RETROSPECTIVE FOCUSES ON STERNBERG

In their Paramount 75th anniversary retrospective, both the County Museum of Art and the UCLA Film and Television Archive this week highlight the early films of director Josef von Sternberg, one of the most tenaciously idiosyncratic stylists in Hollywood history.

Even as his films became increasingly artificial and contrived, he was always able to elicit genuine emotion. UCLA will screen in Melnitz Theater “Thunderbolt” (1929) tonight at 6, “The Docks of New York” (1928) and “Morocco” (1930) Thursday at 8; the museum will screen Saturday at 6 in its Bing Theater “Underworld” (1927) and “The Last Command” (1928).

Sternberg will always be most famous for turning Marlene Dietrich into a screen legend, but before they made “The Blue Angel” (1929) he had already directed several major silent films.

Often regarded as the first true gangster picture, “Underworld” is a vivid melodrama, elementary and sentimental, closer to “Othello” than to “Little Caesar” or “The Public Enemy.” George Bancroft plays one of those crude, burly men who laugh hard all the time but take themselves very seriously. He’s a reigning gangster--the city is unspecified but clearly Chicago--and his girl (Evelyn Brent) is called Feathers. It would seem that the film’s pungent authenticity owes much to the original story by Ben Hecht, who had been a Chicago newspaperman. However, according to Sternberg, Hecht hated the film but went on to accept an Oscar for his contribution, without complaint.

In “The Docks of New York,” Bancroft plays a stoker on a tramp steamer who becomes involved with a despairing young woman (Betty Compson). A typical tough-sentimental saga of lowlife, it is also thick with atmosphere.

As Sternberg’s first talkie, “Thunderbolt,” which makes imaginative use of sound, is fascinating for what it portends rather than what it achieves. It has a trite, maudlin plot, an obstacle that Sternberg was to overcome many times. This time it’s Fay Wray who’s in thrall to Bancroft’s gangster, but she’s fallen for handsome bank teller Richard Arlen. “Thunderbolt,” with dialogue by Herman Mankiewicz, no less, often seems silly and absurd, its pacing frequently as static as that of other early talkies. Yet Sternberg’s individuality and talent shine through, obsessed as he already is with the notion of the femme fatale and the importance of atmosphere.

Emil Jannings specialized in portraying proud, pompous types brought low, and in “The Last Command” he’s an Imperial Russian general reduced to Hollywood extra, a bewildered, shaky old man who arrives at a studio not realizing that in effect he will be playing himself. Developed from an idea supplied by Ernst Lubitsch, “The Last Command” is a most satisfying warm-up for “The Blue Angel” and has an ending that anticipates that of “Sunset Boulevard.”

“Morocco” is Dietrich’s first Hollywood film, the one in which she’s a nightclub singer in white tie and tails, leaning over to kiss a startled woman in the audience--but falling for Foreign Legionnaire Gary Cooper. (213) 825-2581.

Among the other rarities in this week’s Paramount offerings is William Wellman’s 1928 silent “Beggars of Life,” which screens Friday at the museum after the 8 p.m. showing of Wellman’s “Wings,” the World War I aerial classic that won the first best-picture Oscar. “Beggars of Life,” which was written by Jim Tully, is a brisk, warm tale starring Louise Brooks, who rides the rails (while looking adorably vulnerable in boys’ clothes) with hobo Richard Arlen. This beautifully composed film anticipates Wellman’s fast, breezy “Wild Boys of the Road” (1933), one of the few films of the era to reflect the realities of the Depression.

The museum will screen 11 films and a video by underground film maker Robert Frank from Thursday through Aug. 27. “Pull My Daisy” (1959) and “OK End Here” (1963), screening Thursday night at 8 along with “The Sin of Jesus” (1961) (which was unavailable for preview), offer contrasting views of life in New York. The first, written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, is a tedious vignette set in a Bowery loft and featuring a gathering of such notables as poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso and painters Alice Neal and Larry Rivers; it plays like an inside joke but has undoubted historical value. “OK End Here,” on the other hand, is a sharp, timeless study of self-absorption and alienation, centering on an attractive, affluent couple (Sue Ungar and Martin La Salle, star of Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket”). (213) 857-6010.