The Blue Angel
1930
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Mini Bio. Josef von Sternberg split his childhood between Vienna and New York City. His father, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, could not support his family in either city; Sternberg remembered him only as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me."
Josef von Sternberg ( German: [ˈjoːzɛf fɔn ˈʃtɛʁnbɛʁk]; born Jonas Sternberg; May 29, 1894 – December 22, 1969) was an Austrian-born filmmaker whose career successfully spanned the transition from the silent to the sound era, during which he worked with most of the major Hollywood studios.
Josef von Sternberg, born Jonas Sternberg (29 May 1894 – 22 December 1969) was an Austrian-born film director and is among the few whose career successfully spanned the transition from the silent to the sound era.
The titles in this collection, made on the cusp of the sound age, are three of von Sternberg’s greatest works, gritty evocations of gangster life ( Underworld ), the Russian Revolution ( The Last Command ), and working-class desperation ( The Docks of New York) rendered as shadowy movie spectacle.
Introduction. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1894 of working-class Jewish parents, Jonas Stern’s downtrodden young life did not hold the slightest indication that, as Josef von Sternberg, he would become one of the greatest visual stylists in the history of Hollywood filmmaking.
Josef von Sternberg, orig. Jonas Stern, (born May 29, 1894, Vienna, Austria—died Dec. 22, 1969, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.), Austrian-born U.S. film director. He immigrated with his Orthodox Jewish family to New York as a boy. By 1923 he was a scriptwriter and cameraman in Hollywood.
Von Sternberg considered it his greatest film. Whether von Sternberg realized that it would be the last film he would ever make is unclear. But his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1965), leaves little doubt that he saw his life after Dietrich as a series of disappointments, betrayals, and ill fortune. Michael Barson
