This three-disc set features a trio of silent films directed by Josef Von Sternberg.  Titles include Underworld (1927), The Last Command (1928) and The Docks of New York (1928).  The box set also includes a 96-page booklet, filled with photographs and essays dealing with the director’s work.

CRITIQUE

Josef Von Sternberg is probably best remembered as the director who discovered and “created” Marlene Dietrich.  He directed her in The Blue Angel, Morocco and several other films.

Von Sternberg, however, was much more than Dietrich’s collaborator.  He was one of the cinema’s most influential directors.  His unique visual style and unconventional use of lighting and shadows anticipates the film noir work of Anthony Mann, Edward Dmytryk and other top directors of the genre, as well as Orson Welles.

Sadly, with the exception of the Dietrich movies, most of Von Sternberg’s sound pictures are virtually forgotten.  His gift as a director was in creating an all-encompassing atmosphere through his visuals, not in his abilities as a storyteller.  Indeed, much of his work in the 1930s and 1940s is dramatically inept.

The three silent films in this collection are, arguably, the director’s finest work, yet two of them suffer from an actor who does not seem to understand the word “subtlety”.

George Bancroft, best known to today’s audiences for his performance as “Curley,” the sheriff, in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), stars in both Underworld and The Docks of New York.

In Underworld, one of Hollywood’s first ventures into the gangster film, Bancroft plays the boisterous head of a gang of crooks who befriends a down-on-his-luck lawyer (Clive Brook) with an alcohol problem.  Unfortunately, Bancroft’s lady (the lovely Evelyn Brent) and the lawyer fall for each other, which motivates Bancroft, facing execution for killing a rival mob boss, to break out of prison and seek revenge.

Underworld is a fairly involving, fast-paced story that, despite a few awkward moments, still works today.  The key problem is that Bancroft’s acting style is so over-the-top, compared to the other actors, that it’s like they’re performing in two different pictures.

His performance is even more obnoxious in The Docks of New York, in which Von Sternberg does a magnificent job of recreating the New York waterfront, circa 1900.

This movie is supposed to be a gentle love story about a ship’s stoker (Bancroft) and his relationship with an attractive waif (Betty Compson), who he rescues after she attempts to drown herself.

Compson is absolutely charming, one of the most talented actresses of the silent cinema.  But, Bancroft is such a brute, the kind of guy who would rather punch you in the nose than say “Hello,” that one has to wonder why Betty would ever agree to marry him, even if he did save her life.

The best overall movie in this set is The Last Command, which won star Emil Jannings the first Best Actor Academy Award.  This engrossing story, told primarily in flashback, has Jannings cast as a former Russian general, cousin to the Czar, who was forced to flee his native country at the start of the 1917 revolution, and now (in 1928) works as a movie extra in Hollywood.

Evelyn Brent co-stars as a revolutionist with whom Jannings falls in love and William Powell plays a former revolutionary leader, imprisoned by Jannings in 1917, who becomes a top Hollywood director and hires Emil in order to get some measure of revenge.

Jannings may have been the greatest character actor of his day, but he, according to Von Sternberg (supposedly a major egomaniac himself), was impossible to deal with.  When his Hollywood career ended with the coming of sound, Jannings returned to his home country of Germany where he became a minion of Hitler.  According to legend, at the end of World War II when Allied troops were patrolling the streets of Berlin, Jannings was seen holding his Oscar statuette and begging the soldiers not to shoot him.

THE VIDEO

All three films have been restored and are full screen.  There is still some apparent damage, but considering their age, they look pretty good.

THE AUDIO

The Mono Sound has a minimum of distortion, and viewers are give a choice of two accompanying music scores with which to watch the films.

THE EXTRAS

The set includes two, somewhat dry, visual essays by film scholars, plus a 1968 Swedish television interview with Von Sternberg.

FINAL THOUGHT