- Ruth Roman in Lightning Strikes Twice
“It’s possible to look at this film and see nothing but camp, but give it an ounce of respect and you’ll discover a remarkable aesthetic object—an exercise in mise-en-scene of an awesome, glacial beauty.” That’s how Dave Kehr described Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored (which screens twice this weekend) when he wrote it up for the Reader some decades ago. Nowadays Kehr’s staunch auteurist defense no longer represents a minority critical position, as von Sternberg is hardly the contentious figure he once was. That’s not to say that auteurist critics succeeded in redeeming every major Hollywood filmmaker who skirted camp. Case in point: while quite a few of King Vidor’s silent and early sound films (The Big Parade, The Crowd, Our Daily Bread) are widely considered to be classics, almost all of the features he directed after Duel in the Sun—among them Ruby Gentry and Man Without a Star—remain near-exclusive causes of Vidor diehards and camp enthusiasts. If you’re digging the current Dietrich/von Sternberg retrospective at the Music Box, then you might enjoy looking into late Vidor when that series ends.
