Von Sternberg provides details from his childhood in Vienna and youth in America, as well every stage of his film career. The memoir provides numerous character sketches and critiques of film personnel, especially the actors he worked with, among them Marlene Dietrich.[2][3]
The eponymous title of the autobiography is a reference to a 1894 Kinetoscope film by American inventor and film pioneer Thomas Edison[4][5]
Background
Portions of von Sternberg's autobiography were penned as early as 1960 while he traveling in Europe.[6] Literary critic Ruairi McCann writes:
“Fun in a Chinese Laundry was published 12 years after Sternberg last embarked on a feature, and despite floating the possibility of working again, in the midst of all the bridges burning, it never came to be, as he passed four years later.”[7]
Significance of the book’s title
Fun in a Chinese Laundry is a metaphor for the medium that would dominate von Sternberg's artistic and professional endeavors. The movie appeared when both von Sternberg and the film technology were in their infancy. The title for the autobiography is that of a 1894 Kinetoscope burlesque by Thomas Edison. Released shortly before von Sternberg's birth, he offers no explicit remark as to its significance or its influence on his filmmaking.[8][9]
The reference to the film in his autobiography follows a sustained reminiscence of the famous amusement park and the childhood in Vienna that von Sternberg recalls idyllically as “paradise.”[10]
Everything was orderly, there was nothing to confuse me, there were no comic strips, no radio, no motion pictures or moronic succession of television images, though unbeknownst to me, one Thomas Edison had already made a film entitled Fun in a Chinese Laundry.[11][12]
Reception
Kirkus Reviews, in its March 8, 1965 edition described the memoir as “corrosively witty, frank and rather outrageous memoir…His story is one of dirty deals, awesome neglect and a few triumphs. It should become a little classic in its field.”[13]
Author and editor Norman Kaplan in the Fall issue of Science and Society wrote: “That this is so can be corroborated by a reading of Joseph Von Sternberg's new book Fun in a Chinese Laundry—an unabashed and brash boast of a lifetime spent as a purveyor to the most prurient appetites of audiences by a man who prates of his triumph side by side with his expression of contempt for the medium and its audiences.”[14]
Retrospective assessment
Fun in a Chinese Laundry, 1988 Mercury House paperback edition.
Film critic Jean-Paul Chaillet considers Fun in a Chinese Laundry of particular interest for its insights into von Sternberg's long personal and professional relationship with German-American film star Marlene Dietrich:
The first meeting of those two titans of cinema and their ensuing complex relationship has been dissected, reinvented, manipulated, embellished so many times through the years, that it is fascinating to read the carefully worded first-hand recollection of von Sternberg himself.[15]
Chaillet adds that von Sternberg, “at times sounding quite pompous and arrogant, rants about Dietrich’s self-serving public acknowledgments of his greatness over the years.”[16]
Writer and filmworker Ruairi McCann notes that the autobiography “is rife with the characteristics of von Sternberg’s personality and cinema; an unflappability, a searing, sardonic wit and a love for spectacle that comes, part and parcel, with a gift for its creation and dissection” and structurally, the memoir “does not move to the letter of a strict and straight chronology, nor is its language crystalline. Instead, the details of his life and career are often presented allusively, rather than as a procession of stated facts…”[17]
McCann adds that “The book is often very funny...Moments or recurring events that in other biographies would be singled out and analyzed as sources of future pain or strength, he undercuts with a stone dry sense of humor.”[18]
Selected excerpts
On Marlene Dietrich: “I did not endow her with a personality that was not her own; one sees what one wants to see, and I gave nothing that she did not already have. What I did was to dramatize her attributes and make them visible for all to see, though, as there were perhaps too many, I concealed some.”[19][20]
On Louis B. Mayer: “I was very fond of my superior (Louis B. Mayer), overly persuasive that he was, and had the right to be, as he was the highest-salaried individual in the world. He was, outwardly at least, a charming, simple, and sincere person, who could use his eyes, brimming over with tears, to convince an elephant that it was a kangaroo.”[21][22]
On the significance of the movie director: “[F]rom the very inception of this complicated art, one person has stood behind the camera…and whether he has dominated it himself, or has been dominated by others not present, or whether he has jumped in front of it to act as well, he has and remains the determining influence—and the only influence, despotically exercised or not, which accounts for the worth of what is seen on the screen.”[25]
On actors and their function in filmmaking: “There is no such thing as an important actor or an unimportant one; there is only the actor who expresses the purpose to which he owes his presence, and his person may be far less visible than the ideas he is instructed to convey. Most of all he must be in control of himself at all times and allow no inflated ego to distort his appearance…I suggest that the actor in films cannot function as an artist, and cannot even compare to an actor on a stage…he is little more than one of the complex materials used in our craft.”[26][27]
↑ Sternberg, 1988 p. 26: Elided material reads: “actually, some dozen ramblers who have no business there cluster this space” excised for brevity.
↑ McCann, 2021: McCann offers a portion of this passage.
↑ Sternberg, 1988 p. 110-111: first ellipsis reads in original: “His intellect, not his feelings, must at all times be operative. It can be observed with what genuine sovereignty the screen actor dances, skates, sings, rides a horse, runs to catch a train, or is knocked down by an automobile. That, of course, is only because he knows exactly what he is doing. Otherwise he wears an innocuous mask, forced on him by the fictionalized version of himself, disoriented as he always is.” And: second ellipsis: “...subordinate to others as he may be…”
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