Josef von Sternberg

Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg to an impoverished Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[7] When Sternberg was three years old, his father Moses Sternberg, a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary, moved to the United States to seek work. His mother, Serafine (née Singer), and her children joined Moses in America in 1901 when the young Sternberg was seven.[8][9][10] On his emigration, von Sternberg is quoted as saying "On our arrival in the New World we were first detained on Ellis Island where the immigration officers inspected us like a herd of cattle."[11] Jonas attended public school until the family, except Moses, returned to Vienna three years later. Throughout his life, Sternberg carried vivid memories of Vienna and nostalgia for some of his "happiest childhood moments."[12]

The elder Sternberg insisted upon a rigorous study of the Hebrew language, limiting his son to religious studies on top of his regular schoolwork.[13] Biographer Peter Baxter, citing Sternberg's memoirs, reports that "his parents' relationship was far from happy: his father was a domestic tyrant and his mother eventually fled her home in order to escape his abuse."[14] Sternberg's early struggles, including these "childhood traumas" would inform the "unique subject matter of his films."[15][16]

In 1908, when Jonas was fourteen, he returned with his mother to Queens, New York, and settled in the United States.[17] He acquired American citizenship in 1908.[18] After a year, he stopped attending Jamaica High School and began working in various occupations, including millinery apprentice, door-to-door trinket salesman and stock clerk at a lace factory.[19] At the Fifth Avenue lace outlet, he became familiar with the ornate textiles with which he would adorn his female stars and embellish his mise-en-scène.[20][21]

In 1911, when he turned seventeen, the now "Josef" Sternberg, became employed at the World Film Company in Fort Lee, New Jersey. There, he "cleaned, patched and coated motion picture stock" – and served evenings as a movie theatre projectionist. In 1914, when the company was purchased by actor and film producer William A. Brady, Sternberg rose to chief assistant, responsible for "writing [inter]titles and editing films to cover lapses in continuity" for which he received his first official film credits.[22]

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he joined the US Army and was assigned to the Signal Corps headquartered in Washington, D.C., where he photographed training films for recruits.[23][21][24]

Shortly after the war, Sternberg left Brady's Fort Lee operation and embarked on a peripatetic existence in America and Europe offering his skills "as cutter, editor, writer and assistant director" to various film studios.[23][21]

In the summer of 1927, Paramount producer B. P. Schulberg offered, and Sternberg accepted, a position as "technical advisor for lighting and photography."[66] Sternberg was tasked with salvaging director Frank Lloyd's Children of Divorce, a movie that the studio executives had written off as "worthless". Working "three [consecutive] days of 20-hour shifts" Sternberg reconceived and reshot half the picture and presented Paramount with "a critical and box-office success." Impressed, Paramount arranged for Sternberg to film a major production based on journalist Ben Hecht's story about Chicago gangsters: Underworld.[67]

This film is generally regarded as the first "gangster" movie, to the extent that it portrayed a criminal protagonist as tragic hero destined by fate to meet a violent death. In Sternberg's hands the "journalistic observations" provided by Hecht's narrative are abandoned and substituted with a fantasy gangsterland that sprang "solely from Sternberg's imagination."[68][69][70] Underworld, "clinical and Spartan" in its cinematic technique made a significant impression on French filmmakers: Underworld was surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel's favorite film.[71]

With Underworld, Sternberg demonstrated his "commercial potential" to the studios, delivering an enormous box-office hit and Academy Award winner (for Best Original Story). Paramount provided Sternberg with lavish budgets for his next four films.[72] Some historians point to Underworld as the first of Sternberg's accommodations to the studio profit system, whereas others note that the film marks the emergence of Sternberg's distinctive personal style.[73][74]

The movies Sternberg created for Paramount over the next two years – The Last Command (1928), The Drag Net (1928), The Docks of New York (1929) and The Case of Lena Smith (1929), would mark "the most prolific period" of his career and establish him as one of the greatest filmmakers of the late silent era.[75][76][77] Contrary to Paramount's expectations, none were very profitable in distribution.[78][79]

