Von Sternberg. John Baxter
Eisenstein that she took Backwash sufficiently seriously to prepare for the role by spending time in a home for the blind, studying their behavior. It’s more likely she pulled out once The Salvation Hunters proved to be a flop. It played for less than a week in New York and only sporadically elsewhere, losing most of the Pickford-Fairbanks investment. She didn’t mind displaying her acting skills in an atypical role, but only if it was also a commercial success.
The Salvation Hunters put its director on the map, however, and the big studios made offers, if only to ensure that competitors didn’t grab a potential moneymaker. B. P. Schulberg, West Coast production manager of Famous Players–Lasky (soon to be renamed Paramount Publix) was interested, but von Sternberg elected to sign an eight-film contract with MGM. The decision was ill-advised. The richest of the big companies, MGM was also the most rigid, with a factory ethic to which every employee was subordinated. To von Sternberg, however, one fact counted more than any other: Erich von Stroheim was on its payroll, which made the offer irresistible. In only a short time he realized his error. That he had become just another cog in Louis B. Mayer’s machine was emphasized when he was ordered to line up with every other director and technician to be photographed for a promotional film celebrating the studio’s concentration of talent. He stands glowering at the camera, smoldering cigarette in hand. But predictably, he is at the shoulder of his hero, who, in duster and floppy driving cap, looks like he’s on his way to a spin in the country.
While waiting for his first assignment, von Sternberg drove to the studio every day with Robert Florey, who had become his assistant. After telling his secretary not to disturb him, he would drape a red shawl around his shoulders, as men did in the coffee shops of Vienna, and play Florey at chess. Periodically, he completed odd jobs for Mayer. These included directing a screen test for the Moscow-based Jewish Habima Theatre Company, whose forty members arrived in the United States in December 1926. They would tour for two years until the group fragmented, some remaining in the United States, and others moving to Tel Aviv to become the nucleus of the National Theatre of Israel. The test, the producer told von Sternberg, was a courtesy and a gift to the company, which was too distinguished to lower itself to make a film, least of all in Hollywood. No admirer of expressionist acting, in which emotions are externalized, often in exaggerated gestures or shouts, von Sternberg was secretly pleased when the performers, flinging themselves around the soundstage and shouting “Prostitute!” demonstrated that they had no movie potential whatsoever. Knowing nothing of acting technique, he distrusted those who did. In The Docks of New York, Olga Baclanova played her role as she had learned to do in Russia. “Just because you were at the Moscow Art Theatre,” he told her, “don’t think that you understand everything.” He bullied her, as he did many performers, to the point of tears, which resulted in the unrehearsed effect he desired. Years later, meeting in Europe, she told him, “I only began to make pictures when you started to yell at me.”
Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, finally assigned him a British novel by Alden Brooks, published in 1924 as The Enchanted Land and in the United States as Escape. Brooks, a survivor of the Somme, based it on the war experiences of his friend, painter Matthew Smith, who was hospitalized for a year with shrapnel wounds and shell shock. The book’s main character, Dominique Prad, a frustrated artist, almost dies on the battlefield. Convalescing, he swears he will “never do anything else in future but live life, beautiful life, to the full, as it should be led.” Back in Paris, he reluctantly takes over the family silk-weaving factory, which supports a gaggle of parasitic relatives and rapacious prospective in-laws. After attempting suicide, he’s placed in a rural “rest home,” from which he flees, pursued by his fiancée’s father and a posse of police. Meeting a gypsy girl, Silda, he joins her band in the woods, where he settles down to a life of art.
