The Docks of New YorkJosef von Sternberg, 1928 The Docks of New York - The third and greatest film in the Silent Josef von Sternberg set, I find it hard to write about this without just gushing a nonsensical stream of superlatives. George Bancroft stars as a stoker on a ship who, while on shore leave, rescues a girl who'd tried to kill herself by jumping in the water. He fishes her out and takes her to the local bar, where they spend the evening while he gets drunk, pushes people around, and tries to cheer her up. The obnoxious engineer of the stoker's ship causes trouble (he doesn't like the stoker, and does like the girl), leading to a robbery, a wedding and a murder (not necessarily in that order). LIke Japanese Girls at the Harbor, another silent film I saw recently and adored beyond all reason, the plot is the least interesting thing about this movie. While that film was beautifully composed, this movie is literally breathtaking. The opening 30 minutes is visual storytelling at its greatest, not just interesting compositions, or striking uses of shadows and light, or weirdly expressive set design, but instead in unifying all those things it seems to represent the core of what cinema is all about. Like FW Murnau's Sunrise, really the only film I can compare it with, it is the absolute peak of silent filmmaking, by which I mean the peak of any kind of filmmaking.
The Docks of New York didn't strike me as a motion picture. That is, I didn't recognize it as photography in motion. It much more closely resembled a painting with breath. It was frustrating trying to capture screenshots because the frozen images never seemed to match my experience of the film's visuals as it played out in time. There are some pretty pictures above, sure, but to me they all seem to lack the luminescent, romantic vitality that von Sternberg brushes onto the screen for most of
The Docks of New York's fairly brief running time. Likewise, no still picture of George Bancroft seems able to capture the larger-than-life physicality that he brings to the role Bill Roberts. He's so much smaller in the screenshots than in the film, so much more ordinary.
The Docks of New York is cinema, and the magic of that, that painting with light, can be hinted at by still photography — but that's the limit.
It's telling, I think, that von Sternberg's previous film was
The Last Command, because the attention given to the background actors here is quite remarkable. Just look at
their faces! They bring such vibrancy to the mise-en-scene, giving the main players the perfect background to play against. And the casting is wonderful.
Jules Furthman's story is a bit slight, and it all plays out a little bit slowly. I didn't mind too much, happy as I was to soak in the visuals, but it is what keeps
The Docks of New York from greatness, for me. For now. I think it would improve on a second viewing, especially if that viewing could be in 35mm.
Grade: B+
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