Andrew Simpson on piano

Josef von Sternberg's first solo venture was an expressionistic tale of three drifters aboard a muddy dredge in the midst of a harbor. With its minuscule budget and immense artistic aspiration, critics dubbed the film "America's first avant-garde feature." "I had in mind a visual poem," replied Von Sternberg. (1925, 35 mm, silent with live accompaniment, 79 minutes)

Andrew Simpson on piano

The young and beautiful lovers Clara Bow and Gary Cooper are the lead players in an assignment that Sternberg salvaged and partly reshot from another film originally meant for another's direction. For Sternberg, Children of Divorce was his first major project for Paramount, the studio that ultimately released his most successful films. (1927, 35 mm, silent with live accompaniment, 70 minutes)

Surprisingly full of delightful experimental touches and twists, Sternberg's first talking picture is a gangster film that, wrote Andre Sarris, "is the stuff of grand opera." Among other enchantments, weary prisoners on death row harmonize blues songs and popular standards from their cells. (1929, 35 mm, 95 minutes)

Donald Sosin on piano, Joanna Seaton vocals

Poignantly evoking Manhattan's 1920s waterfront with beautifully rendered down-and-out denizens, The Docks of New York is an early gem. When a ship's stoker (George Bancroft) saves a prostitute (Betty Compson) from drowning, his heroic deed becomes a deeply compassionate gesture. (1928, 35 mm, silent with live accompaniment, 96 minutes)

In The Immigrant, Charlie Chaplin's silent comic masterpiece, poor peasant Charlie lands in New York harbor. (Charles Chaplin, 1917, 35 mm, 30 minutes)

In Sternberg's perceptive adaptation of Dreiser's novel ("the understated opposite of George Stevens' later version," writes historian Janet Bergstrom), Phillips Holmes plays tragic hero Clyde Griffiths with an equal measure of self-doubt and determination. Lured up society's ladder by rich debutante Sondra (Frances Dee), he is undone by his destructive liaison with poor textile worker Roberta (Sylvia Sydney). (1931, 35 mm, 94 minutes)

An early and unusual collaboration with Marlene Dietrich, Dishonored is arguably the most beautiful Sternberg film after Morocco. Set in the director's native Vienna, the story restructures the Mata Hari legend with the gloriously costumed Dietrich in the service of Austria mainly to unmask a Russian spy (Victor McLaglen). "The absurdities," writes critic Raymont Durgnat, "make Sternberg one of the screen's surrealist poets of l'amour fou." (1931, 35 mm, 90 minutes)