Von Sternberg

In Uniform

In Uniform The apparel oft proclaims the man. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet IN APRIL 1917 THE United States entered the European war. As Hollywood whipped up hatred of the Hun in its films, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and other stars toured the nation, selling bonds. In July Congress ordered the Army Signal Corps to obtain photographs and create a comprehensive pictorial history of the war. With U.S. troops already in France and General John Pershing installed in Paris, the Signal Crops hurriedly formed a Photographic Section. Moviemakers who had been peeling potatoes, drilling, or learning the workings of an Enfield rifle were whisked to Columbia University in uptown Manhattan, where the School of Military Cinematography ran a six-week course for combat cameraman and photographers. Among them was Victor Fleming, former cameraman for Douglas Fairbanks and later director of Gone with the Wind, as well as future directors Wesley Ruggles; Ernest B. Schoedsack, creator of King Kong; Henry Hathaway, who would work as von Sternberg’s assistant and second unit director on Morocco and other films; and Lev Milstein, who, as Lewis Milestone, showed war from the German side in All Quiet on the Western Front. Josef Sternberg and his brother Fred enlisted on the same day, June 5, 1917. Jo gave his profession as “lab expert” and his address as the 26 In Uniform 27 World studios; Fred was listed as “salesman” with Sternberg Brothers, 902 Broadway. Jo went to the Signal Corps, Fred to the Marine Corps. Their ready acceptance into the armed forces is surprising, given the prevailing anti-Teutonic hostility. Many actors with German names adopted something more Anglo-Saxon for the duration. Gustav von Seyffertitz, who later acted in The Docks of New York, Shanghai Express, and Dishonored, became “G. Butler Clonebaugh,” and von Sternberg’s future scriptwriter Jules Furthman used the noms de plume “Stephen Fox” and “Julius Grinnell.” But apparently an Austrian-born editor with an unrepentantly German name working at the heart of the U.S. war information effort aroused no suspicion. His posting even made the trade paper Moving Picture World, which reported, “Joe Sternberg has been stationed at Columbia University, where he will be engaged in important work connected with the preparation of a film which will be used as an aid to training recruits.” It was a milestone of sorts—his first citation in the “trades,” where he would appear with some regularity. Von Sternberg probably planted the story himself. Von Sternberg’s training films attracted attention, particularly one on the use of the bayonet. According to a 1931 profile, “officers at the cantonments had been complaining that they could order the doughboys to attend showings of these educational pictures, but they could not command them to stay awake. Von Sternberg, wholly uninhibited by censorship for once, began a lesson on the bayonet with a few feet showing what knife wounds looked like. Enthusiastic reports reached the War College; the men had stayed awake, not only during the show, but most of the night as well.”1 Fred was less fortunate. Caught in a gas attack at Belleau Wood in June 1918, he was invalided home. Subsequently the French government awarded his unit, the Fourth Brigade of Marines, a collective Croix de Guerre for courage. After the war Fred found work as a film projectionist, but he never fully recovered his health and died in 1936. In July 1915 von Sternberg was in Chicago when the steamer Eastland capsized while ferrying employees of the Western Electric Company back from a picnic, causing 844 people to die. “I wept while the bodies were carried off in truck after truck,” he wrote. Such emotion wasn’t Von Sternberg 28 typical, since he was already formulating a rebarbative personal style. Jesse Lasky Jr., son of the man who cofounded Famous Players–Lasky, remembered “a short, somewhat hunched figure, opinionated, pompous , seemingly unhumorous, introverted and vain, [who] looked like hell.”2 Much calculation went into this image. At a time when fashion favored a clean-shaven face and neatly trimmed hair, gleaming with pomade, von Sternberg wore his hair long, letting it droop over his pale forehead, conferring a poetic melancholy on his deep brown eyes. Describing him in middle age, Sergei Eisenstein wrote, “He was short, greying, with a slightly artistic haircut. He sported a greyish moustache which drooped unevenly on either side.”3...