to his denial of credit to the more important collaborators, von Sternberg remained loyal to these performers and even inserted a panel into the credits of The Shanghai Gesture, praising its “large cast of HOLLYWOOD EXTRAS, who, without expecting credit or mention, stand ready day and night to do their best—and who at their best are more than good enough to deserve mention.” Claiming that such people made up the cast of The Salvation Hunters was a good story, but untrue. Arthur was thoroughly experienced, and Robert McIntyre, an MGM casting director, helped out by recommending other talented and reliable candidates. Olaf Hytten, a fellow Scot who played a deckhand (“The Brute”), had twenty films to his credit. Otto Matiesen, aka “The Man” (or, more accurately, “The Pimp”) who lures “The Girl” into prostitution, played Napoleon in Ballin’s Vanity Fair. Even six-year-old Bruce Guerin (“The Child”) had appeared in a dozen movies. In the least likely piece of casting, “The Woman,” drab companion of “The Man” and, by implication, a whore (an intertitle describes her as having “fallen as low as her stockings,” signaling a “fallen woman”), was played by Nellie Bly Baker. She was Charlie Chaplin’s secretary but took acting roles on the side, notably as a stern-faced masseuse in A Woman of Paris. Her involvement with Arthur suggests that she was his mole in the Chaplin organization.
The only true newcomer was his star. Georgia Hale, a nineteen-year-old “dress extra” he’d met on Vanity’s Price. Impressed by her “sullen charm,” he’d lent her Daughters of Vienna and promised her a great future. Possibly they became lovers, although Hale’s sentimental memoirs, Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups, insist the relationship was platonic, with Sternberg a solicitous friend, urging her to read more, and fretting about their stuttering careers. When, following the success of The Salvation Hunters, he took her to dinner in his new red Packard, offered her a diamond ring in lieu of a salary, and proposed marriage, she turned him down. He’d been supplanted by Chaplin, who was grooming her as his next lover and star.
Von Sternberg’s synopsis of The Salvation Hunters was curt: “Three derelicts live on a mud scow from which circumstances and environment release them after poetically conceived tribulations.” On screen, he amplifies his theme in a wordy foreword. “There are important fragments of life that have been avoided by the motion picture because Thought is concerned and not the Body. A thought can create and destroy nations—and it is all the more powerful because it is born of suffering, lives in silence, and dies when it has done its work. Our aim has been to photograph a thought. A thought that guides humans who crawl close to the earth—whose lives are simple—who begin nowhere and end nowhere.” Boiled down, this equates to “the will to achieve an end can triumph over force of circumstances”—a belief that motivated von Sternberg all his life and, one suspects, he first encountered in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.”
The “derelicts” of The Salvation Hunters are The Boy, The Girl, and The Child. The Girl and The Child live on the dredge, which, in some manner that is never clarified, is responsible for their orphaned situation. The Boy mopes around the harbor, brooding on the gulls, the rusting scrap iron along the water’s edge, and the fishermen mending nets. Meanwhile, the dredge tirelessly drops its claw into the water, drags up mud, dumps it, and returns for more, indifferent to the fact that with each load, an equal quantity of earth crumbles from the bank. Convinced that fate intends something better for them, The Boy suggests that the three move to the city. Von Sternberg wastes no time showing Los Angeles as a palm-shaded paradise; instead, he relocates them in a slum of dirt streets and wooden shacks in what was then Chinatown. Hopeless and hungry, they are approached by The Man, who offers them a room until they get on their feet. His companion, The Woman, is ready to feed them as well, but The Man stops her. “Hunger,” he explains in a memorably insidious intertitle, “will whisper things into their ears that I might find it troublesome to say.” In case we don’t grasp that he’s Satan incarnate, von Sternberg poses The Man against a set of goat horns attached to the wall, so that they appear to grow from his head.
Finding no work, The Boy returns with just a stick of gum. The Girl starts to look more favorably on whoring and, reluctantly, drags herself downstairs and into the street. Ignoring “Jesus Saves!” chalked on a boarded-up window, she almost immediately picks up The Gentleman, a dapper individual with a cane. He follows her to the room, where, to his confusion, The Boy and The Child are waiting while The Man lurks outside the door. Understandably spooked, he gives some money to The Child and flees. The Gentleman was played by another veteran of Vanity’s Price. “Stuart Holmes, the famous ‘villain,’ had an evening to spare and played a part for us,” recalled von Sternberg. “It cost [$100], and he insisted on being paid beforehand, but his name was worth it.”
Following this disappointing encounter, The Man offers to take everyone on a drive. Their destination is a tract of the then-deserted San Fernando Valley, where the only mark of settlement is a real estate agent’s sign announcing, “Here Your Dreams Come True.” When The Man tries to seduce The Girl, there’s a fistfight in which The Boy triumphs. After this, the three derelicts march down the road to the optimistic intertitle, “It isn’t conditions, nor is it environment—our faith controls our lives!” As a synopsis of the time suggested, “This is where you cheer.”
Even though it was shot almost entirely outdoors, The Salvation Hunters has the look of a studio film. The dockside exteriors display a backlot evenness of tone. As a photographer, von Sternberg understood how Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen distilled beauty from urban squalor. According to critic Peter Wollen, all his films occur in “het-erocosms”—fantasy cities where the real and imaginary intersect, as in dreams. Though the Atlantic separates the waterfront of The Docks of New York and the streets of Lubeck in The Blue Angel, von Sternberg’s vision integrates them. Decorative elements from The Salvation Hunters turn up in all his later films, suggesting that, rather than reflecting actual locations, they make up part of his mental furniture. The “Here Your Dreams Come True” billboard foreshadows similar signs in Underworld and Blonde Venus. The newspaper pinups and chalked words that decorate walls, as well as a dockside announcement in Chinese, reappear in Dishonored and Shanghai Express. Stuart Holmes’s Gentleman, a reserved figure with a moustache, a three-piece suit and a cane, provides the model for von Sternberg’s own appearance and style and represents a recurring character in his films. Equally, Georgia Hale, though lacking the intensity of Marlene Dietrich or Evelyn Brent, is the prototypical von Sternberg heroine—brooding, self-destructive, a focus and motivation for the humiliating actions of the men she fascinates.
In its simplicity and reticence, not to mention its acceptance of poverty and prostitution, The Salvation Hunters was ahead of its time. It anticipated the end of stage melodrama as the model for film narrative and acting. But prophets are always without honor, and von Sternberg was no exception. The premiere in a tiny Sunset Boulevard theater ended in chaos. “The members of the cast were in the audience which greeted my work with laughter and jeers,” he wrote, “and finally rioted.” Not by nature inclined to philosophical resignation, he took the reaction as a personal affront. “[The film] started as a promotion idea for myself, but it became a Cause. I became ill with neuritis. Then, at the preview, the audience laughed for an hour. My neuritis left me.”3 In his eyes, the rejection of The Salvation Hunters proved the Nietzschean dictum: “That which does not kill you makes you strong.”
In desperation, Arthur, who had already sold his car, took extreme measures to get the film launched.
I tried to get Charlie Chaplin to see it, as I know him pretty well. Some time passed, and one Sunday evening at eleven o’clock Charlie rang me. He seemed frantically excited about our picture, asked me to go to see him at once, and said he thought the whole industry would go mad about it. Charlie telephoned Douglas Fairbanks and asked him to come and see The Salvation Hunters but he was out. The next morning Charlie told me he thought we had the greatest picture ever seen. Douglas Fairbanks promised me he would see the picture, but I knew that was a matter