The Last Command earned high praise among critics and added luster to Paramount's prestige. The film had the added benefit of forging collaborative relations between the director and its Academy Award-winning star Emil Jannings and producer Erich Pommer, both temporarily on loan from Paramount's sister studio, UFA in Germany.[80] Before embarking on his next feature, Sternberg, at the studio's behest, agreed to "cut down to manageable length" fellow director Erich von Stroheim's The Wedding March. Sternberg's willingness to accept the assignment had the unhappy side effect of "destroying" his relationship with von Stroheim.[81]

The Drag Net, a lost film, is believed to be a sequel to Underworld.[82] The Docks of New York "today the most popular of Sternberg's silent films" combines both spectacle and psychology in a romance set in sordid and brutal environs.[83]

Of Sternberg's nine films he completed in the silent era, only four are known to exist today in any archive. That Sternberg's output suffers from "lost film syndrome" makes a comprehensive evaluation of his silent oeuvre impossible.[84][85] Despite this, Sternberg stands as the great "Romantic artist" of this period in film history.[86]

A particularly unfortunate loss is that of The Case of Lena Smith, his last silent movie, and described as "Sternberg's most successful attempt at combining a story of meaning and purpose with his very original style."[87][88] The film fell victim to the emerging talkie enthusiasm and was largely ignored by American critics, but in Europe "its reputation is still high after decades of obscurity."[89][83] The Austrian Film Museum has assembled archival material to reconstruct the film, including a 5-minute print fragment discovered in 2005.[90]

Paramount moved quickly to adapt Sternberg's next feature, Thunderbolt, for sound release in 1929. An underworld melodrama-musical, its soundtrack employs innovative asynchronous and contrapuntal aural effects, often for comic relief.[91][92] Thunderbolt garnered leading man George Bancroft a Best Actor Award nomination, but Sternberg's future with Paramount was precarious due to the long string of commercial disappointments.[93]

A measure of The Blue Angel's European marketing and its "instant international success": Danish movie poster.[94][95]

Sternberg was summoned to Berlin by Paramount's sister studio, UFA in 1929 to direct Emil Jannings in his first sound production, The Blue Angel. It would be "the most important film" of Sternberg's career.[96] Sternberg cast the then little-known Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola, the female lead and nemesis of Jannings character Professor Immanuel Rath, whose passion for the young cabaret singer would reduce him to a "spectacular cuckold."[97] Dietrich became an international star overnight and followed Sternberg to Hollywood to produce six more collaborations at Paramount.[98][99] Film historian Andrew Sarris contends that The Blue Angel is Sternberg's "most brutal and least humorous" work of his oeuvre and yet the one film that the director's "most severe detractors will concede is beyond reproach or ridicule ... The Blue Angel stands up today as Sternberg's most efficient achievement ..."[100]

Sternberg's romantic infatuation with his new star created difficulties on and off the set. Jannings strenuously objected to Sternberg's lavish attention to Dietrich's performance, at the elder actor's expense. Indeed, the "tragic irony of The Blue Angel" was "paralleled in real life by the rise of Dietrich and the fall of Jannings" in their respective careers.[101]

Riza von Sternberg, who accompanied her spouse to Berlin, discerned that director and star were sexually involved. When Dietrich arrived in the United States in April 1930, Mrs. von Sternberg personally presented her with $100,000 libel lawsuits for public remarks made by the star that her marriage was failing, and a $500,000 suit for alienation of [Josef] Sternberg's affections. The Sternberg-Dietrich-Royce scandal was "in and out of the papers", but public awareness of the "ugly scenes" was largely concealed by Paramount executives.[102][103] On 5 June 1931 the divorce was finalized providing $25,000 cash settlement to Mrs. Sternberg and a 5-year annual alimony of $1200. In March 1932, the now divorced Riza Royce dropped her libel and alienation charges against Dietrich.[104][105]

Sternberg and Dietrich would unite to make six brilliant and controversial films for Paramount: Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil is a Woman (1935).[106] The stories are typically set in exotic locales including Saharan Africa, World War I Austria, revolutionary China, Imperial Russia, and fin-de-siècle Spain.[107]

Sternberg's "outrageous aestheticism" is on full display in these richly stylized works, both in technique and scenario. The actors in various guises represent figures from Sternberg's "emotional biography", the wellspring for his poetic dreamscapes.[108] Sternberg, largely indifferent to the studio publicity or to his movies' commercial success, enjoyed a degree of control over these pictures that permitted him to conceive and execute these works with Dietrich.[109][110]

Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich as Agent X-27 on the set of Dishonored.

