Josef von Sternberg

Josef von Sternberg spent his childhood in both Vienna and New York City. His father, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, struggled to support the family in either city; Sternberg recalled him as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me." Due to financial hardship, von Sternberg left high school and worked in a Manhattan store that supplied ribbons and lace to hat makers. A chance encounter in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, led to a career in the cleaning and repair of movie prints. This position granted him access to the burgeoning film production industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey. From around 1916 to the early 1920s, von Sternberg worked as an apprentice filmmaker, developing a lasting contempt for most of the directors and producers he encountered (with the exception of Emile Chautard, who later acted in some of Sternberg's 1930s films), and believing he could surpass their work. Given a budget of a few thousand dollars—then considered absurdly small—von Sternberg proved his abilities with *The Salvation Hunters* (1925), which became a critical and financial success. Over the next few years, he alternated between acclaim and obscurity, sometimes within the same project (for example, he was honored with the rare opportunity to direct a film for Charles Chaplin, but it was shelved after a single screening and later vanished). His commercial breakthrough came with *Underworld* (1927), a seminal Hollywood gangster film; behind the scenes, von Sternberg successfully asserted creative control over writer Ben Hecht. With *The Last Command* (1928), starring the equally strong-willed Emil Jannings, von Sternberg began a nearly decade-long period as one of the most celebrated artists in world cinema. Both his career and personal life were transformed by *The Blue Angel* (1930). Chosen by Jannings and producer Erich Pommer to direct Germany’s first major sound film, von Sternberg took a gamble by casting Marlene Dietrich, then relatively unknown, as Lola Lola, the nightclub dancer who leads Jannings’ character into moral decline. The collaboration between von Sternberg and Dietrich—she appeared in six more of his films and he became one of her many lovers—has become a staple of film history. His films of the mid-1930s are among the most visionary ever made in Hollywood, though contemporary audiences found them dramatically inert. The films' poor box office performance and a falling-out with Ernst Lubitsch, then head of production at Paramount Pictures (Sternberg’s employer), meant that after *The Devil Is a Woman* (1935), he would never again have the control necessary to fully express himself. In his sardonic autobiography, he largely disowned all his subsequent films. Despite (or perhaps because of) his abbreviated career and difficult personality, von Sternberg remains a hero to many critics and filmmakers. His best films exemplify his belief that in any worthwhile film, the director is "the determining influence, and the only influence, despotically exercised or not, which accounts for the worth of what is seen on the screen."