Josef von Sternberg

  • Jet Pilot (1957)

    Jet Pilot (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) Can a film be fascinating for all of the wrong reasons? Of course. Take Jet Pilot, for instance—starting with being far more interesting for its production than for what appeared on-screen. On its own, it’s a bad movie. The premise blends Cold War thrills with romance in what may be one of the worst ways to go about it—featuring John Wayne as a fighter pilot who is asked to seduce an attractive Russian pilot who has defected to the United States. While the film drapes itself in the nuts-and-bolts realism of circa-1950 American fighter jets in luscious colour cinematography, the spy-caper plot itself doesn’t make a shred of sense. The casting alone is ludicrous: I don’t like John Wayne, and he’s completely wrong here as an ace pilot lusting after twenty-year-his-junior Janet Leigh, who’s also badly miscast at the Russian defector. A badly written script leads to titters of amusement, as, in the words of a better film critic than I, “the planes enjoy a more active sex life than the human beings”. Jet Pilot becomes increasingly more ludicrous as it goes on, and the miscast pair ensures that we’re less charmed than relieved that it’s all over by the end. But things become far more interesting once you hit the film’s Wikipedia page and start reading about the incredible production and post-production odyssey of the film. The legendary Chuck Yeager was a stunt pilot for the film. Josef von Sternberg directed some of the film but not all of it. Producer Howard Hugues, clearly lusting after the success of his earlier aviation films, spent no ness than seven years editing the final film—By the time the film appeared on screens in 1957, some footage was seven years old, and the US Air Force had moved on to another generation of planes. Much of that is irrelevant to twenty-first century audiences, but it explains part of why the film was a commercial and critical dud upon release even with some really interesting colour footage of US fighter planes. I like aviation just a bit too much not to find the entire thing interesting, but I would have liked Jet Pilot a lot more with different actors and a script that actually tried to be halfway plausible.

  • Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930)

    Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Anyone getting pulled into serious film history will eventually watch films not for their entertainment value, but because of their historical importance, however loosely defined that can be. In the case of The Blue Angel, the film is most often cited as being important for being the first German full-length sound picture, and perhaps more importantly featuring Marlene Dietrich in her first big-screen role. Much has also been written about the very close relationship between Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg—there’s clearly a near-voyeuristic quality to the film as it captures her cabaret act. It’s all meant to be sexy, but for a very narrow definition of it—and since I’m neither a big fan of Dietrich nor the androgynous look she often sported, the effect is somewhat lost. It doesn’t help that The Blue Angel plays like a warning against the siren call of her appeal—our poor protagonist goes from being a respected teacher to a miserable cuckolded cabaret clown throughout the entire film. I found Dietrich far more interesting in the later Shanghai Run, or the much later Witness for the Prosecution, but hey—this is an imposed viewing. I’m not any fonder of the film’s mortally slow pacing, in which roughly a minute’s worth of plot takes ten minutes to complete—the film may have been with sound, but it kept the pacing problems of the silent era. None of this was helped by a terrible viewing experience: the film I watched had major, major sound issues, with sound interruptions and major crackling issues to the point where I muted the film. When I turned it back on later during the film, the broadcast was entirely silent. I’d normally blame the broadcast, but this was on Turner Classic Movies, which takes great care to show movies in the best available format. No matter where or how or why, I didn’t get much out of The Blue Angel other than a sense that I could cross it off my list and be done with it.

  • Shanghai Express (1932)

    Shanghai Express (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2018) There’s a remarkable amount of exoticism on display in Shanghai Express, which follows a few characters are they board a train from Pekin to Shanghai and get caught up in the Chinese civil war. Trains are good for taking characters a long way while remaining in manageable locations, and so the movie does feel far more expansive than its limited sets suggest. (Although there is one notable outdoors sequence showing the train leaving Pekin.)  Notably helmed by Josef von Sternberg before the Hays Code crackdown began, Shanghai Express features a courtesan as heroine, opium dealing, forced sex, civil war dealings and one big murder. Marlene Dietrich is spectacular as the morally compromised “Shanghai Lily”, with a then-rare leading role for Asian-American performer Anna May Wong. While the first half of the film is a bit melodramatic and seems content to see its ensemble cast just chat away, the film gets far more interesting as a thriller once the train is stopped by government forces and the characters are kicked out of their comfortable berths. Great cinematography helps propel a morally ambiguous subject matter that still feels decently modern. It wraps up satisfyingly, which is true for the film as a whole: Made in 1932 but almost just as interesting today, Shanghai Express is a welcome reminder that the basics of cinema were all understood even as early as the early thirties.