"The Salvation Hunters" has some good acting. It has some nicely-composed images. But it has at least two major problems: with the intertitles and with the basic scenario.
It's not that a good film couldn't necessarily have been made on this slender material (three waterside drifters go to town in search of a better life, find it full of poverty and exploitation, exit still skint but having undergone a personal epiphany which will turn their lives around in the future). It's just that the material with which we are presented does not, for me, come anywhere near justifying the claims made for it in the intertitles.
It is all very well to say that the characters' lives have been transformed, but I don't see any development happening on screen; I resent being suddenly told at the end that all is well (with repeated exclamation marks! on every title card!) when all I have seen is a rather nasty beating-up scene. Is this assault -- on a man of whose nefarious intentions the Boy is in fact, so far as I can tell, still more or less ignorant -- really the great transformative factor claimed by the captions?
The irony is that, in spite of the very lengthy shots and wordy intertitles, the precise details of what is happening are not actually particularly clear. One can assume that their host's plans are, in fact, underhand, because we have been shown a shot of him labelling him as a predator; but other than the fact that he is up to no good, it is not very plain exactly what he is up to. Presumably this is not supposed to be important. He wants the Girl, and exactly how his operations are supposed to obtain this is not deemed worthy of elucidation.
(I am not very clear how the Girl expects to be able to prostitute herself successfully by bringing back a client to a room already inhabited by two other people, either -- but as she appears to have changed her mind at the last moment, presumably this was not part of her original plan. And wasn't that client the same man who was plotting something or other with their host? How does he fit in?)
The Girl is perhaps the most interesting character, a convincingly hard-bitten and embittered loner who regards the Boy as a soft fool -- a verdict with which it is hard to disagree: could any dockside labourer really be so naive and moralistic? -- but who demonstrates a tentatively growing bond of companionship towards him and the Child throughout the course of the film... these actual signs of development being what make her into the most interesting character, of course. The other intriguing character, for me, is the woman in the next door room (or has she been evicted in their favour?), 'fallen as low as her stockings', who obviously has a back-story of some kind...
Sternberg apparently produced the intertitles himself: he writes "In my haste, and in the throes of exhaustion, I wrote some things which make me shudder to this day", but the specific title to which he objects -- "Good girls do not smoke" -- although it falls like a dead brick, is not the worst of them by any means. Worse are the tendentious and lengthy announcements backed up by very little plot. (The multiple exclamation marks I found for some reason especially hard to forgive.)
My real objection to the film, however, lay in what I found to be the lack of satisfactory development and resolution for the characters and the scenario itself. There are plot holes (how are these strays with no visible means of support supposed to have been clothing and feeding themselves in their previous life, since they start to starve as soon as the film begins?) but up until the end, I was thinking 'well, this is a bit clumsy, but it has atmosphere and it's not badly acted'. When the film suddenly declared itself at a happy end without having -- apparently -- solved any of the characters' problems, however, my overall estimation of it abruptly fell. The end scene is very close to that of Chaplin's later "Modern Times"; but while for Chaplin the walk into an unknown future and the sunset works, here it really doesn't.
Films like "Sunrise" or "The Crowd" can get away with attempting to represent great philosophical truths, because they are beautiful, heartbreaking, joyous and superbly acted. This film attempts to do it on the cheap through heavy stylisation and hectoring declarations, and in consequence the attempt feels intolerably pretentious. I see no salvation here.
(The period harbour scenes in the background are quite interesting, if you're that way inclined -- I am...)
It's not that a good film couldn't necessarily have been made on this slender material (three waterside drifters go to town in search of a better life, find it full of poverty and exploitation, exit still skint but having undergone a personal epiphany which will turn their lives around in the future). It's just that the material with which we are presented does not, for me, come anywhere near justifying the claims made for it in the intertitles.
It is all very well to say that the characters' lives have been transformed, but I don't see any development happening on screen; I resent being suddenly told at the end that all is well (with repeated exclamation marks! on every title card!) when all I have seen is a rather nasty beating-up scene. Is this assault -- on a man of whose nefarious intentions the Boy is in fact, so far as I can tell, still more or less ignorant -- really the great transformative factor claimed by the captions?
The irony is that, in spite of the very lengthy shots and wordy intertitles, the precise details of what is happening are not actually particularly clear. One can assume that their host's plans are, in fact, underhand, because we have been shown a shot of him labelling him as a predator; but other than the fact that he is up to no good, it is not very plain exactly what he is up to. Presumably this is not supposed to be important. He wants the Girl, and exactly how his operations are supposed to obtain this is not deemed worthy of elucidation.
(I am not very clear how the Girl expects to be able to prostitute herself successfully by bringing back a client to a room already inhabited by two other people, either -- but as she appears to have changed her mind at the last moment, presumably this was not part of her original plan. And wasn't that client the same man who was plotting something or other with their host? How does he fit in?)
The Girl is perhaps the most interesting character, a convincingly hard-bitten and embittered loner who regards the Boy as a soft fool -- a verdict with which it is hard to disagree: could any dockside labourer really be so naive and moralistic? -- but who demonstrates a tentatively growing bond of companionship towards him and the Child throughout the course of the film... these actual signs of development being what make her into the most interesting character, of course. The other intriguing character, for me, is the woman in the next door room (or has she been evicted in their favour?), 'fallen as low as her stockings', who obviously has a back-story of some kind...
Sternberg apparently produced the intertitles himself: he writes "In my haste, and in the throes of exhaustion, I wrote some things which make me shudder to this day", but the specific title to which he objects -- "Good girls do not smoke" -- although it falls like a dead brick, is not the worst of them by any means. Worse are the tendentious and lengthy announcements backed up by very little plot. (The multiple exclamation marks I found for some reason especially hard to forgive.)
My real objection to the film, however, lay in what I found to be the lack of satisfactory development and resolution for the characters and the scenario itself. There are plot holes (how are these strays with no visible means of support supposed to have been clothing and feeding themselves in their previous life, since they start to starve as soon as the film begins?) but up until the end, I was thinking 'well, this is a bit clumsy, but it has atmosphere and it's not badly acted'. When the film suddenly declared itself at a happy end without having -- apparently -- solved any of the characters' problems, however, my overall estimation of it abruptly fell. The end scene is very close to that of Chaplin's later "Modern Times"; but while for Chaplin the walk into an unknown future and the sunset works, here it really doesn't.
Films like "Sunrise" or "The Crowd" can get away with attempting to represent great philosophical truths, because they are beautiful, heartbreaking, joyous and superbly acted. This film attempts to do it on the cheap through heavy stylisation and hectoring declarations, and in consequence the attempt feels intolerably pretentious. I see no salvation here.
(The period harbour scenes in the background are quite interesting, if you're that way inclined -- I am...)