The Salvation Hunters
| The Salvation Hunters | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Josef von Sternberg |
| Produced by | Josef von Sternberg |
| Written by | Josef von Sternberg |
| Starring |
Georgia Hale George K. Arthur |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
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Release date
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Running time
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65 min. |
The Salvation Hunters (1925) is an American silent film, the first work directed by young Josef Sternberg, later known as Josef von Sternberg.
The film stars George K. Arthur and Georgia Hale and was released by United Artists. This was the first film directed by Josef von Sternberg. Produced by World Film Company of Fort Lee, New Jersey, it is sometimes described as the first American independent film, as it was shot on a small budget by an unknown director. Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford were impressed by this film, and Chaplin invited Sternberg (as he was then known) to work with him at his Hollywood studio.
The film opens with a foreword:
There are important fragments of life that have been avoided by the motion picture because Thought is concerned and not the Body. A thought can create and destroy nations—and it is all the more powerful because it is born of suffering, lives in silence, and dies when it has done its work. Our aim has been to photograph a thought—A thought that guides humans who crawl close to the earth—whose lives are simple—who begin nowhere and end nowhere.
The "humans who crawl close to the earth" are introduced one after another. The Boy is a homeless, unemployed youth who fancies The Girl. He is a failure, the intertitles explain, because he believes in failure. According to The Boy, there are two types of people in the world—the poor, helpless "children of the mud" and the rich, successful "children of the sun" (note: drawn from a 1905 play by the same name by Russian playwright Maxim Gorky)—and he places himself somewhere in the middle. The Boy and The Girl live near a harbor and struggle to find food; eventually, they have to leave for the city: not only The Boy is unable to find a job, but also The Brute has been harassing The Girl, and The Boy is afraid of a direct confrontation. They leave, taking with them The Child, an orphan who lost his parents to an accident and was also a victim of The Brute.
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