Sternberg returns to the milieu of poverty and degradation explored in The Salvation Hunters with this tale of a weary dancehall girl hopelessly in love with a brusque stoker. Moving away from the poetic realism of the earlier film, Sternberg’s silent masterpiece offers an operatically dramatic and even glamorous depiction of squalor. Overshadowed in its original release by The Jazz Singer, The Docks of New York contains some of the most exquisite black-and-white cinematography ever filmed, with Sternberg’s virtuosic mobile camera adding rare subtlety to gesture and performance. While the film’s characters are ultimately more archetypes than individuals, they nevertheless reveal themselves most intensely through shadowed nuance rather than through broad caricature.

Live Piano Accompaniment by Donald Sosin