Seeking to capitalize on the immense European success of The Blue Angel, though not yet released to American audiences,[111][112] Paramount launched the Hollywood production of Morocco, an intrigue-romance starring Gary Cooper, Dietrich and Adolphe Menjou. The all-out promotional campaign declared Dietrich "the woman all women want to see", providing a fascinated public with salacious hints about her private life and adding to the star's glamor and notoriety.[113][114] The fan press inserted an erotic component into her collaboration with Sternberg, encouraging Trilby-Svengali analogies. The publicity tended to distract critics from the genuine merits of the five movies that would follow and overshadowing the significance of Sternberg's lifetime cinematic output.[115][116][117][118]

Morocco serves as Sternberg's exploration of Dietrich's aptitude for conveying onscreen his own obsession with "feminine mystique", a mystique that allowed for a sexual interplay blurring the distinction between male and female gender stereotypes. Sternberg demonstrates his fluency in the visual vocabulary of love: Dietrich dresses in drag and kisses a pretty female; Cooper flourishes a ladies' fan and places a rose behind his ear.[119][120] In terms of romantic complexity, Morocco "is Sternberg's Hollywood movie par excellence".[120]

The box-office success of Morocco was such that both Sternberg and Dietrich were awarded with contracts for three more films and generous increases in salary. The film earned Academy Award nominations in four categories.[121][114]

Dishonored, Sternberg's second Hollywood film, featuring Dietrich opposite Victor McLaglen, was completed before Morocco was released.[122] A film of considerable levity but plot-wise one of his slightest works, this espionage-thriller is a sustained romp through the vicissitudes of spy-versus-spy deception and desire.[123][124] The feature closes with the melodramatic military execution of Dietrich's Agent X-27 (based on Dutch spy Mata Hari), the love-struck femme fatale, a scene that balances "gallantry and ghoulishness."[125][126]

Dishonored had not met with the studio's profit expectations at the box-office, and Paramount New York executives were struggling to find a vehicle to commercially exploit the "mystique and glamor" with which they had endowed the Sternberg-Dietrich productions.[127] While Dietrich was visiting her husband, Rudolf Sieber and their daughter Maria Riva in Europe during the winter of 1930–31, Paramount enlisted Sternberg to film an adaption of novelist Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy.[128]

The production was initially under the direction of preeminent Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. His socially deterministic filmic treatment of the novel was rejected by Paramount, and Eisenstein withdrew from the project. Already heavily invested financially in the production, the studio authorized a complete revision of planned feature.[129] While retaining Dreiser's basic plot and dialogue, Sternberg eliminated its contemporary sociological underpinnings to present a tale of a sexually obsessed middle-class youth (Phillips Holmes) whose deceptions lead to the death of a poor factory girl (Sylvia Sidney). Dreiser was outraged at Sternberg's failure to adhere to his themes in the adaptation and sued Paramount to stop distribution of the movie, but lost his case.[130][131]

Images of water abound in the film and serve as a motif signaling Holmes' motivations and fate. The photography by Lee Garmes invested the scenes with a measure of intelligence and added visual polish to the overall production. Sternberg's role as replacement director curbed his artistic investment in the project. As such, the picture bears little resemblance to his other works of that decade. Sternberg expressed indifference to the mixed critical success it received and banished the picture from his oeuvre.[132][133]

When Dietrich returned to Hollywood in April 1931, Sternberg had emerged as a top-ranking director at Paramount and was poised to begin "the richest and most controversial phase of his career." In the next three years he would create four of his greatest films. The first of these was Shanghai Express.[134][106]

The "Dietrich face": more than merely the triangulation of "three lights". Cinematographer Lee Garmes won an Academy Award in his category for Shanghai Express.[135]

The theme of the work, as in most of Sternberg's films, is "an examination of deception and desire" in a spectacle pitting Dietrich against Clive Brook, a romantic struggle in which neither can satisfactorily prevail.[138] Sternberg strips the denizens of the train, one-by-one, of their carefully crafted masks to reveal their petty or sordid existences. Dietrich's notoriously enigmatic character, Shanghai Lily, transcends precise analysis but reflects Sternberg's own personal involvement with his star and lover.[139] Scriptwriter Jules Furthman famously provided Dietrich with the poignant admission, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.".[136]

