Josef von Sternberg created self-en­closed worlds with their own rules of artistic coherence and beauty. His first film, The Salvation Hunters, stands apart from the anti-realist virtuosi­ty that made him famous later, and not only for the films that transformed George Bancroft and then Marlene Di­etrich into stars. Its story is intertwined with documenting Los Angeles in 1924: the port in San Pedro, the Plaza down­town with jobless wanderers, the still uninhabited fields of the valley. Los An­geles is not named, only abstractions: the harbor, the city, the country.

Von Sternberg and British actor George K. Arthur banked their meager assets, primarily their skills and resource­fulness, to make a film that would get them work in Hollywood. Von Sternberg directed, edited, designed the sets and created visual poetry. Arthur, the male lead, won distribution from United Art­ists and rave reviews through his friend Charles Chaplin’s endorsement. Chaplin then cast Georgia Hale, Sternberg’s “sul­len beauty”, as his glowing leading lady in The Gold Rush.

The Salvation Hunters has been called the first avant-garde feature film because of its haunting beauty and opening titles announcing “a film about thought.” But von Sternberg wasn’t aim­ing for the art-film circuit. He wanted to mainstream his conception of cinema art in the Hollywood studios.

“I had in mind a visual poem,” he wrote in his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1965). “Instead of flat lighting, shadows. In the place of pasty masks, faces in relief, plastic and deep-eyed. Instead of scenery which meant nothing, an emotionalized back­ground that would transfer itself into my foreground. Instead of saccharine char­acters, sober figures moving in rhythm… And dominating all this was an impos­ing piece of machinery: the hero of the film was to be a dredge.”

The Salvation Hunters is the story of destitute, unrelated individuals – a boy, a girl, a child – living in the shadow of this machine’s huge claw swinging back and forth scooping mud from the chan­nel. They find enough hope to leave for the city, naïve to its dangers.

Janet Bergstrom