A Film Canon

As the title suggests, the strongest feature of this film is its depiction of place. The narrative occurs against three atmospheric backdrops - a steamship's boiler room, the New York docklands, and a seedy riverside tavern - but approaches melodrama in a manner that detracts from, or at least fails to exploit, these spaces, mainly by engendering a predictability that sits poorly with the indeterminacy and ambiguity produced by von Sternberg's evocative interplay of light, fog and water. This is all the more unfortunate in that the basic premise - a sailor's one night ashore - would seem conducive to that indeterminacy which, admittedly, von Sternberg (unsuccessfully) attempts to recoup at the last minute. For this reason, the most impressive parts of the film occur in the first act, before the narrative proper begins, when the sailor and his eventual love interest exist as mere emanations of their mileux, rather than vice versa. Accordingly, this is the point at which tracking and panning shots predominate, navigating their way through a series of spaces that are more significant than any of the individuals inhabiting them, and contributing to a general sense of movement that manifests itself in the continuity between the steam of the boiler-room, the fog of the docks, and the cigarette-smoke of the tavern.