Josef von SternbergFilmography

The Epic That Never Was

Synopsis: This British television documentary, hosted by Dirk Bogarde, is about the aborted 1937 film I Claudius. The film, directed by Josef Von Sternberg and produced by Alexander Korda with an all-star cast, was shut down after only a few weeks of filming, reportedly because of its extravagant cost. This Read More

Jet Pilot

Crew: Director

Actors: John Wayne, Janet Leigh, Jay C. Flippen, Paul Fix, Richard Rober

Synopsis: If Jet Pilot seems hopelessly out of date today, imagine how filmgoers in 1957 reacted when this relic from 1949 was taken off the shelf. Many, many years in the making due to the maniacal tinkering by producer Howard Hughes (who reportedly lost $4 million on it - a massive sum back then) Read More

Anatahan

Crew: Cinematographer, Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Akemi Negishi

Synopsis: Anatahan (aka Ana-Ta-Han) represented the apotheosis of filmmaker Josef von Sternberg's lifelong fascination with the Orient. Over a year in the making, the film was the most expensive ever made in Japan up to 1953. Based on fact, the story concerns a group of Japanese marines who refused to Read More

Macao

Crew: Director

Actors: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Thomas Gomez, Gloria Grahame

Synopsis: The tendency is to scoff at Macao as just another example of Josef von Sternberg's late-career exercises in exoticism; true, it has its problems, including a weak plot and a slightly hasty pace, but it is still an extraordinary film for its time and its personnel. The real sparkplug for the movie Read More

The Shanghai Gesture

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Gene Tierney, Victor Mature, Ona Munson, Walter Huston, Phyllis Brooks

Synopsis: Josef von Sternberg made his first return to exotic Shanghai since 1932's Shanghai Express in this baroque conflagration, based on a 1925 play by John Colton that required 30 revisions before it was sufficiently sanitized to pass muster with Hays Office censors. The film takes place in the Read More

I Take This Woman

Crew: Director

Actors: Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, Veree Teasdale, Kent Taylor, Laraine Day

Synopsis: This soapy drama stars Hedy Lamarr as a would be model who meets a research doctor en route to the US from Europe. They meet when Dr. Spencer Tracy prevents her from taking a suicidal plunge from the upper decks of the ocean liner. It seems that Lamarr had been involved with married man Kent Read More

Sergeant Madden

Crew: Director

Actors: Wallace Beery, Tom Brown, Alan Curtis, Laraine Day, Fay Holden

Synopsis: In this interesting drama, a highly respected straight-arrow Irish cop is pleased when his son follows him onto the force. Unfortunately, the son is more interested in promotions than in upholding the law and he makes few friends among his peers. When he shoots a child caught stealing, the others Read More

The King Steps Out

Crew: Director

Actors: Grace Moore, Franchot Tone, Walter Connolly, Raymond Walburn, Victor Jory

Synopsis: Josef Von Sternberg, past directorial master of movie exotica, came down to earth with The King Steps Out, a major studio musical. Set in 19th century Vienna, the plot concerns a sprightly young lady (opera star Grace Moore) who wishes to rescue her sister from marrying their cousin, the "wicked" Read More

The Devil Is a Woman

Crew: Cinematographer, Director

Actors: Marlene Dietrich, Cesar Romero, Lionel Atwill, Edward Everett Horton, Alison Skipworth

Synopsis: Director Josef Von Sternberg and his greatest discovery, Marlene Dietrich, worked together for the last time on this historical melodrama, which was a notorious and controversial box-office flop in its day. Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero), a young military officer, meets a mysterious and alluring Read More

Crime and Punishment

Crew: Director

Actors: Edward Arnold, Peter Lorre, Marian Marsh, Tala Birell, Elizabeth Risdon

Synopsis: The story goes that Peter Lorre wanted to star in a film version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, but was certain that Columbia Pictures chieftain Harry Cohn would turn the project down flat. So Lorre hired a secretary to type up a synopsis of the story in words of one syllable then Read More

The Scarlet Empress

Crew: Composer (Music Score), Director, Editor

Actors: Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser, Maria Sieber

Synopsis: Of the two 1934 film versions of the life of Russia's Catherine the Great, Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress was the most opulent and exotic. Marlene Dietrich plays the German-born Catherine, who is required to marry Russia's mad Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe, decked out in a Harpo Marx Read More

Blonde Venus

Crew: Director

Actors: Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant, Dickie Moore, Gene Morgan, Francis Sayles

Synopsis: Marlene Dietrich stars as Helen Faraday, a German cabaret singer in the States whose husband, Ned, falls ill and his only hope is to receive expensive medical treatment at a clinic in Europe. Struggling to afford his care and to support their son Johnny, she works at a nightclub and succumbs to Read More

Shanghai Express

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong, Warner Oland, Eugene Pallette

Synopsis: "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily," purrs Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express. She certainly has her well-manicured hands full with more men than she can count in this exotic far-Eastern adventure. Among her fellow passengers on the Shanghai Express are her Read More

Dishonored

Crew: Composer (Music Score), Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Marlene Dietrich, Victor McLaglen, Lew Cody, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Warner Oland

Synopsis: Contemporary viewers who go into Dishonored expecting a musty, dated espionage melodrama will be in for a surprise. Marlene Dietrich delivers a subtle and witty performance as a Viennese prostitute who offers her services as a spy during WWI. As "Agent X-27" our heroine proves invaluable to her Read More

An American Tragedy

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, Frances Dee, Irving Pichel, Frederick Burton, Emmett Corrigan

Synopsis: Though his parents are street evangelists, Clyde Griffiths (Phillips Holmes) grows up in squalor, but not without ambitions. He first works as a bellhop in Kansas City, but when he's the passenger in a car that kills a little girl, Clyde fears he'll be arrested and flees town. His wealthy uncle Read More

