Von Sternberg

Cardboard Continental

Cardboard Continental To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment WITH TIME ON HIS hands, von Sternberg took refuge in art, organizing an exhibition of his collection at the Los Angeles County Museum. Urged by Preston Harrison, a prominent collector and donor, the museum devoted most of its wall space in June and July to fortythree oils, fifty-five watercolors and drawings, and thirty-five sculptures. Along with works by Modigliani, Picasso, Pascin, Kandinsky, Nolde, Vlaminck, Dix, Grosz, Archipenko, and Kokoschka, the show included most of the self-portraits first displayed on the set during the making of Blonde Venus, plus work by von Sternberg protégés Peter Ballbusch and Peter Kollorsz and a painting of his own so fresh that it was initially too wet to hang. The Los Angeles Times reviewed the show respectfully, remarking that von Sternberg’s choice of art, like his films, could “aggravate some people” but that both showed “the same flair for bold adventuring in the realm of plastic form, color and movement.”1 Meanwhile, Ben Schulberg once again threw him a lifeline. Ousted from Paramount, Schulberg had signed a production deal in April 1935 with Columbia, the tightfisted but energetic organization of Harry Cohn. At the height of the furor over The Devil Is a Woman, Schul193 Von Sternberg 194 berg offered von Sternberg a two-picture contract. He accepted eagerly, though not without a sense of having come down in the world. As soon as he arrived at Columbia, von Sternberg’s fortunes became linked to those of another European émigré, Peter Lorre, whom Cohn had also signed to a two-film deal. The Hungarian-born actor bore a reputation from his theater work in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill and his starring role as the pedophile in Fritz Lang’s M. He had just appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much in London and was anxious to establish himself in Hollywood. The ideal role, he decided, would be the young killer Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It is the story of a brilliant student who, inspired by Napoleon and driven by the conviction that a superior will transcends morality, murders an old pawnbroker and her sister. Although he gets away with it, his own remorse, his love for the saintly prostitute Sonya, and the cunning of Porfiry, a policeman investigating the crime, lead him to confess. He is sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in Siberia. Sonya accompanies him, holding out some hope for redemption. Cohn had never heard of the book, so Lorre prepared a simplified summary for his benefit. After reading it, Cohn’s first question was, inevitably, “Can we get the rights?” He was delighted to hear that Dostoyevsky’s work was in the public domain. Shrewdly, Cohn offered Lorre both carrot and stick. At MGM, Karl Freund was remaking the horror story The Hands of Orlac. Lorre had been proposed, probably by Freund, to play the doctor who, catastrophically, replaces the severed hands of a pianist with those of a murderer. If Lorre agreed to be lent to MGM for the Orlac film, now called Mad Love, Cohn promised to produce Crime and Punishment, with von Sternberg directing. It must have seemed as good a deal to Lorre as it did to Cohn. The actor would be launched in the U.S. cinema in a classic text directed by a major name, and Cohn, by loaning Lorre to the wealthy MGM at a multiple of his salary, would profit substantially. Lorre was ill throughout the production with the chronic respiratory diseases that would lead to his addiction to heroin. A former student of Sigmund Freud, he strove to create a psychologically accurate portrait of Raskolnikov to rival his role as the child murderer in Lang’s Cardboard Continental 195 M. Von Sternberg, however, recognized the novel’s deficiencies as material for a commercial film. “At best it can be no more than a film about a detective and a criminal,” he said, “no more related to the true text of the novel than the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower is related to the Russian environment.” The only possible approach was to shoot it as a detective story, but one in which the murderer is...