Svengali's Revenge

FUN IN A CHINESE LAUNDRY by Josef von Sternberg. 348 pages. Macm/'//arr. $6.95.

Old directors never die--they just become verbose. Take Josef von Sternberg, for example: today he is remembered only as the man who discovered Marlene Dietrich. Clearly there was nothing he could do but write a bitter book and generously distribute the blame.

His autobiography is notable for the acid it exudes. Other Hollywood directors, he remembers distinctly, knew nothing about their craft, the big studio producers rejected anyone with ideas, and the unknowns he ushered into fame --William Powell, Gary Grant--were ungrateful. He exposes in painful detail the ineptitude and neuroses of Actors Emil Tannings and Charles Laughton. By Sternberg's account, Laughton was not only incapable of delivering the simplest line, but could not begin a scene without listening to a recording of the Duke of Windsor's abdication speech, was in a constant state of panic, and froze so often in front of the camera that Sternberg was forced to film rehearsals, when Laughton didn't think the cameras were running.

His account of Dietrich and the Svengali-Trilby relationship that produced The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express and The Devil Is a Woman is pitiably bitter. While other stars complained of Sternberg's cruel direction, Marlene loyally praised the very hardships he put her through, as when he made her walk barefoot across the blazing desert while filming Morocco with Gary Cooper. But to Sternberg this was no more than a deliberate plot designed by Dietrich to gain public admiration for herself and to shower abuse on him. He recognizes some talent in her, chiefly an ability to follow direction, but dismisses this, as he does all acting, as a gift of no importance "requiring only a relatively minor ability to mimic." He mentions her husband, Rudolf Sieber, grudgingly, never speaks of her daughter.

In his own time, Sternberg's films were criticized for being static, plotless, "two-dimensional fabrications." Today film buffs recognize his early Salvation Hunters and The Blue Angel as masterly classics, but recognition has come too late and.too grudgingly to allay Sternberg's bitterness, which infects his vision and distorts what is otherwise a fascinating narrative.

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