The silent drama Salvation Hunters defies the labels "good" or "bad". If you think director Josef von Sternberg can do no wrong, it's a brilliant portrayal of life's endless drudgery with enough symbolism to fill an ocean. If you don't, it's an alternately boring and hilarious waste of 67 minutes.
If you're like me -- not something I'd wish on anybody -- it's interesting just for being released by a major Hollywood studio in 1925. Ergo, I give it a pass, albeit with reservations.
You know Salvation Hunters has pretenses to art because the characters aren't identified by name. The Boy and The Girl (both in their 20s) spend their depressing days walking the docks of an unnamed coastal city, staring at the giant metal claw endlessly dredging the bay of mud.
When the The Boy rescues The Child (at least he's the age of his character) from a beating, they all sit together and watch the bay being dredged. As a subtitle explains, For every load of mud the claw dislodged, the earth laughed and pushed in another. I'm glad somebody's laughing.
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| Better get used to this pose -- you're going to see a lot more of it. |
Seeing that there's just so much entertainment to be had by watching mud, they steal a rowboat and set out for the nearest big city. And so they move, the subtitle informs us, perhaps in the wrong direction -- followed by misery, flanked by failure and lack of confidence, shadowed by despair... Um, excuse me while I get some popcorn...
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| I get it! The Man is supposed to be Satan. Or maybe he's full of bull? |
The jolly trio wind up walking the streets of their new, depressing hometown,when they run into a shady character known as The Man (who should have been called The Pimp, but that wouldn't fly in 1925). Feigning pity, The Man leads them up a rickety flight of stairs in a dingy apartment building, where only a hooker lives. We know she's a hooker because we're told she's A woman as fallen as her stockings. No judging, please.
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| Some people are never satisfied. |
The Boy, Girl and Child spend the rest of the day in their crummy room sitting on their ratty couch and staring at nothing. At least if they had stayed where they were, they could have watched mud being dredged! An attempt by The Woman at streetwalking fails when her trick discovers she lives with a couple of sullen roommates. (You'd think she'd have realized what a downer that would be.)
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| Enough of the sitting around and staring! |
You'll never guess what everybody does when they arrive. Yes! They sit around and stare sadly at their surroundings. Even the hooker! There is just no pleasing anybody in this picture.
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| This is the thanks he gets for taking them to the country. |
While in love with The Girl, The Boy sits by helplessly as The Man makes a move on her. It's only when The Man smacks around The Child that The Boy at last finds the courage to beat the shit out of the guy and toss him unconscious into the car. Finally! After almost an hour, something happens that doesn't involve dredging mud.
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| "We're still hungry, homeless and broke -- this is a happy ending?" |
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| Von Sternberg gets into the swing of things by sitting and staring with his equally-sullen cast. |
In preparing to direct his first movie, Josef von Sternberg seems to have spent two weeks sitting and staring at German avant garde movies. Salvation Hunters' first 20 minutes are filled with endless artsy shots of mud being dredged filmed from every possible angle. No matter what's happening in the foreground, that metal claw is always looming behind the action upfront.
Wait, did I say action? Silly me. There is no action! Salvation Hunters must have been the least physically-taxing picture ever made. There is so much sitting and staring that I felt compelled to go for an hour-long walk immediately afterwards. So maybe there was some good in it after all.
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| When in doubt, always have your tragic hero walk through garbage. And mud. |
Josef Von Sternberg's career finally went full throttle when his 1927 gangster movie Underworld marked the beginning of an unbroken string of a dozen classics through 1935, with several other interesting releases following. And not one of them feature mud in a co-starring role. Just some advice for aspiring directors.
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