Sternberg, Josef von b. May 29, l894;Vienna, Austria d. December 22, 1969; Hollywood, California
Austrian-born U.S. film director. Growing up in a Jewish family, the young Jonas Sternberg spent his childhood between Austria and America, crossing the ocean a few times, beginning in 1901.
At seven, he moved with his mother, brother, and sister to the United States, where his father had established himself three years before, looking in vain for a better life. When Jonas turned ten, they all returned to Vienna, but four years later, in 1908, the Sternberg family went once again to the United States, to live on Long Island.After many small jobs, at seventeen, Jonas changed his name to Josef, and worked for the World Film Corporation. In addition, he directed technical documentaries for the Signal Corps and the Medical Corps of the U.S. Army during World War I. In 1919 he began as an assistant director, and later as a scriptwriter for various projects, under the invented name of Josef von Sternberg. He worked as a sustaining actor in Europe until 1924 when
he returned to Hollywood. A project with Charles Chaplin from 1926, The Sea Gull (or The Woman of the Sea, 1926), was screened only once and then forever hidden by Chaplin, who produced and codirected the film with Sternberg. An efficient, versatile technician who could often replace other directors in the middle of a shoot, Sternberg supervised the postproduction and editing of two films initially directed by Erich von Stroheim: The Wedding March (1928) and The Honeymoon (1928), as he did later (although uncredited) for Julien Duvivier’s The Great Waltz (1938), set in Vienna.
For his first film as sole author, The Salvation Hunters (1925), Sternberg was simultaneously scriptwriter and director, as well as editor and producer. With the exception of Anatahan (1954), this drama was his only feature film shot outside the studio. In fact, Sternberg became famous by creating what was retrospectively seen as the first modern gangster movie, Underworld (1927), which was a huge success and the prototype of the genre later labeled “film noir.” For The Last Command (1928), Sternberg invented a story set in pre-1917 Russia and gave the leading role of General Golgoroucki to actor Emil Jannings, who had just arrived from Germany.
Many of his subsequent movies were set in a European context, including The Case of Lena Smith (1929) and The King Steps Out (1936).After a trip to England in 1926, Sternberg went to Germany to work for the most important German producing company in those days, the Universum Film Aktiongesellschaft (UFA). His most famous film and his first talkie, Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), from Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrath, was shot in Berlin, again with Jannings, in two versions (German and English). But the real star of that film was Marlene Dietrich. After the success of this movie, Sternberg produced six more movies together with Dietrich: Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil Is a Woman (1935). They made a perfect team; Sternberg invented the exotic stories and situations in which Dietrich created passionate characters, wore flamboyant costumes, and delivered her famous lines. In sum, Dietrich incarnated the femme fatale, but it was Sternberg who created that evanescent character in his movies.
Although they were shot in Hollywood studios, many of these films with Dietrich exploited the Atlantic connection: Morocco is set in French North Africa; Dishonored takes place in Vienna during World War I; Blonde Venus tells the love story between a German singer and an American chemist who both live in the United States but have to leave for Europe; The Scarlet Empress refers to the eighteenth-century Prussian princess Sophia Frederica, who became a Russian princess. The last of their collaborations, The Devil Is a Woman, was adapted from a novel by French author Pierre Louys (La femme et la pantin), and the story is located in Spain. From that group, only Shanghai Express was set in China, on a continent that often inspired Sternberg.
After the Marlene Dietrich cycle, Sternberg adapted a remake of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (1935), with Peter Lorre playing Roskol- nikov.
In the following years, Sternberg worked in England on an unfinished project (I Claudius), and returned to Hollywood during World War II, directing for the U.S. Office of War Information a short propaganda film titled The Town (1943). Sternberg’s last films focused on the Pacific. Indeed, The Shanghai Gesture (1941) is set on the South China coast. Produced by Howard Hughes, Jet Pilot (shot in 1950, but delayed and released in 1957) is the sentimental story of a female Soviet pilot who seeks refuge in Alaska; the film was imagined to magnify Janet Leigh’s generous profile. Similarly, Macao (1952), with Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum, tells the story of a New York policeman who is involved in a special investigation in Hong Kong and Macao.The last film by Sternberg, Anatahan (1953) is very different from all his previous movies, being done with a Japanese cast and crew. It is the story of a group of Japanese isolated on the island of Anatahan in 1944. Very often, Sternberg said this was the favorite of his own films. In the following years, Sternberg worked on abandoned projects, lectured at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) where he began in 1947, and wrote his memoirs.
Yves Laberge
See also Dietrich, Marlene; Film (German), Amerian Influence on; Hollywood; Jannings, Emil; Lorre, Peter; Stroheim, Erich von
References and Further Reading
Sternberg, Josef von. Fun in a Chinese
Laundry. New York: Macmillan, 1965.