Sternberg honored the former filmmaker and early mentor Émile Chautard by casting him as the bemused Major Lenard.[140][141]

With Shanghai Express, Sternberg exhibits complete mastery over every element of his work: décor, photography, sound and acting. Lee Garmes, who would serve as cinematographer on this suite of films, won an Academy Award, and both Sternberg and the movie were nominated in their categories.[142][6]

When Sternberg embarked on his next feature, Blonde Venus, Paramount Pictures' finances were in jeopardy. Profits had plummeted due to a decline in theatre attendance among working class moviegoers. Fearing bankruptcy, the New York executives tightened control over Hollywood film content. Dietrich's heretofore forthright portrayals of demi-mondes (Dishonored, Shanghai Express) were suspended in favor of a heroine who embraced a degree of American-style domesticity. Producer B. P. Schulberg was banking on the success of further Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations to help the studio survive the financial downturn.[143][144]

Sternberg's original story for Blonde Venus and the screenplay by Furthman and S.K. Lauren presents a narrative of a fallen woman, with the caveat that she is ultimately forgiven by her long suffering husband. The narrative exhibited the "sordid self-sacrifice" that was de rigueur for Hollywood's top female performers, yet the studio balked at the redemptive denouement.[136] When Sternberg declined to alter the ending, Paramount put the project on hold and threatened the filmmaker with a lawsuit. Dietrich joined Sternberg in defying the New York executives. Minor adjustments were made that satisfied the studio, but Sternberg's compromises would revert to him after the less than stellar critical and box-office success of the movie.[145]

Paramount's toleration of the duo's defiance was conditioned largely by the considerable profits that they were reaping from Shanghai Express, over $3 million in early distribution.[146][147][148]

Blonde Venus opens with the idealized courtship and marriage of Dietrich and mild-mannered chemist Herbert Marshall. Quickly ensconced as a Brooklyn, New York housewife and burdened with an impish son Dickie Moore, she is compelled to make herself a mistress to politico and nightclub gangster Cary Grant when her husband requires expensive medical treatment for radiation exposure. The plot grows increasingly improbable as Dietrich resurrects her theatrical career that takes to exotic locations around the world – with her little boy in tow.[149][150][151]

The movie is ostensibly about the devotion of a mother for her child, a subject that Sternberg uses to dramatize the traumas of his own childhood and his harsh experiences as a transient laborer in his youth.[152][153] With Blonde Venus, Sternberg reached his apogee stylistically. A film of great visual beauty achieved through multiple layers of evocative décor where style displaces and transcends personal characterizations.[154][155] The highly episodic narrative, disparate locales and an unimpressive supporting cast, the movie is frequently dismissed by critics.[156][157] Blonde Venus's "camp" designation is attributable in part to the outrageous and extremely stylized "Hot Voodoo" nightclub sequence. Dietrich, the beauty, assumes the role of the beast and emerges from an ape costume.[158][159][160]

Paramount's expectations for Blonde Venus were out of proportion to realities of declining theatre attendance. Though not an unprofitable picture, the less than robust critical acclaim weakened the studio's commitment to sustaining further Sternberg-Dietrich creations.[161]

At odds with Paramount and their individual contracts nearly expired, Sternberg and Dietrich privately conceived of forming an independent production company in Germany. Studio executives were suspicious when Sternberg offered no objections when Dietrich was scheduled to star in director Rouben Mamoulian's The Song of Songs (1933) in the final weeks of her term. When Dietrich balked at the assignment, Paramount quickly sued her for potential losses. The courtroom testimony revealed that she was preparing to abscond to Berlin to pursue filmmaking with Sternberg. Paramount prevailed in court, and Dietrich was required to remain in Hollywood and complete the film.[162][163] Any hopes for such a venture were dashed when the National Socialists were ushered into power in January 1933 and Sternberg returned to Hollywood in April 1933.[164][165] Abandoning their plans for independent filmmaking, both Sternberg and Dietrich reluctantly signed a two-film contract with the studio on 9 May 1933.[166]

Reacting to Paramount's increasing coolness towards his films and to the general disarray that plagued studio management since 1932, Sternberg prepared to make one of his most monumental movies: The Scarlett Empress, a "relentless excursion into style" that would antagonize Paramount and mark the onset of a distinct phase in his creative output.[167]

Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, in the costume of Sophie Frederica, on the set of The Scarlett Empress, 1934

The Scarlet Empress, an historical drama concerning the rise of Catherine the Great of Russia, had been adapted to film on several occasions by American and European directors when Sternberg began organizing the project.[168] In this, his penultimate film starring Dietrich, Sternberg abandoned contemporary America as a subject and contrived a fantastical 18th-century Imperial Russia, "grotesque and spectacular", stupefying contemporary audiences with its stylistic excesses.[169][170]

The narrative follows the rise of the child Sophia "Sophie" Frederica through adolescence to become Empress of Russia, with special emphasis on her sexual awakening and her inexorable sexual and political conquests.[163][171] Sternberg's decision to examine the erotic decadence among 18th-century Russian nobility was partly an attempt to blindside censors, as historical dramas ipso facto were granted a measure of decorum and gravity.[172][173] The sheer sumptuousness of the sets and décor obscure the allegorical nature of the film: the transformation of the director and star into pawns controlled by the corporate powers that exalt ambition and wealth, "a nightmare vision of the American dream."[174][175]

The film portrays 18th-century Russian nobility as developmentally arrested and sexually infantile, a disturbed and grotesque portrayal of Sternberg's own childhood experiences, linking eroticism and sadism. The opening sequence examines the young Sophia (later Catherine II) early sexual awareness, conflating eroticism and torture, that serves as a harbinger of the sadism that she will indulge in as an empress.[176] Whereas Blonde Venus portrayed Dietrich as a candidate for mother love, the maternal figures in The Scarlet Empress make a mockery of any pretense to such idealizations.[163] Dietrich is reduced to a fantastic and helpless clothes horse, bereft of any dramatic function.[177]

Despite withholding distribution of the film for eight months, so as not to compete with the recently issued United Artists film The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934), starring Elisabeth Bergner, the movie was dismissed by critics and the public. Americans, preoccupied with the challenges of the financial crisis were in no mood for a picture that appeared to be an exercise in self-indulgence.[145][178][171] The film's conspicuous failure among moviegoers was a blow to Sternberg's professional reputation, recalling his 1926 disaster, A Woman of the Sea.[178][179]

Sternberg embarked on the final film of his contract knowing that he was finished at Paramount. The studio was undergoing a realignment in management that was the fall of producer Schulberg, a Sternberg stalwart, and the rise of Ernst Lubitsch, which did not bode well for the director.[180][181] As his personal relationship with Dietrich deteriorated, the studio made clear that her professional career would proceed independently of his. With the cynical blessing of incoming production manager Ernst Lubitsch, Sternberg was given full control over what would be his final film with Marlene Dietrich: The Devil is a Woman.[182]

The Devil is a Woman is Sternberg's cinematic tribute and confession to his collaborator and muse Marlene Dietrich. In this final tribute he sets forth his reflections on their five-year professional and personal association.[183][184]

His key thematic preoccupation is fully articulate here: the spectacle of an individual's conspicuous loss of prestige and authority as the price demanded for surrendering to a sexual obsession.[185] To this endeavor Sternberg brought to bear all the sophisticated filmic elements at his disposal. Sternberg's official handling of the photography is a measure of this.[186][171][187]

Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs, The Woman and the Puppet (1908), the drama unfolds in Spain's famous carnival at the end of the 19th century. A love triangle develops pitting the young revolutionary Antonio (Cesar Romero) against the middle-aged former military officer Don Pasqual (Lionel Atwill) in a contest for the love of the devastatingly beautiful demi-mondaine Concha (Dietrich). Despite the gaiety of the setting, the film has a dark, brooding, reflective quality. The contest ends in a duel where Don Pasqual is wounded, perhaps mortally: the denouement is never made explicit.[188][171]

More so than any of his previous pictures, Sternberg picked a leading man (Atwill) who is the director's double in more than facial appearance: short stature, stern countenance, proud bearing, verbal mannerisms and immaculate attire. Sternberg has effectively stepped from behind the camera to play opposite Dietrich. This deliberate self-portraiture signals that the film is a submerged commentary on the decline of his career in the movie industry as well as his loss of Dietrich as a lover.[189][190] The sharp exchanges between Concha and Pasqual are filled with bitter recriminations.[191] The players do not emote to convey feeling. Rather, Sternberg carefully applies layer upon layer of décor in front of the lens to create a three-dimensional effect. When an actor steps into this pictorial canvas, the most delicate gesture registers emotion. His outstanding control over the visual integrity is the foundation for much of the eloquence and force of Sternberg's cinema.[192][193]

