Austrian Karl Adolph's novel Tochter (1914); the translation, entitled Daughters of Vienna, was published in 1923. By then, he was in Hollywood.

The 1924 release By Divine Right, on which he worked as assistant director and scenario writer, is the first known instance of the name Josef von Sternberg being used in a screen credit. According to him, his name was "elongated" without his knowledge or approval by the director of the film. During 1924, von Sternberg wrote, produced, and directed The Salvation Hunters. Consciously realistic, with arty overtones of social significance, the film was shot on the mud flats south of Los Angeles. This simple tale of a boy who wins a worldly girl from a brute was produced for less than $5, 000, most of which came from George K. Arthur, the young, unknown English actor who played the boy.

It won lavish praise from Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, whose United Artists Corporation subsequently distributed the film, and was chosen by one critic as among the ten best of the year. While a projected collaboration with Mary Pickford never materialized, von Sternberg landed a multiple-picture contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Executives who did not like his first film for the studio partially reshot it, and von Sternberg stalked off the set of the second film after two weeks, unhappy with the assignment. MGM soon terminated his contract.

In 1926, Chaplin employed von Sternberg to direct a comeback film for the comedian's former leading lady Edna Purviance. The Sea Gull (retitled A Woman of the Sea to avoid confusion with the Chekhov play) was partly reshot by Chaplin, previewed once, and then suppressed by the comedian, who supposedly destroyed the negative. The reasons for Chaplin's actions remain a mystery. Von Sternberg again joined the ranks of the assistant directors.

In 1927, Paramount assigned him to reshoot Children of Divorce. He completed a substantial number of retakes in only three days, salvaged the film, and earned a project of his own. Between 1927 and 1935, he directed fourteen films one-half of all the films he finished during his career. Von Sternberg began auspiciously with Underworld (1927), a tough, violent melodrama credited with initiating that era's cycle of gangster films.

His next film, The Last Command (1928), deals with czarist general who is cast in a bit role as a general in a film about the Russian Revolution. Emil Jannings, the eminent German actor, played the general in what proved to be the best film of his brief American career. Von Sternberg's other 1928 releases were The Dragnet, a mystery, and The Docks of New York, a harsh but romantic melodrama. He had two films released in 1929: The Case of Lena Smith, a bitter tale of a mother and her illegitimate child set in fin-de-siecle Vienna; and Thunderbolt, a gangster film that was his first talkie and made striking use of asynchronous sound.

During 1928-1929 he also wrote the story for another Jannings film, and at Paramount's behest and with the director Erich von Stroheim's approval he recut The Wedding March (1928). Jannings, in his homeland to make his talkie debut, persuaded the German production company UFA, which had ties to Paramount, to engage von Sternberg. The director arrived in Germany in August 1929, and after some discussion among all parties, it was decided to film Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat, which deals with the decline of a teacher who becomes involved with a loose-living entertainer at the Blue Angel cabaret.

Von Sternberg had little interest in Mann's social criticism and emphasized (as in most of his previous films) the sexual relationships between the protagonists. The entertainer, Lola Lola, a callous femme fatale, degrades the teacher, who finds release only in death. Filmed in both German and English versions, Der blaue Engel, von Sternberg's best-known film, won critical acclaim and commercial success.

Much of that triumph lay in von Sternberg's use of Marlene Dietrich, then a little-known but experienced actress, as the erotic Lola Lola. His career was inextricably wound up with hers until 1935, and he made only one movie without her during that time an uneven 1931 adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy that outraged the author and disappointed the critics.

In a succession of movies, von Sternberg molded Dietrich's image to such an extent that he was accused of being a Svengali to her Trilby. In Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), von Sternberg used his considerable skills to create in each film a variation of the femme fatale portrayed by Dietrich in The Blue Angel.

A master of light and shadow, von Sternberg was the only director at the time admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers. In 1935, during the last days of shooting The Devil Is a Woman, von Sternberg announced an end to their collaboration. But he never again accomplished what he had created before her or with her. After leaving Paramount, von Sternberg made few films, but many of his projects never materialized. He completed three films during the 1930's, including an iconoclastic but fascinating version of Crime and Punishment (1935), with Peter Lorre.

An abortive project was his attempt to film Robert Graves's I, Claudius in 1937 with Charles Laughton, an effort detailed in the 1965 BBC-TV documentary The Epic That Never Was. His last major film, The Shanghai Gesture (1941), was based on a vintage theatrical shocker. In the early 1950's, at the invitation of Howard Hughes, he shot two potboilers for RKO; both Macao (1952) and Jet Pilot (1957) were extensively reshot.

Von Sternberg financed his last film, which received little distribution: Anatahan (1953) dealt with a group of Japanese soldiers and one woman stranded on a Pacific island during and after World War II. He spent most of the 1950's and 1960's teaching at universities and appearing at retrospectives of his work around the world.

Achievements

• Von Sternberg received various honors, including the George Eastman House Medal of Honor (1957). He died in Los Angeles. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932).

Works

More photos

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  • Docks of New York VHS

    (Roughneck stoker Bill Roberts (George Bancroft) gets into...)

  • The Scarlet Empress (The Criterion Collection)

    (Filmmaker-svengali Josef von Sternberg escalates his obse...)

  • An American Tragedy

    (An American Tragedy is a powerful pre-code classic that f...)

  • Universal Hollywood Icons Collection: Marlene Dietrich (Blonde Venus / Desire / Angel / Seven Sinners)

    (Universal Hollywood Icons Collection spotlights the glamo...)

  • Marlene Dietrich: Directed by Josef Von Sternberg

    (Turner Classic Movies and Universal Studios Home Entertai...)

  • The Blue Angel: Kino Classics 2-Disc Ultimate Edition Blu-ray

    (The crowning achievement of the Weimar cinema, The Blue A...)

  • Fun In Chinese Laundry (The Lively arts)

    (The pioneering film director describes his personal life,...)

  • The Salvation Hunters

    (Germany released, PAL/Region 0 DVD: it WILL NOT play on s...)

  • Dishonored -1931- Josef Von Sternberg ( Fatalidad) European Import- Region 0

    (Una viuda es obligada a ejercer la prostitución para sobr...)

  • Devil Is a Woman DVD 1935 Region 1 US Import NTSC

Views

Quotations: "Shadow conceals - light reveals. To know what to reveal and what to conceal, and in what degrees to do this, is all there is to art. "

"Every light has a point where it is brightest and a point toward which it wanders to lose itself completely. It must be intercepted to fulfill its mission; it cannot function in a void. Light can go straight, penetrate and turn back, be reflected and deflected, gathered and spread, bent as by a soap bubble, made to sparkle and be blocked. Where it is no more is blackness, and where it begins is the core of its brightness. The journey of rays from that central core to the outposts of blackness is the adventure and drama of light. "

"There are some things which cannot be learned, though they can be studied. Among them are the laws of art - and the lawlessness of it, as well. "

"A shaft of white light used properly can be far more effective than all the color in the world used indiscriminately. "

"The only way to succeed is to make people hate you. "

"The finished product is not finished when the actor is. The work is completed by a pair of shears. "

Personality

Von Sternberg had a distinct visual style that intriguingly utilized various textures, ranging from lace to smoke. In all his films he made unusual use of symbols, reflections, and dissolves (one scene beginning while the previous one ends). Prior to The Blue Angel, he had been known as a director who clearly and quickly developed plot and characterizations.

But von Sternberg's concentration on Dietrich came at the expense of exposition. He also became profligate, spending hours on a shot that would show Dietrich onscreen for a few seconds. The result was intriguing and she was ravishing, but the films suffered and costs soared. Their last three films, though beautifully crafted, were neither critically nor commercially successful.

A major talent who in his best films displayed a remarkable visual bravura, von Sternberg was a great craftsman but unfortunately not a commercial filmmaker. His avowedly personal style of filmmaking proved too enigmatic, too evasive, too exotic. His films, with a few exceptions, failed at the box office, and the industry turned its back on him.

Connections

Von Sternberg married the actress Riza Royce in July 1926. In 1927, an interlocutory divorce decree was granted. They reconciled but then were divorced in June 1930.

On July 30, 1943, von Sternberg married his twenty-one-year-old secretary, Jeanne Avette McBride; she divorced him in 1945. On October 2, 1948, he married a twenty-eight-year-old war widow, Meri Ottis Wilner; they had one child.

Father:

Maurice Sternberg

Was a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary.

Mother:

Serafine Singer

Wife:

Meri Von Sternberg

15 February 1920 - 22 June 2017

Wife:

Riza Royce

They were married from 1926 to 1930.

Wife:

Jean Annette McBride

They were married from 1945 to 1947.

References

• The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg (The International Film Guide series)
• The Parade's Gone By...
• Josef Von Sternberg: a Critical Study of the Great
• Von Sternberg (Screen Classics)
• The films of Josef von Sternberg