Josef von Sternberg

The earliest of the fifteen directing credits Josef von Sternberg has in the catalogue reaches back to 1925. Michael Atkinson's collection piece in the archive objects to his settled image: the usual reading counts him Marlene Dietrich's mentor and passes over the five years before The Blue Angel as an apprenticeship. Atkinson rejects that; by his account the man had worked on thirteen films before he met Dietrich, and may be, before anything else, a director of silent films. His reason is this: Underworld, The Last Command and The Docks of New York are as shadowed and as worked as the sound films, and by that account those films were seen for their beauty and their atmosphere in their own time, and awarded Oscars. Atkinson finds the late genre films, The Shanghai Gesture and Macao, still interesting precisely for the wildness of their errors.