The Salvation Hunters

Josef von Sternberg, in his first effort producing and directing a feature film, made a sort of resume movie demonstrating his cinematic skills. He financed half of the relatively cheap $5,000 production costs, the other half bankrolled by the movie's main actor, George Arthur. The two premiered the film, "The Salvation Hunters," in New York City in February 1925 amid scathing criticism. A subsequent nationwide showing also fell flat.

But as writer Henry Adams noted, it's not the amount of people who see an artist's work; the importance lies with those who have influence to appreciate it. Charlie Chaplin heard of the young Sternberg film and arranged for a private showing to his United Artists Corporation partners, including Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. They loved it, especially Chaplin. It launched the career of one of the most highly regarded directors in cinema, largely known for his composition and lighting techniques in film.

Born in Austria and educated in New York City before dropping out of high school, Jonas Sternberg, who changed his name to Josef at 17 and adding von to give him a little image panache, entered the film world in 1911. As a projectionist handling and cleaning up film stock for movie studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he rose up the ranks at the World Film Company as a chief assistant, editor and composer of inter titles. During the Great War he made training films in Washington, D. C.

After the war, he soaked up the European cinematic style in his trips overseas. He worked as an assistant under director Emile Chautard. Sternberg credits Chautard in lending him invaluable lessons on film composition, leaving a huge imprint on his life's work. He continued assisting and editing other American and European productions before he and actor Arthur jumped in to make his debut feature, "The Salvation Hunters."

"I had in mind a visual poem," Sternberg recalled. "Instead of flat lighting, shadows. In the place of pasty masks, faces in relief, plastic and deep-eyed." His lingering shots on his characters reveal a "psychological conflict rather than physical action." The film, lending an "unglamorous realism" onto the screen, is set in a dingy waterfront harbor and the rundown district of the seaside city. A Boy (Arthur) sees a Brute (Olaf Hytten) beat up a little orphaned Child (Bruce Guerin), but is afraid to intercede until a Girl (Georgia Hale) shames him on his inaction. Boy scoops up the Child along with the Girl to walk to the city, where the Boy is confronted with an aggressive Man (Otto Matieson). The Girl sees if the latest confrontation could motivate the Boy to kick some butt.

Chaplin was so captivated by actress Georgia Hale he slotted her into his next feature, 1925's 'The Gold Rush.' The comedian also incorporated the finale of "The Salvation Hunters" by using its 'walk into the sunset' conclusion into a few of his future films.

For the 30-year-old Sternberg, "The Salvation Hunters" was successful for its original purpose. United Artists bought the movie for $20,000, more than recouping the costs for the director and Arthur. More importantly, it opened the door to Sternberg for an eight-film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer later in the year.

The UCLA archives have a restored print of this film; they seem to have put more effort into it than the original director did.

Josef von Sternberg was an extremely pretentious man (the "von" was an affectation, and in his autobiography he lied about his reasons for using it), but he was also an exceedingly talented director. "The Salvation Hunters" was his directorial debut, filmed on a tiny budget as a showcase for his pictorial talents. Shortly after the formation of United Artists, three of its shareholders - Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford - attended a screening of "The Salvation Hunters" and were impressed enough to bankroll this film for general release. This was during the period when Gilbert Seldes and other highbrow critics were trumpeting Chaplin as an intellectual, so (purely on Chaplin's endorsement) "The Salvation Hunters" got a lot of highbrow attention which it didn't deserve. After the film flopped, Chaplin claimed that he had deliberately praised a bad movie just to fool all the critics. Sure, Charlie.

"The Salvation Hunters" is a SLOW film, very depressing, about a bunch of people who live in shanties in the California mud flats and have almost nothing to eat. There are many, many, MANY shots of a steam-dredger, scooping up gollops of mud, and moving them from one place to another. This is meant to be deeply symbolic of life's utter hopelessness, boo-hoo. In the movie's intertitles, all the characters in this melodrama are given allegorical names: The Boy, The Girl, The Child, The Brute. This practice was fairly common in silent days, but in "The Salvation Hunters" it's worse than usual. Eventually the Boy has to stand up to the Brute. Guess who wins.

George K. Arthur gives a fairish performance as the Boy. The Scottish-born Arthur later attained a measure of stardom in the late silent-film era, notably as one half of a comedy team opposite Karl Dane. When talkies arrived, George K. Arthur's Aberdonian accent limited his range of roles, and he moved into subsidiary parts and production work.

The depiction of poverty in "The Salvation Hunters" is so inept as to be laughable. In one scene, three people attempt to make a dinner out of one stick of chewing-gum! This is the sort of thing that Chaplin lampooned so well in "The Gold Rush". Both of these films have the same leading lady: Georgia Hale. She gives an inert performance in "The Salvation Hunters", but her good looks probably inspired Chaplin to cast her in "The Gold Rush", in which she gave a much better performance. It doesn't help "The Salvation Hunters" that all of the actors look too well-fed to be playing people on the brink of starvation. Otto Matieson acts like a walking statue: maybe he thought he was performing in a "Golem" movie.

