Von Sternberg

Family Ties

Family Ties The Father a Cop . . . The Son a Killer. —Publicity line for Sergeant Madden EVEN THOUGH THE DEVIL Is a Woman effectively terminated von Sternberg’s career as a filmmaker of the first rank, it inaugurated the growth of his legend. Of the personalities with whom he was most often compared during the 1920s and 1930s, Murnau had died in a 1931 car accident. Pabst refused to risk his reputation on the international scene and made a succession of negligible if exotic program films for the Continental market. Reinhardt would die in a New York hotel room in 1943, having achieved nothing of note in exile. Although Eisenstein survived until 1948, his last works, Bezhin Meadow and Ivan the Terrible II: The Boyars’ Plot, were suppressed by Stalin and never released in his lifetime. Meanwhile, von Stroheim spiraled down into character acting, feeding on the legend of his mutilated directorial masterpieces. Von Sternberg alone commanded the moral high ground. Refusing to concede his role as the great artist, he accepted occasional journeyman work, but only on his own terms, abandoning a project when it fell below his standards—which it invariably did. If each new encounter added to the list of his enemies and reduced even further the chances of serious work, he regarded that as no more than the price one had to pay. In 1938 MGM imported French director Julien Duvivier to make The 220 Family Ties 221 Great Waltz, vaguely based on the life of “waltz king” Johann Strauss the younger. He started shooting in May with a cast that included Luise Rainer, Fernand Gravey, and Estonian soprano Miliza Korjus (pronounced “gorgeous,” as MGM’s publicists helpfully pointed out). At the end of June, Duvivier returned to France, unaware that, almost immediately , MGM assigned Victor Fleming to reshoot many sequences. The film was too dark, the studio executives said, both visually and in its political references, and Korjus was deemed “brittle.” Fleming called in von Sternberg to direct the complicated conclusion, described by Michael Sragow as “a montage of Strauss’s melodies winning the hearts of waltzers across the Continent and beyond as his sheet music pours off the presses.” According to Gravey and Dorothy Barrett, who plays a dancer from Spain in these scenes, von Sternberg did “all the montage shots . . . all the little intricate shots and trick shots.”1 He finished work on The Great Waltz in September, and in October MGM offered him another job. Following a pattern that had become tediously familiar, he was hired specifically for his expertise in photographing actresses, in this case, fellow Austrian Hedy Lamarr. She had been under contract to MGM for some time, but no project had satisfied Louis B. Mayer, who had taken a personal interest in her Hollywood debut. By chance, another producer became responsible for Lamarr’s first onscreen role in the United States. Charles Boyer met Lamarr at a party and persuaded Walter Wanger, to whom he was under contract, to borrow her to star her opposite him in Algiers, a remake of the French crime melodrama Pepe Le Moko. Wanger and Mayer negotiated a deal under which Lamarr would appear in Algiers and Boyer agreed to play Napoleon in MGM’s lackluster Conquest, with Greta Garbo as his Polish lover Marie Walewska. Lamarr was electric in Algiers as the thrill-seeking Parisian beauty who proves to be the downfall of gangster Boyer, and MGM producers pressed Mayer to cast her immediately as a femme fatale in a thriller set in some atmospheric and exotic locale. Mayer hired von Sternberg as director, with orders to make Lamarr over, using Dietrich as the model. However, Mayer chose the unrepentantly domestic New York Cinderella as the vehicle and, as her screen lover, the all-American Everyman Spencer Tracy. The story originated with Charles MacArthur, Von Sternberg 222 with some help from Ben Hecht. Tracy plays a public-spirited New York doctor who, returning by liner from the Yucatan, prevents jilted fashion model Lamarr from jumping overboard. Back in New York, they marry, and she joins him in his slum clinic, until memories of the married man who dumped her tempt her back to the high life. Mayer interfered constantly, even correcting the way Tracy read his lines. He receives no screen credit, but this may be the only film personally produced by the studio head. For her part, Lamarr still...