[Do Josef von Sternberg's] films have any importance, other, let us say, than that of having brought to the screen the redoubtable filmic personality of Marlene Dietrich? The answer, which, I feel, is most definitely in the affirmative, lies in the perceiving of certain cinematic tendencies and ideas which are gradually gaining momentum in the commercial cinema of Europe and in the experimental cinema of the United States. (p. 405)

[In The Salvation Hunters (1924)], we can see the beginnings of a formal method of film construction and, more specially, the positive statement of an artist confident of the inner strength of the individual.

Placing his characters in the most disheartening of environments, where one would expect to find a story illustrating some fault with the social structure capable of producing such conditions, we find instead this slum-district background employed symbolically as a visual portrayal of inner ugliness, an ugliness...