The Criterion Collection

The exceptional early Hollywood movies in the new DVD collector’s set 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg have been unavailable for so long that their reemergence is being treated by critics as a cinema event. In the New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews this “must-have boxed set” and gives a little background on the legendary Vienna-born, New York–raised auteur who gives it its name, calling him “an avant-garde filmmaker who found himself, by fluke and only for a short while, at the controls of the Hollywood machine.” Kehr digs in further, positing, tantalizingly, that “his films’ unreal settings, languorous rhythms, and perverse eroticism were not designed to engage and arouse an audience but rather to reflect the private concerns of their creator. For once, the Dream Factory seemed to be producing actual dreams.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Dennis Lim has a favorite in the set, the working-class romance The Docks of New York: “For a movie that’s more than eighty years old, it feels almost impossibly fresh, filled with small gestures and images—a spontaneous kiss between two women, a threaded needle seen through the weepy heroine’s eyes—that are as sublime and alive as movie moments get.” The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney finds Underworld to be a blast, explaining, “It’s the granddaddy of all gangster pictures, yet it’s not like any other gangster picture. Al Capone’s Chicago it’s not.” And Matt Hough, at Home Theater Forum, deems The Last Command “Von Sternberg’s masterpiece.” Hough has words of praise not only for the director (“von Sternberg’s painterly use of lighting, people placement, and sets both small and grand are all terrific”) but for its star, Emil Jannings: “Jannings won the first Academy Award for best actor, and there’s no denying his astonishing performance was fully deserving of the honor.”

More praise from the Globe and Mail and Paper.