It’s odd to think of Josef von Sternberg, the masterly stylist and visual poet of degradation, as a political filmmaker, but his 1935 romp through the erotic tangles of turn-of-the-century Spain, “The Devil Is a Woman” (which I discuss in this clip)—a pinnacle of visual style, which he assured by working as his own cinematographer, and his last film with Marlene Dietrich, whose allure he discovered and first exalted in “The Blue Angel”—plays like a rude awakening experienced and delivered in the face of mounting menace. In his sharp, salty autobiography, “Fun in a Chinese Laundry,” Sternberg (he added the “von” as a nom de caméra; his given name was Jonas), calls the film his “salute to the Spanish people,” who, of course, were about to endure a civil war (that prequel to the Second World War) and the resulting Franco dictatorship.
The story concerns a Republican activist who, facing arrest, returns home on a clandestine trip from Paris and meets a woman (Dietrich) who tempts him to compromise his mission. And it foreshadows, with a poignant prescience, the famous riff from “Casablanca”: “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” It’s worth recalling that Sternberg’s first feature, from 1924, “The Salvation Hunters,” is often called the first independent film; I’ve never seen it, but it’s described as a grimly realistic drama of urban life; his 1928 film, “The Last Command” (for which the titanic Emil Jannings won the first Academy Award for Best Actor), is set against and in the wake of the Russian Revolution; his 1941 proto-noir drama, “The Shanghai Gesture,” suggests the desperate search for refuge from Europe; and his famously unfinished adaptation of “I, Claudius,” starring Charles Laughton (surviving footage is preserved in the documentary “The Epic that Never Was”), from 1937, resounds like a response to the bloodthirsty tyrannies that were shaking the world.