Some of the frame compositions in "The Salvation Hunters" are excellent, and the film has some interest as early evidence of von Sternberg's great talent. But this movie is slow, slow, SLOW. I could chop 25 minutes out of this film without losing any of the story. I'll rate 2 points out of 10 for "The Salvation Hunters", mostly for Arthur's performance which shows some evidence of his acting ability.

I caught this on YouTube of all places and the copy was quite decent, with an appropriate musical score on a theater organ to accompany it. The inter-titles in the beginning set the tone - incorrectly - of a pretentious talk-a-thon but soon the images took over and Sternberg was able to show the world just how wonderfully talented he was with his camera. The enormous dredge seen throughout the beginning made a powerful statement. Its very size dwarfed the players and its angles provided an abstract geometry not seen in many films of the day. The purpose of this huge machine, as we are shown, was to scrape out mud which would subsequently fall back into the depths where it was found - further implying the uselessness of life for the protagonists. This initial feeling and their eventual "escape" to another world was essentially the plot. I enjoyed seeing this very much. It was one of the last films of the director I hadn't seen and I wasn't disappointed.

There are many, many silent films where one wishes one had a fuller and/or better copy by which to judge the film. There are however a handful where one wishes one had a less "perfect" copy.

The Informer (1929 version) was for instance made both as a silent film and as part talkie and for a long time the part-talkie version was thought to the lost. Now it has been rediscovered and the silent version seems to have disappeared. It is interesting (historically) to have the part-talkie, but the dubbing of the voices is so atrocious that it completely spoils the films. What one really wants to watch is the silent version.

The same is true for rather different reasons of Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters. If only one had this without the pretentious foreword or any of the intertitles, this would be a very charming little film if not really a masterpiece. But the intertitles (not a single word of which is necessary) are just awful, needlessly underlining the symbolism (and making it therefore seem more irritating than interesting) and written in a style that is absolutely nauseating. So here it would be much better to have an imperfect version which simply retained the images.

In this case one could, with a it of an effort, re-edit oneself but alas it is not possible with The Informer just to turn off the sound because one needs the intertitles that were present in the silent version.

If silent films survived to be re-released during the "sound" era, they were often sadly marred by the addition of sound, colour and unnecessary titling (on the theory presumably that audiences used to sound would lack the necessary concentration required for visual understanding). Some of the worst examples of this are the films of haplin, who seemed incapable of leaving well alone and would add his own overly-sentimental musical compositions and unnecessary (and unfunny) titles (he had absolutely no talent in this regard. It is again a case where the last thing one wants is the director's "final cut".

Sternberg was in many ways a pretentious man (certainly a highly conceited one) but he was not normally pretentious in this manner. He is in fact on record as saying that the use of language was the worst means of communicating and in his best films was an adept of the "unspoken" (Morocco is for me the finest example in that particular respect).

The verbosity in this film is therefore very uncharacteristic and reminds far more of Chaplin (the Chaplin for instance of Limelight). I would not be at all surprised if some day it is discovered that it was Chaplin who advised Sternberg to include so much tiresome verbiage, advice that Sternberg would have had at the time compelling reasons to accept.

Just watched this film and I'm not sure what to think. There was a sliver of biography preceding the film that talked about George K. Arthur approaching Josef von Sternberg with $6,000 to make a film. They assembled a cast of "unknowns" that included Georgia Hale, Otto Matieson, Bruce Guerin, Nellie Bly Baker.

Von Sternberg fashioned a story about life with the harbor dredge acting as a symbol of life's futility as it gouges up harbor mud even as the shore crumbles back into the sea.

The Boy, The Girl and The Child leave the harbor and go to the city where they are immediately set upon by The Man who tries to press The Girl into prostitution. He already has The Woman in another room, seemingly a prisoner.

After a failed tryst, The Man thinks that maybe a trip to the country will make The Girl more pliable but he has to take everyone along. They stop at a development site that boasts something like DREAMS ARE MADE HERE. When The Child gets in the way of The Man's advances, he starts beating the kid so that The Boy comes to his rescue, finds his own manhood, and trounces the cad. The three walk away into the sunset and "to the sun."

So the whole films acts as a metaphor of man coming out of the primordial ooze with the ultimate goal of going "to the sun."

Not very arty for a von Sternberg film, especially the grimy San Pedro harbor scenes, and despite a few nice close-ups of Georgia Hale, this almost has the look and feel of a documentary but with pretensions.

The bio tells us that Chaplin saw this (Nellie Bly Baker had been his secretary and had appeared in a few of his films) and was impressed. He brought it to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford who loved it and distributed the film through UA, thus making von Sternberg's career in America.

The question remains: exactly what did these 3 giants see in this film?