The March 1935 premiere of The Devil is a Woman in Hollywood was accompanied by a press statement from Paramount announcing that Sternberg's contract would not be renewed. The director anticipated his termination with his own declaration before the film's release explicitly severing his professional ties with Dietrich, writing "Miss Dietrich and I have progressed as far as possible ... if we continued, we would get into a pattern that would be harmful to both of us."[194]

Even with better than expected reviews, The Devil is a Woman cost Sternberg his reputation in the film industry.[195] Sternberg would never again enjoy the largesse nor the prestige that had been conferred on him at Paramount.[196]

A postscript to the release of The Devil is a Woman concerns a formal protest issued by the Spanish government protesting the film's purported disparagement of "the Spanish armed forces" and an insult to the character of the Spanish people. The objectionable scenes depict Civil Guards as inept at controlling carnival merrymakers, and a shot of a policeman consuming an alcoholic beverage in a café. Paramount president Adolph Zukor agreed to suppress the picture in the interest of protecting US-Spain trade agreements – and to protect Paramount film distribution in the country.[197]

An adaption of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment was Sternberg's first project at Columbia, and a mismatch in terms of his aptitudes and interests. Presenting literary masterpieces to the masses was an industry-wide rage during the financially strapped 1930s. As copyrights on these works were generally expired, the studio paid no fees.[199]

Sternberg invested Dostoevsky's work with a measure of style, but any attempt to convey the complexity of the author's character analysis was suspended in favor of a straightforward, albeit suspenseless, detective story.[200][201] However uninspired, Sternberg proved an able craftsman, dispelling some of the myths regarding his eccentricities, and the film proved satisfactory to Columbia.[202][203]

Columbia had high hopes for Sternberg's next feature, The King Steps Out, starring soprano Grace Moore and based on Fritz Kreisler's operetta Cissy. A comedy of errors concerning Austrian royalty set in Vienna, the production was undermined by personal and professional discord between opera diva and director. Sternberg found himself unable to identify himself with his leading lady or adapt his style to the demands of operetta.[204][205][206] Wishing to distance himself from the fiasco, Sternberg quickly departed Columbia Pictures after the film's completion. The King Steps Out is the only movie that he insisted be expunged from any retrospective of his work.[207]

In the wake of his distressing two-picture sojourn at Columbia Pictures, Sternberg oversaw the construction of a home on his 30-acre (12-hectares) property in the San Fernando Valley north of Hollywood. Designed by architect Richard Neutra, the avant-garde structure was built to the director's specifications, featuring a faux-moat, an eight-foot (2.4 meter) exterior steel wall and bullet-proof windows. The siege-like character of this desert retreat reflected Sternberg's apprehensions regarding his professional career, as well as his mania to assert strict control over his identity.[208][209]

From 1935 to 1936, Sternberg travelled extensively in the Far East, cataloging his first impressions for future artistic endeavors. During these excursions he made the acquaintance of Japanese film distributor Nagamasa Kawakita - they would collaborate on Sternberg's final movie in 1953.

In Java Sternberg contracted a life-threatening abdominal infection, requiring his immediate return to Europe for surgery.

A paternalistic Wallace Beery patrolman rises through the ranks to become sergeant. As father he presides over a blended family of natural and adopted children: a biological son Alan Curtiss and adopted children Tom Brown and Laraine Day. After the natural son marries his "sister", he turns to crime and dies in a police shootout, in which Berry participates. The adopted and dutiful son emulates his father to become a good cop and marries his deceased brother's wife.[235]

The film is notable in that the theme and style strongly resemble German films of the post-WWI period. Thematically, the precept that social duty is superior to family loyalty was commonplace in German literature and film. In particular, the spectacle of an adopted son displacing an interior offspring in a test of physical and moral strength thus proves his worth to society. The central conflict in Sergeant Madden recounts the natural son (Curtis) engages in mortal combat with a powerful father (Barry), bears parallels to Sternberg's boyhood struggles with his tyrannical father Moses.[236][237]

