Once considered one of Hollywood's premier directors, Josef von Sternberg is now remembered chiefly for his seven films with Marlene Dietrich. Actually, his main contribution to cinema is probably his handling of lighting and mise-en-scene. Sternberg (the "von" was added, as with his fellow Austrian Erich von Stroheim, to lend glamour to his name) was first and foremost a master cinematographer (the only one, in fact, who was able to use the American Society of Cinematographers credit "A.S.C." after his name on a directorial credit). He only made one color film (the unfortunate "Jet Pilot" 1957), but the rich textures of his cinematic spaces attained a color of their own; if he learned anything from the experiments of early German cinema, it was the establishment, through "expressionist" use of light and dark, of "Stimmung" (atmosphere). Even when the plot line of his film was diffuse, its stunning visuals took on a life of their own. Whether a Sternberg film is set in a small German town or an outpost in Morocco, sunny Spain or a misty Japanese island, the Russian Imperial court or the California coast, it is part of a distinct universe.
Sternberg's first films were made in Hollywood, and his very first, "The Salvation Hunters" (1925), was an immediate success. The great German actor Emil Jannings, whom Sternberg brought to the US to star in "The Last Command" (1928) as a Russian general dispossessed by the Revolution, recommended that he return to Europe to direct the film version of Heinrich Mann's "The Blue Angel" (1930). The film, Germany's first sound production, made an international star not only of Dietrich but of Sternberg himself, and the two were welcomed back to Hollywood with great fanfare, initiating a collaboration that would, in the space of five years, make film history with "Morocco" (1930), "Dishonored" (1931), "Shanghai Express" (1932), "Blonde Venus" (1932), "The Scarlet Empress" (1934) and "The Devil Is a Woman" (1935).
While "The Blue Angel," based on a literary source, employed a certain degree of realism to tell its tale of an authoritarian schoolmaster smitten with a free-spirited cabaret entertainer, the Hollywood films seem to deal with aspects of the Eternal Feminine, as personified by the sometimes glamorous and mysterious, sometimes mischievous and witty, sometimes earthy, always feisty Dietrich, whose very presence gives a decidedly feminist cast to all these films.
Of Sternberg's post-Dietrich films, three are notable: 1937's uncompleted "I, Claudius", which might have been his finest film he had not run into problems with financial backers; "The Shanghai Gesture" (1941), a delightfully dark piece of suspense and exoticism in which Gene Tierney, Ona Munson, and Victor Mature together assume the Dietrich persona; and the director's own favorite project, "The Saga of Anatahan" (1952), a poetic study of Japanese soldiers isolated on an island at the end of WWII. "Anatahan" can be seen as a virtual encyclopedia of the possibilities inherent in black-and-white cinematography.