Von Sternberg

Over There

Over There How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)? —Song by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis, 1918 BY THE TIME THE war ended with the armistice of November 1918, von Sternberg had left the Army War College and was attached to the Medical Corps in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t demobilized until 1919, and then only after William Brady intervened. He found the film industry much changed. In 1916 Brady had forced Lewis Selznick out of World and switched to stage-bound melodramas that exploited his Broadway connections. These proved so unpopular that he sold his interest back to Selznick in 1918, having lost millions for his backers and instilled a caution about investing in the cinema that persists on Wall Street today. With World nearly defunct, von Sternberg looked for other work in New York but had little success. Some of the French artists and technicians from Fort Lee were back in Paris, but Émile Chautard remained. He hired von Sternberg as his assistant on the 1919 adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s detective story The Mystery of the Yellow Room and let him direct a few scenes. In August 1920 he worked for two weeks as assistant on Twisted Souls, a country house murder melodrama directed by George Kelson, a former World director who frequently worked as assistant to Harley Knoles. Stage magician Howard Thurston appeared 32 Over There 33 in the film as an upright Western spiritualist who unmasks the methods of fake mediums from India. Von Sternberg also received credit (as “Jo Sternberg”) as assistant to Wallace Worsley (later director of The Hunchback of Notre Dame) on The Highest Bidder, released in 1921. It marked his first meeting with actor Lionel Atwill, his alter ego in The Devil Is a Woman. With the industry migrating west, von Sternberg turned to Hollywood , which was flourishing as the public developed a taste for spacious action films. Unwilling to pay for a sleeping berth on the train, he sat up for the entire five-day journey, sustained by sandwiches. But Los Angeles proved no paradise. After New York, with its teeming crowds, public transport, and easy access, the emptiness disquieted him. He saw “only a barren village, [and] after a week of walking along empty streets lined with eucalyptus trees, not having seen a single soul connected with films, I made my way back again.” War had shattered the cinemas of Germany and France, allowing the U.S. industry, fat on three years free of competition, to devour most continental theater chains, production facilities, and talent. Any European director or performer of conspicuous ability quickly received an invitation from Hollywood. All the same, von Sternberg felt a greater affinity with European methods than American ones, and he crossed the Atlantic on a cattle boat in 1921. He went straight to Vienna, visiting the city six times that year. On each occasion he lived at Gartnerstrasse 9, listing his profession as “film director.” (The apartment apparently belonged to a relative, since he also stayed there in 1925.) He looked up his old teacher Karl Adolph, who had won a late reputation for his writing. No doubt pleased to be described by his ex-pupil as “an old-fashioned man who knows [the Viennese] better than any man alive today,”1 Adolph authorized him to make an English version of his 1914 Tochter, a series of stories about working-class life that reflected his years spent as a housepainter. On May 24 von Sternberg called on Arthur Schnitzler, but overcome with nerves, he couldn’t stop talking. Schnitzler had to remind his visitor that he had come to hear the thoughts of the author of Reigen and Traumnovelle, not vice versa. “But,” von Sternberg said, “he told me he had never listened to such a cultured and interesting talk.” For the rest of his life, an inscribed photograph Von Sternberg 34 of Schnitzler hung in his office. Of his boldly sexual plays and tales, he said, Schnitzler “was the first one to give me artistic courage.” From Austria he went to England, where he bought a Triumph motorcycle and crashed it, breaking a kneecap. Looking for work, he gravitated to the Alliance Film Corporation, formed by advertising entrepreneur Sir David Higham. Its fourth production, an adaptation of the opera The Bohemian Girl, was being directed by Harley Knoles...