Stylistically, Sternberg's film techniques mimic the dark, gray atmosphere of the German Expressionist films of the 1920s. The minor characters in Sergeant Madden appear to have been recruited from the films of F. W. Murnau. Despite some resistance from the bombastic Berry, Sternberg coaxed a relatively restrained performance that recalls Emil Jannings.[238][239]

German producer Arnold Pressburger, an early associate of the director, held the rights to a John Colton play entitled The Shanghai Gesture (1926). This "sensational" work surveyed the "decadent and depraved" denizens of a Shanghai brothel and opium den operated by a "Mother Goddam". Colton's lurid tale presented difficulties to adaption in 1940 when strictures imposed by the Hays Office were in full force. Salacious behavior and depictions of drug use, including opium, were forbidden, leading censors to disqualify more than thirty efforts to transfer The Shanghai Gesture to the screen.[241] Veteran screenwriter Jules Furthman with assistance from Karl Vollmöller and Géza Herczeg formulated a bowdlerized version which passed muster. Sternberg made some additions to the scenario and agreed to film it. Paul Ivano, Sternberg's cinematographer on A Woman of the Sea was enlisted as cameraman.[242][243]

To satisfy censors, the story is set in a Shanghai casino, rather than a brothel; the name of the proprietress of the establishment is softened to "Mother Gin-Sling", rather than the impious "Mother Goddam" in the Colton's original. Gin-Sling's half-caste daughter Gene Tierney – the result of a coupling between Gin-Sling and British official Sir Guy Charteris Walter Huston – is the product of European finishing schools rather than a courtesan raised in her mother's whore house. The degradation of daughter who sports the nickname "Poppy" is no less degraded by her privileged upbringing.[242][244]

Sternberg augmented the original story by inserting two compelling characters: Doctor Omar (Victor Mature) and Dixie Pomeroy (Phyllis Brooks). Dr. Omar – "Doctor of Nothing" – is a complacent sybarite impressive only to cynical casino regulars. His scholarly epithet has no more substance than Sternberg's "von" and the director humorously exposes the pretense.[245] The figure of Dixie, a former Brooklyn chorus girl contrasts with Tierney's continental beauty and this all-American commoner takes the measure of the banal Omar. Poppy, lacking "the humor, intelligence and an appreciation of the absurd" succumbs to the voluptuous Omar – and Sternberg cinematically reveals the absurdity of the relationship.

The veiled parental confrontation between Charteris and Gin-Sling revives only past humiliations and suffering, and Poppy is sacrificed on the altar of this heartless union. Charteris obsessive rectitude blinds him to the terrible irony of his daughter's murder.[246]

The Shanghai Gesture is a tour-de-force with Sternberg's sheer "physical expressiveness" of his characters that conveys both emotion and motivation. In Freudian terms, the gestures serve as symbols of "impotence, castration, onanism and tranvestism" revealing Sternberg's obsession with the human condition.[247]

In the midst of World War II, Sternberg, in a civilian capacity, was asked by the United States Office of War Information to make a single film, a one-reel documentary for the series entitled The American Scene, a domestic version of the combat and recruitment oriented Why We Fight. Whereas his service with the Signal Corps in World War I included filming shorts demonstrating the proper use of fixed bayonets, this 11-minute documentary The Town is a portrait of a small American community in the Midwest with emphasis on the cultural contributions of its European immigrants.[249][250][251][252]

Aesthetically, this short documentary exhibits none of Sternberg's typical stylistic elements. In this respect it is the only purely realistic work he ever created. It is executed, nonetheless, with perfect ease and efficiency, and his "sense of composition and continuity" is strikingly executed. The Town was translated into 32 languages and distributed overseas in 1945.[253][254][255]

At the end of the war, Sternberg was hired by producer David O. Selznick, an admirer of the director, to serve as a roving advisor and assistant on the film Duel in the Sun, starring Gregory Peck. Attached to the unit overseen by filmmaker King Vidor, Sternberg pitched into any task he was assigned with alacrity. Sternberg continued to seek a sponsor for a highly personal project entitled The Seven Bad Years, a journey into self-analysis concerning his childhood and its ramifications for his adult life. When no commercial backing materialized, Sternberg abandoned hopes for support from Hollywood and returned to his home in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1947.[256]

