The Salvation Hunters (1925)

I have been watching the Criterion Von Sternberg box for quite sometime now and really have to hand it to them for doing such an excellent job presenting these films (I am salivating for their Eclipse lines' Silent Naruse set).  One of the joys in sets like this is not only with the films you get, but how they make you want more.  Thunderbolt?  A Woman of the Sea?

Watching the excellent Tag Gallagher essay on his films that comes as an extra, a good amount of time is spent on Sternberg's first film which I had no idea of and then wanted to see now, The Salvation Hunters.

Completely unavailable on either VHS or DVD at least to my knowledge, I found the links below (found in the Comments section) so now you too can enjoy this odd little movie.  UCLA did restore the film, but this is not that restoration, just an fyi.

As the forward puts it:

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.

What you get is an amalgamation of realism and allegory all made independently by  Sternberg.  It has been described as the first independent film (which is a bit disingenuous), Von Sternberg did make it privately for around $6, 000 (later spruced up with 14k more form Chaplin and United Artist after he saw and loved the film.  So much so that he cast actress Georgia Hale, in The Gold Rush).  

Psychological and expressionistic, the film is a nascent one:  slow moving and symbolic it does not completely work, but points to the director Sternberg would become while also becoming an excellent record of parts of California in the early part of the last century that you would not see otherwise.  Well worth checking out.