
The Docks of New York is one of those orphaned silents, released in 1928, the very end of the era. Apparently, it was previewed the same week as Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool, his first “all-talking” picture, the follow-up to The Jazz Singer and the highest-grossing film of the year. While The Singing Fool enjoyed an exclusive New York premiere, with eleven-dollar orchestra seats and special souvenir tickets, The Docks of New York wasn’t so much as mentioned by the New York Times until two years later, and then by the paper’s Paris correspondent, when it and von Sternberg’s Underworld were all the rage over there. It never became the rage over here.
But if 1928 was the end of the silent era, it was also its apex. It was the year of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman and Steamboat Bill, Jr., Chaplin’s The Circus, Victor Sjöström’s The Wind, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Fritz Lang’s Spies, Dovzhenko’s Arsenal, Eisenstein’s October, Marcel L’Herbier’s L’argent, Tod Browning’s West of Zanzibar, Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly and The Wedding March, King Vidor’s The Crowd and Show People, and Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher, among others. Some of these films managed to be hits in the face of the tide of technological change, while others took decades to be recognized as classics, but all of them are distinguished by a common mastery of form, a confidence and sophistication about the medium, a plateau of achievement from which there was seemingly nowhere to go but sideways.
The Docks of New York is one of those that became famous by accumulated rumor over the years—famous being a relative term, since it came to be considered von Sternberg’s best film in some quarters, while most people still had no idea he had made any pictures before The Blue Angel (1930). In fact, he had made nine movies by then, eight silents and one sound picture, although four of the silents are now lost, including the one that immediately preceded The Docks of New York, a gangster picture called The Drag Net (1928), and the one that immediately followed it, his last silent, The Case of Lena Smith (1929), of which all we have are a brief fragment, a few tantalizing stills, and the suggestion that it in some way derived from the director’s memories of his early childhood in Vienna. Another lost film is The Sea Gull (1926), also known as A Woman of the Sea, which is lost, it is rumored, because Chaplin, who commissioned it for his former paramour Edna Purviance, disliked it and destroyed the negative. The Docks of New York was, in its time, the least successful of the four silents that survive, and also the most personal. For all their idiosyncrasies, Underworld and The Last Command both drew substantial audiences, the first for its ripped-from-the-headlines curiosity value, the latter for Emil Jannings and the nostalgia for prewar grandeur and epaulets then in vogue. The Docks of New York was not lacking in mass appeal, but it was a trifle late, as well as, perhaps, a touch more poetic than the crowds were willing to countenance. Read more 
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