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Cézanne has his geometric apple, Char marvels at "l'énergie disloquante de la poésie," Josef von Sternberg sets out "to photograph thought." The harbor sets the eloquently squalid stage, doleful strays and rusty leviathans drifting in the void. In the world of archetypal abstraction, the lad (George K. Arthur) is somewhere between "the Children of Mud" and "the Children of the Sun," the girl (Georgia Hale) is a hard-bitten survivor impaling suitors with a sidelong glance. Add a tiny orphan (Bruce Guerin) and a black feline, and the makeshift clan of "Flotsam, Jetsam and Company" poses for a deadpan Human Condition poster. Admirably foregrounding the machinery of symbolism, the film posits God's hand as a steam-dredge's iron maw, laboriously sliding across the screen and dipping into the waters for endless helpings of sludge. ("For every load of mud the claw dislodged, the earth laughed and pushed in another.") The trajectory out of the ooze and into the sky, no rush. The approach is pictorial first and foremost, but a pictorialism cracked by emotion: A maritime vista broken by ropes and pipes, a smoky cityscape divided by diagonal wires, figures posed against a blank wall near a gaping fissure. The dandified pimp (Otto Matieson) and the fallen dame in the soiled kimono (Nellie Bly Baker) embody the Big City, where Hale rents herself to ward off starvation while Arthur pantomimes visions of ludicrous luxury. "Who put you in charge of my morals," she snaps at the seaman, who finally eats his spinach and defeats his foe behind a sign reading "Here Your Dreams Come True." Antonioni's largo rhythm three decades early, the sorrowing port recalled by Visconti (La Terra Trema). It ends on a note of uplift effectively mocked by every subsequent Sternberg film. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |