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Josef von Sternberg enjoys a challenge, he strolls into Borzage's turf and turns up the emotionalism using tabula-rasa models. A chiaroscuro canvas in the bowels of a freighter, smoke and grease in furnaces but also feminine hieroglyphs in a makeshift shrine, stokers stand agog before it. The outside world smolders just as much, the wharf is a cosmos distilled into wood planks and fog while The Sandbar welcomes wanderers into a rowdy welter of nets and mirrors. A lark ashore with the mariner (George Bancroft) whose hulking bulk belies svelte gesture—faced with a suicide attempt (upside-down reflection, splash, ripples), he calmly removes cap and jacket before fishing the jumper out of the slush, "no place for a lady." Leaps of despair, leaps of faith for the fatigued doll (Betty Compson), "too many good times" is the affliction yet one more might be the cure. Married doppelgängers complement the constellation, the slouching floozie (Olga Baclanova) and the lecherous engineer (Mitchell Lewis), one night and one morning to change everybody's lives. Dostoyevsky and Hogarth and O'Neill wondrously piled, a film of famous perfections. A reckless wedding, suddenly a reason to care, the impulse behind the Sternberg mask. "Save your soul and your money," dour Hymn-Book Harry (Gustav von Seyffertitz) trudges into the saloon, glares at the cackling audience, and recognizes the wounded need in the bride's eyes. Two crumpled bills at dawn are enough for the groom ("One ship's as good as another, Chief. Any port in a storm"), a crime of passion and a torn pocket delay his departure. (Amid the hurly-burly, a piercing exchange of glances between women as one of them steps into a police wagon.) The rudder in the tavern, Lautréamont's "lèvres tatouées," the tear-soaked needle. Carné is the inheritor with Quai des Brumes, the courtroom at the close is very much a movie theater. Cinematography by Harold Rosson. With Clyde Cook, May Foster, Guy Oliver, and George Irving. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |