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This masterpiece by Josef von
Sternberg belongs to the last years of silent cinema (1928), the period in
which the form, facing extinction, achieved perfection. There's no waste, no
excess, in Sternberg's production: the melodramatic plot (a ship's stoker rescues
a girl from suicide, marries her, and takes the rap for a minor crime she is
accused of) is so familiar and so desultorily presented that it's barely
perceptible, and the acting is minimal, confined to ritual gestures endlessly
repeated. Sternberg suppresses direct emotional appeal to concentrate on
something infinitely fine: a series of minute, discrete moral discoveries and
philosophical realignments among his characters. --Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader,
2013
THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK
April 4 (Friday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
(United States, 1928, 76 minutes, b/w, silent with live musical accompaniment
by Mike Schiffer)
Starring George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova
In this 1928 silent masterpiece
directed by Josef von Sternberg, a steamboat stoker working on the New York
City waterfront saves a suicidal woman who has jumped off a pier into the briny
water below. The selfless act changes his life forever.
