The Salvation Hunters

Three people living beside the mud of a harbour dredger, a young man, a girl and a child, get away and go to the city. The city turns out to be the same mud in another form. The film is not interested in event. It is interested in stasis: at its centre a dredger bucket works endlessly, and the characters do the same thing, scraping the bottom and dumping it back. Sternberg reduced plot deliberately. The form is poor and experimental: shot in San Pedro harbour, Chinatown and the San Fernando Valley. No studio, real locations. It is Josef von Sternberg's first film and came almost entirely out of his own pocket. The cost was around five thousand dollars, half from Sternberg and half from his lead actor George K. Arthur. Charlie Chaplin heard of it and arranged a private screening for his United Artists partners; the company bought it for twenty thousand dollars, and Sternberg signed an eight-picture contract with MGM the same year. Georgia Hale plays the girl; Chaplin saw her here and cast her in The Gold Rush. Who it is for: viewers curious about the experimental side of silent film and Sternberg's beginning. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story. The film is deliberately eventless, its symbolism is heavy and the intertitles are excessively philosophical.