On Blu-ray - David Hare enthuses over the 'pure Sternbergiana' of Criterion's edition of Josef von Sternberg's DOCKS OF NEW YORK (USA, 1928)

Betty Compson

Ferocious emotion in Sternberg. 

In the history of movies there has long been a select group of masterpieces nominated over the years from the silent picture era which always rise to the surface, time after time and with good reason. Sjostrom's The Wind, Murnau's Sunrise, Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Chaplin's The Circus, King Vidor's The Big Parade and Sternberg's 1928 The Docks of New York. 

Docks, made at Paramount, brings together cameraman Hal Rosson and screenwriter Jules Furthman with original material by the great John Monk Saunders, who would shortly pioneer the aviation picture genre, starting with Hawks’ Dawn Patrol, Ford's Air Mail, Leisen's Eagle and the Hawk and many others.

George Bancroft

The tone and texture of Docks is pure, distilled Sternbergiana with signature compositions of characters against bare chipped walls, and ornamentation entirely composed of a flimsy nightie and cigarette smoke, through to densely layered choreographed riots of crowds whom only a rapidly travelling dolly can break up with its own fervent search for the essential subject of the sequence. 

Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova

In this case for the last two screens, the "heroine", Mae a broke prostitute whom Bill (George Bancroft) has just rescued from the New York harbor and a failed suicide attempt. The "other" woman is Lou (Olga Baclanova) who befriends Mae, with the preternatural knowledge from her own life to see the abysmal future in store for Mae. The embrace between the two women in the last two screens is one of the most moving moments in Sternberg, perhaps equalled only by Keiko's ghost appearing at the airport to honor the men returning to Japan, living and dead who shared her life on Anatahan, in that final masterpiece, 

Both George Bancroft and Betty Compson were hugely popular stars in the day in what the French used to call “alimentaire” or popular genre films, and here they’re giving startlingly nuanced performances, often with nothing more than their eyes in shots that last up to twenty seconds, creating a depth of acting so shaded no post-war 20th century acting school could have ever come near it for subtlety and expression. 

Olga Baclanova, Betty Compson

Sternberg takes Bancroft's natural physicality and directs him to play scenes often rigid or still, with just one arm or a leg moving in distraction. Elsewhere with only title cards to provide dialogue which happily Furthman has written so everyone can "get it" before it's even read, Jo gives us the central organic truth that only cinema can reveal. It's the human face, and for his entire career, everything Jo created, assembled, wrote, devised, cut, moved around and photographed was the human face. With everything else in the frame - from a bare wall, to smoke, water and birds, to massive levels of chiaroscuro and disguise, mask, feather, lattice, foliage, costume - all totally subservient to the central meaning of every shot. As he insisted, nothing in the frame is superfluous. Everything points to one meaning. 

The screens are from Criterion's reissue, finally in Blu-ray of the three great last Paramount silents first released on DVD in 2010 including Docks, Underworld (1927) and The Last Command (1928.)