Peter Pan With his star rising among the studio executives, Sternberg signed a long-term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Despite this promising entry into commercial movie-making his "association [with Metro] was doomed from the start" as evidenced in his first feature The Exquisite Sinner. Theme “The underlying theme of Sternberg’s cinema,” observes critic Andrew Sarris, is the relationships of men and women “or more precisely, man’s confrontation of the myths of womanhood.” His oeuvre demonstrates this “from The Salvation Hunters to Anatahan”, his last film. The Gentleman (played by Stewart Holmes) is “curious”: the “first screen character who respects the women he seeks to reduce to prostitution.” The Gentleman is portrayed neither as a depraved denizen of bordellos nor a salacious deviate. “[T]hough eager to sleep with The Girl, he never loses his dignity or bearing [and] respects her reluctance when he discovers she is driven by hunger”, as well as concern for her younger companions. Sternberg's Gentleman is a “far more advanced” depiction of the “predatory Men of the World” than achieved by directors Chaplin or Lubitsch in the 1920s. The character “prefigures G.W. Pabst’s treatment of Louise Brooks and her respectful lovers in Diary of a Lost Girl and Pandora's Box” in the late twenties. The Girl, who with merely a look succeeds in deflecting The Brute and commands the operation of heavy equipment (the mud-dredge), exhibits “a mystical authority...[an] authority which marks Sternberg’s attitude toward women long before the debut of Marlene Dietrich. “The real drama of The Salvation Hunters is not concerned with the rise of the downtrodden, but rather with the moving (emotion in motion) spectacle of a Girl waiting for a Boy to grow into a Man.” See also A Woman of the Sea (1926), film directed by Sternberg for Chaplin References Citations Sources Baxter, John. 1971. The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. The International Film Guide Series. A.S Barners & Company, New York. Baxter, Peter, 1993. Just Watch! Paramount, Sternberg and America. British Film Institute, BFI Publishing. Messerli, Douglas. 2013. Children of the Sun: Josef von Sternberg/The Salvation Hunters in World Cinema Review. Retrieved April 3, 2018. Sarris, Andrew: The Films of Josef von Sternberg. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Silver, Charles. 2010. Josef von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York. Retrieved April 3, 2018. External links DVD The Salvation Hunters / The Case of Lena Smith (Fragment) 1925 films 1925 drama films American silent feature