The Blue Angel

Crew: Director

Actors: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron, Rose Valetti, Hans Albers

Synopsis: Marlene Dietrich became an immediate international star on the strength of her performance as the temptress Lola Frohlich in Josef von Sternberg's classic tale of love and obsession. Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is a strict and humorless schoolmaster who is shocked when he discovers the Read More

Morocco

Crew: Director

Actors: Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou, Ullrich Haupt, Sr., Eve Southern, Julie Compton

Synopsis: Like so many campaigners before him, Gary Cooper joins the Foreign Legion to "forget." At a smoky cabaret in Morocco, Cooper meets café entertainer Marlene Dietrich (making her American film debut). A woman with a very checkered past, Dietrich toys with the callow Cooper, but eventually falls Read More

Thunderbolt

Crew: Director

Actors: George Bancroft, Fay Wray, Richard Arlen, Tully Marshall, Eugénie Besserer

Synopsis: Thunderbolt was Josef von Sternberg's first American talking picture. George Bancroft, a von Sternberg regular (despite frequents clashes between the two men), plays a death row inmate who may be on the eve of eternity, but who has still one more murder on his mind. He plans to kill the young Read More

Case of Lena Smith

Crew: Director

Actors: Esther Ralston, James Hall, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Emily Fitzroy, Fred Kohler

Synopsis: A lesser-known effort from director Josef Von Sternberg, The Case of Lena Smith has been unfairly chastised for all the wrong reasons. It has been branded a financial failure, but in fact its comparatively small box-office take was due to the decision by Paramount Pictures to withdraw several of Read More

The Street of Sin

Crew: Director

Actors: Emil Jannings, Fay Wray, George Kotsonaros

Synopsis: Street of Sin was the final American film of Scandinavian director Mauritz Stiller, whose inability to adapt to Hollywood (and vice versa) forced him to return to Sweden where he died, dispirited and disillusioned, not long after the release of this film. The story is set in the seamy Soho section Read More

The Docks of New York

Crew: Director

Actors: George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova, Clyde Cook, Mitchell Lewis

Synopsis: The smokily erotic ambience of Josef Von Sternberg's silent Docks of New York is best appreciated on a big theatrical screen--but only if the available print is at the very least second-generation. George Bancroft plays a two-fisted ship's stoker on shore leave. He saves Betty Compson from Read More

The Last Command

Crew: Director

Actors: Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell, Nicholas Soussanin, Michael Visaroff

Synopsis: Josef vonSternberg's The Last Command was inspired by the true story of General Lodijenski, a Russian aristocrat who arrived penniless in the US after the 1917 Revolution and who supported himself by playing movie bit parts and managing a Russian restaurant. Emil Jannings stars as the Grand Duke Read More

The Dragnet

Crew: Director

Actors: George Bancroft, Evelyn Brent, William Powell, Fred Kohler

Synopsis: The 1928 Dragnet bears no relation to the 1950s TV series of the same name. This Josef von Sternberg exercise in esoterica stars George Bancroft as tough cop Two-Gun Nolan. When he becomes convinced that he has accidentally killed his partner, Nolan goes on a bender. Actually, the crime was Read More

The Wedding March

Crew: Editor

Actors: Erich Von Stroheim, Fay Wray, George Fawcett, George Nichols, ZaSu Pitts, Maude George

Synopsis: Having alienated virtually all the major Hollywood studios, filmmaker Erich Von Stroheim turned to independent entrepreneur Pat Powers for funding for his 1927 epic The Wedding March. Set during the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg regime, the film stars director Von Stroheim as wastrelly Prince Nikki Read More

It

Crew: Director

Actors: Clara Bow, Antonio Moreno, William Austin, Jacqueline Gadsden, Julia Swayne Gordon

Synopsis: Contrary to popular belief, Clara Bow was already Paramount's biggest box-office draw when she starred in this delightful rags-to-riches comedy. But It, from the fertile mind of bizarre best-selling author Elinor Glyn, remains perhaps the quintessential Bow picture. Not that the story of a poor Read More

Underworld

Crew: Director

Actors: George Bancroft, Clive Brook, Evelyn Brent, Larry Semon, Fred Kohler

Synopsis: Underworld opens with a series of title cards setting its mood, telling of "a great city in the dead of night...streets lonely...moon clouded...buildings as empty as the cave dwellings of a forgotten age." Suddenly an explosion shatters the façade of a bank building, and the title cards announce Read More

The Exquisite Sinner

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Conrad Nagel, Renée Adorée, Paulette Duval, Frank Currier, George K. Arthur

Synopsis: Josef von Sternberg had been the original director of Exquisite Sinner, but MGM was dissatisfied with the picture and refused to release it. When the film finally surfaced in 1926 (a full year after its completion), it had been radically altered by staff director Phil Rosen. Adapted by Alice Duer Miller Read More

The Salvation Hunters

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: George K. Arthur, Georgia Hale, Bruce Guerin, Otto Matiesen, Nellie Bly Baker

Synopsis: This low-budget production -- Josef von Sternberg's first directoral effort -- earned praises from Charles Chaplin and was released by United Artists. (Chaplin also used the female lead, Georgia Hale, in The Gold Rush.) The Salvation Hunters was a highly unusual film for its era. Its moody Read More

Masked Bride

Crew: Director

Actors: Mae Murray, Francis X. Bushman, Roy D'Arcy, Basil Rathbone

Synopsis: In the 1920s, when a motion picture featured an Apache, it wasn't referring to Native Americans but to denizens of the Parisian Underworld. By the end of 1925, the Apache theme had been pretty much worn through, but the Parisian settings made a nice backdrop for Mae Murray, who was given the Read More