Expedience rather than appropriateness dictated the choice of this subject for von Sternberg. King Vidor’s The Big Parade, a romance between a wounded American soldier and a French peasant, had been the decade’s biggest hit for MGM. Thalberg wanted something similar and assigned the same actress, Renée Adorée, to the film. Von Sternberg worked on the scenario with Alice D. G. Miller, daughter of the better-known Alice Duer Miller. The younger Miller began her career with D. W. Griffith, whose sentimental tastes were evident in her writing for films such as Slave of Desire, So This Is Marriage, and Lady of the Night. We know nothing of how Escape was adapted, but much can be inferred from its incongruous new title, The Exquisite Sinner. Opposite Adorée, Conrad Nagel, a favorite of Louis B. Mayer, played Dominique. Von Sternberg found a small role for George K. Arthur. A young model from Montana named Myrna Loy, who had posed for photographer Harry Waxman, was lightly draped in netting and plastered with white greasepaint to play a “living statue” in an artist’s studio—her Hollywood debut.
With Florey as “technical adviser,” von Sternberg tried to instill some French atmosphere into the film. Although they visited Quebec to scout locations, MGM insisted on recycling a chateau set left over from 1923’s In the Palace of the King. The rest was shot in a village mocked up on the back lot. Von Sternberg did his best to personalize the sets, pasting up posters and daubing walls with graffiti. Determined to show he was his own man, he had a large sign painted with the words “Please BE SILENT Behind Camera.” (As a joke, the actors posed for a photograph with von Sternberg and the sign, fingers to lips. He did not appear amused.) On location, he arrived wearing another pawnshop find, a bulky fur-lined overcoat that had belonged to a Shakespearean actor. However, he reserved his special performance for the first day of shooting. Florey was a witness:
Thirty gendarmes were supposed to march into a Breton village…. At 8.45 von Sternberg arrived on the set. All the actors were lined up. He passed before them in review, inspecting them from head to foot, their sergeant-major waiting at a respectful distance. When he arrived at the twenty-first gendarme, von Sternberg stopped, hypnotising the poor man. Then he turned to the technicians and shouted angrily, “What do you take me for? For [Fred] Niblo or [King] Vidor? Who do you think I am?” Enraged, he began rapping on the camera with his cane, to the alarm of Max Fabian, the cameraman. “Get me the head of production. I will not permit you to mock me” etc. [His producers] arrived at the gallop, and von Sternberg exposed the reason for his protest. “A button is missing from the tunic of this gendarme. I will not endure an insult of this sort! “3
Having just endured three months of such behavior from von Stroheim on The Merry Widow, MGM bridled at getting it from a near unknown. All the same, such antics might have been tolerated if the completed film had been good, but opinions on The Exquisite Sinner were divided. Somewhat puzzlingly, given von Sternberg’s solemnity, Florey called it “full of interest, and … the humour of which von Sternberg was a master.”4 On surer ground, he praised the luminous photography, with its shadows and silhouette scenes. Even John Grierson acknowledged the beauty of the sequence in which Dominique marries Silda in the forest. The New Yorker described it as “harsh and beautiful and sincere.”5 But preview audiences found the film obscure. A studio assessor agreed. While conceding that “Mr. von Sternberg has a photographic talent all his own,” he complained, “in vain we are looking in the picture for the theme of the story—the longing of a man for freedom.” Rewritten intertitles didn’t help, so producers Hunt Stromberg and Eddie Mannix were directed to find a solution. Ideas were solicited from staff members. In August the studio accepted a proposal from husband-and-wife team Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, who had fabricated a screenplay from a flimsy short story called “It” by Elinor Glyn. They suggested remaking The Exquisite Sinner as a screwball comedy. “Ninety-nine people out of a hundred want MONEY!” they wrote. “And these ninety-nine would feel that any man who runs away from money—just because he wants to PAINT—is crazy! THEREFOR we suggest the following angle—FARCE COMEDY—on the story.”
Phil Rosen shot the new version, eliminating most if not all of von Sternberg’s footage. Florey remained as assistant director, fuming as Rosen discarded Adorée’s authentic costume of head scarf, earrings, and simple dress for a Breton bonnet, laced bodice of the sort worn by Swiss milkmaids, flowered apron, and wooden clogs. Silda became