From Underworld, Josef von Sternberg, 1927
QUITE a nifty picture, of course. I was hardly surprised at how much Scarface it’s got in it, but slightly surprised at how much Rio Bravo. von Sternberg and Hawks—you could hardly imagine more dissimilar directors, I guess, but the connective tissue here is of course Ben Hecht. (There’s a bit more connective tissue, too, but we’ll save that for another time.) I watched this as part of a Hecht study—I’m midway through his epic autobiography now, and something’s brewing. Anyway, this bit of dialogue, uttered by Evelyn Brent (hubba hubba cubed) as “Feathers” (toldja bout the Rio Bravo thing), struck me. I do enjoy a drift now and again, myself.
Cool! A relative very kindly gave me the Sternberg box for Christmas, but I haven’t had a chance to break it open yet– this beautifully evocative title card really makes me need to do so right away.
You’re in for a treat, Brian. I got the set while my plasma display was broken, and I was almost in physical pain over not being able to see this properly for so long. Now I’m savoring it, it’s SO wonderful…
Damn. I really should have picked this up at the last B&N sale. Since watching Murnau’s SUNRISE a few months ago, I feel a connection, or potential connection, to silent films I haven’t had before, but wanted to. This set sounds like a perfect way to keep that going.
Aw, Bill, “Underworld” is so directly up your alley it’s not even funny. The ur-text of gangster movies, as they’d say in some film appreciation class. And “Last Command?” Forget it. You need this. Put it on a wish list or something!
I know! I’ll…I’m working on it.
Glenn, did you know that Brent is the one-armed Satan worshipper in THE SEVENTH VICTIM?
Glenn, I really relate. The Sternberg set became available right as my old DVD player abruptly became non-functional. Spent some time looking for the new one because I wanted something all-region this time, and meantime I bought the Sternberg set and it sat there for a long time waiting.
So when I could finally play it I also started with UNDERWORLD and am looking forward to getting back to the other two with keen anticipation. This was just such a pleasure.
Did you read Hecht’s original story that is included? The first thing he wrote for movies–of course it’s brilliant and suggests the characters, milieu and story that are all there in the movie. And yet Sternberg transformed it and really made it his own, sculpting the three main characters into more of a true triangle through nuances and a wealth of visual touches. I don’t think
Josef von S cared particularly about gangsters and certainly didn’t know that reality the way Hecht did. But what he understood and what suffuses every image is the film’s internal reality, which is actually even more fascinating–what goes on in gesture, attitude, expression and suppression of emotion. I think he recognized this was an opportunity that could help him commercially but be fully artistic as well–and it certainly did the trick. No surprise either that he worked with all three of the leading actors again.
Glenn, isn’t this bit of dialogue from Jules Furthmann?
Who wrote for the von and Hawks of course, many the same of same times.
@ David: Actually, it’s Charles Furthman, Jules’ brother, who’s credited with “adaptation.” Robert N. Lee also gets that credit, while George Marion is credited with “Titles.” Hecht’s credit is for story. Hawks himself claimed pretty intimate involvement in “Underworld” to interviewer Joseph McBride for “Hawks on Hawks,” but Todd McCarthy breaks that down as a Hawksian tall tale in his biography of the director. But of course the Hecht-Furthman connection is another Subject For Further Research. I remember my jaw dropping while watching the Hecht-penned “The Iron Petticoat,” thinking, “Good God, this is the same picture as ‘Jet Pilot,’ ” “Pilot” of course having been written by Jules Furthman for von Sternberg. Haven’t gotten to Furthman in Hecht’s autobiography yet, though…
@Kent: I had not put that together, no. I’ll take any pretext to look at “The Seventh Victim” again, though, now that you mention it!…
Apparently it is possible to see von Sternberg and Hawks as similar. This passage from Todd McCarthy’s Hawks biography has stuck in my mind because it both fascinated and puzzled me:
“… Hawks was actually the most stylized Hollywood director this side of Josef von Sternberg, with whom he had more in common than anyone imagined at the time. At their best Hawks’ films, like Sternberg’s conveyed a beautifully wrought philosophy of life entirely through action, embodied in characters who enact certain behavioristic rituals in a remote setting artfully detached from the real world.”
@bill – I just showed my wife SUNRISE over the weekend (she loved it, cried even – s’why I married her) and MODERN TIMES on New Year’s Day and have similar feelings.
Not to go off-topic, but the dog jumping in the lake in the first third of SUNRISE *instantly* reminded me of the dog jumping into the river in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, taking me back to Glenn’s “inheritors of F.W. Murnau” line in his TRUE GRIT review. Of course, it could be purely coincidental, but it was enough to make me wonder.
Nonetheless, count me among those who need to dig into the von Sternberg set.
I remember wondering whether Hawks and Hecht had imagined the relationship between John Barrymore and Carole Lombard in TWENTIETH CENTURY, at least in part, as a parody or parallel (or something) of the strangely codependent partnership between Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. I haven’t found anything to substantiate this pet theory (and the character played by Barrymore in the film was modeled on Belasco in the source play) but the timing and tone are still enough to tickle my spider-sense.
@Chris O – Speaking of the Coens, and Hecht and von Sternberg: “Drift” appears in this same slang usage periodically during MILLER’S CROSSING. Which has got me to wondering, too.
“Glenn, did you know that Brent is the one-armed Satan worshipper in THE SEVENTH VICTIM?
@Kent: I had not put that together, no. I’ll take any pretext to look at “The Seventh Victim” again, though, now that you mention it!…”
Something extra casting-wise (though sadly not von Sternberg related) that may be interesting to note when looking at Seventh Victim (and which I only learnt from the Kim Newman and Alan Jones commentary on the UK disc of Suspiria) is that one of the actors playing the suspicious ‘drunks’ handling the body of Irving August in the subway car later turns up in Dario Argento’s Inferno as the architect again in service of a coven of witches!
Dan: As many times as I’ve seen TWENTIETH CENTURY (both the movie and the play), I’ve never made the equation to Sternberg and Dietrich–but it absolutely makes sense…and given his mostly-downward trajectory after they split, it could even be considered prophetic.