Janet Leigh and Sternberg on the set of Jet Pilot

As a precondition, Sternberg agreed to deliver a conventional movie that focused on aviation themes and hardware, avoiding the erotic embellishments he was famous for.[259] In a Furthman script that resembled a comic-book narrative, a Soviet pilot-spy Janet Leigh lands her Mig fighter at a USAF base in Alaska, posing as defector. Suspicious, the base commander assigns American pilot John Wayne to play counter-spy. Mutual respect leads to love between the two aviators and when Leigh is denied asylum, Wayne weds her to avoid Leigh's deportation. The USAF sends them to Russia to spread fraudulent intelligence, but upon his return to the air base Wayne is suspected of acting as a double agent and scheduled for brainwashing. Leigh arranges for their escape to Austria.[260]

Janet Leigh is placed at the visual center of the film. She is permitted a measure of eroticism that contrasts sharply and humorously with the All-American pretensions of the Furthman script.[261][262] Sternberg stealthily inserted some subversive elements in this paean of cold war militarism. During the airborne refueling scenes (anticipating Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove), the fighter jets take on the persona and attributes of Leigh and Wayne.[263]

Sternberg wrapped up shooting in merely seven weeks, but the picture was fated to undergo innumerable permutations until it finally enjoyed distribution – and a moderate commercial success – by Universal Studios six years later in September 1957.[264]

With Jet Pilot completed, Sternberg immediately turned to his second film for RKO: Macao.

To Sternberg's discomfiture, RKO maintained strict control when filming commenced in September 1950. The thriller is set in the exotic locale of Macao, at the time a Portuguese colony on the coast of China. American drifters Robert Mitchum and gold-digger Jane Russell become involved in an intrigue to lure corrupt casino owner and jewel smuggler Brad Dexter offshore into international waters so he can be arrested by US lawman William Bendix. Mistaken identities put Mitchum in danger and murders ensue, ending in a dramatic fight scene.[265]

Cinematically, the only evidence that Sternberg directed the picture is where he managed to impose his stylistic signature: a waterfront chase that features hanging fish nets; a feather pillow exploding in an electric fan.[266][267] His handling of the climatic fight between Mitchum and Dexter was deemed deficient by producers. Mastery over action scenes predictably eluded Sternberg and director Nicholas Ray (uncredited) was summoned to re-shoot the sequence in the final stages of production.[268] Contrary to Hughes's inclination to retain Sternberg as a director at RKO, no new contract was forthcoming.

Persevering in his efforts to launch an independent project, Sternberg obtained an option on novelist Shelby Foote's tale of sin and redemption, Follow Me Down, but failed to obtain funding.

Visiting New York in 1951, Sternberg renewed his friendship with Japanese producer Nagamasa Kawakita, and they agreed to pursue a joint production in Japan. From this alliance would emerge Sternberg's most personal film – and his last: The Saga of Anahatan.[269][270]

• The Salvation Hunters (1925)
• The Exquisite Sinner (1926, lost)
• A Woman of the Sea (1926, also known as The Sea Gull or Sea Gulls or The Woman who loved once, lost)
• Underworld (1927)
• The Last Command (1928)
• The Dragnet (1928, lost)
• The Docks of New York (1928)
• The Case of Lena Smith (1929, lost)

• Thunderbolt (1929)
• The Blue Angel (1930)
• Morocco (1930)
• Dishonored (1931)
• An American Tragedy (1931)
• Shanghai Express (1932)
• Blonde Venus (1932)
• The Scarlet Empress (1934)
• The Devil is a Woman (1935)
• Crime and Punishment (1935)
• The King Steps Out (1936)
• Sergeant Madden (1939)
• The Shanghai Gesture (1941)
• The Town (1943, short film)
• Macao (1952)
• Anatahan (1953 also known as The Saga of Anatahan)
• Jet Pilot (1957)

• The Masked Bride (1925, directed with Christy Cabanne, uncredited)
• It (1927, directed with Clarence G. Badger, uncredited)
• Children of Divorce (1927, directed with Frank Lloyd, uncredited)
• Street of Sin (1928, directed with Mauritz Stiller, uncredited)
• I, Claudius (1937, unfinished)
• The Great Waltz (1938, directed with Julien Duvivier, uncredited)
• I Take This Woman (1940, directed with W.S. Van Dyke, uncredited)
• Duel in the Sun (1946, directed with King Vidor, uncredited)