Sternberg split his childhood between Vienna and New York City. His father, a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary, could not support his family in either city; Sternberg remembered him only as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me." Compelled by poverty to drop out of high school, Sternberg worked for a time in a Manhattan store that sold ribbons and lace to hatmakers. A chance meeting in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, led to a new career in the cleaning and repair of movie prints. This job provided an entree to the film production industry, then flourishing around Fort Lee, New Jersey. As an apprentice filmmaker, from around 1916 to the early 1920s, Sternberg developed a lasting contempt for most of the directors and producers he worked for (an exception was Emile Chautard, who acted in some of Sternberg's films of the 1930s), and was sure that he could improve on their products. Staked to a few thousand dollars -- even then an absurdly small budget -- Sternberg proved himself right with THE SALVATION HUNTERS (1925). It was an immediate hit, but for the next couple of years, he seesawed between acclaim and oblivion, sometimes on the same project. For instance, he received the rare honor of directing a film for Charles Chaplin, but it was shelved after only one showing and later disappeared forever. His commercial breakthrough was UNDERWORLD (1927), a prototypical Hollywood gangster film; behind the scenes, Sternberg successfully battled Ben Hecht, the writer, for creative control.
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 mischievious and witty, sometimes earthy, always feisty Dietrich, whose very presence gives a decidedly feminist cast to all these films. The Dietrich films' mediocre box office and a falling-out with Ernst Lubitsch, then head of production at Paramount (Sternberg's employer), meant that after THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN Sternberg would never again have the control he needed to express himself fully. In his sardonic autobiography, he more or less completely disowned all of his subsequent films. In spite (or perhaps because) of his truncated career and bitter personality, Sternberg remained a hero to later critics and filmmakers. His best films exemplify the proposition, as he put it, that in any worthwhile film the director is "the determining influence, and the only influence, despotically exercised or not, which accounts for the worth of what is seen on the screen."
Of Sternberg's post-Dietrich films, three are notable: 1937's uncompleted I, CLAUDIUS, which might have been his finest film had he not run into problems with financial backers and remained unfinished; THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941), a delightfully dark piece of suspense and exoticism in which Gene Tierney and Gale Sondergaard together assume the Dietrich persona; and the director's own favorite project, ANATAHAN (1953)/THE SAGA OF ANATAHAN, a poetic study of Japanese soldiers isolated on an island at the end of WW II. ANATAHAN can be seen as a virtual encyclopedia of the possibilities inherent in black-and-white cinematography.
Nominated for Director 1930-31: MOROCCO
Nominated for Director 1931-32: SHANGHAI EXPRESS
2 nominations