Made in 1925, The Salvation Hunters was Josef von Sternberg’s directorial debut. It was a total flop, and only picked up a bit interest after it was endorsed publicly by Charlie Chaplin (who encouraged his business partners Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to go along with him). But in spite of newspaper advertisements tendering Chaplin’s personal seal of approval (“It’s a great picture and different”) it still refused to fly with audiences, who probably found its tone too didactic, its approach too abstract and its long scenes featuring people staring moodily into the middle distance too dull.
They are right about all those things. But Chaplin’s point still stands. There is something important and different about this film, once we’ve cleared away all the moralising undergrowth.
In a long and needlessly wordy preamble, von Sternberg instructs us about the importance of orientating ourselves towards the sun rather than the mud, and then in an allegory that is entirely unnecessary, gives us opening scenes set in a harbour where a dredger goes about its work, bringing mud (see!) to the surface. Around and about all this mechanical activity a little preliminary sequence of events plays out, a threeway between a Girl (as she’s billed), a Boy (in fact a young man) and a Brute. Between them all The Child, who will prove decisive.
The Brute is soon left behind and we move into the film proper, which consists of The Boy persuading The Girl to go with him into the city – he’s better than all this mud he says. And though she finds his passivity unappealing (“You disgusting weakling”), this may well be a projection of her own inability to connect. The Child goes along too, the three of them forming an instant family, whose bond will be tested when they are picked up by The Man – a pimp – who wants to farm The Girl out to high-end customers. As evidence of what will happen to The Girl if she becomes a sexual hired hand we only need to look at The Woman, The Man’s other working girl, a hopeless wretch who’s lost all self-motivation.
Von Sternberg’s finest hour would come later, with the four films he made with Marlene Dietrich. Looked at from this end of the telescope, The Salvation Hunters looks like von Sternberg doing his warm-up exercises in what can easily be read as an immigrant from depressing, war-damaged Europe re-orienting themself towards the positivity of the USA. Though not in tip-top shape, the film looks lovely. It’s not as insanely over-dressed, gauzily lit and precisely designed as von Sternberg’s Dietrich films, but the images are often picturesque and in his heroine, Georgia Hale, von Sternberg has a Dietrich in utero – sullen, sexy and imperious.
In von Sternberg films the men “can’t help it” – to borrow from the key song from his 1930 film The Blue Angel – and here everyone is in love, or worse, with The Girl. She is the spur that drives The Brute towards sexual abuse. She is the reason the milksop Boy eventually grows a pair. And when he finally does, The Girl’s nostrils flare, her bosom heaves – she’s visibly sexually excited, her first spark of real emotion in the whole film.
You can see why Chaplin loved it – it’s leaking sentimentality – and Chaplin also loved Hale, who he made into a star by casting her in The Gold Rush later that year and also took as a lover.
From her appearance here it’s understandable. Up to this point an extra, Hale is the best thing in the film, though George K Arthur deserves prizes for wistful staring as The Boy (he co-financed the film with Sternberg, a rare case of independent film-making in the studio era, so deserves more prizes). Bruce Guerin is particularly cute as The Child – funny sometimes too – and Otto Matieson does fine work as The Man, never twirling the metaphorical moustache and yet somehow always twirling it.
Fans of von Sternberg’s layer effects – the diaphonous veils of the Dietrich era – can see the beginnings of that in his use of tree branches when everyone involved (Boy, Girl, Child, Man and Woman) heads off into the countryside, where the ultimate showdown will occur in time for the trio of Boy, Girl and Child to walk off into the sunset together. Having now, through “faith” (we’d now say self-belief) left the mud behind, the heroic trio have shaken off their personal hang-ups and become “children of the sun”. Lift-off has been achieved, moral nirvana attained. Icky, yes, but von Sternberg does make it all look fantastic.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
