Sergeant Madden

Wet Diaper Alert

Josef von Sternberg's Sergeant Madden, from 1939, is a threadbare B from MGM with a declining Wallace Beery and a rising Laraine Day. The script has a streak of sentimentality that would have had even John Ford crying "Mother Machree". The supporting players are largely unmemorable and the film concludes with a wet diaper joke. Yet, despite these hurdles, von Sternberg fashions a grim fable that attests to his greatness.

The sexual glamour and decadence of his films with Dietrich have obscured the side of Sternberg that is rooted in the realism of writers such as Norris, Crane. and Dreiser and painters such as Edward Hopper and the Ashcan school. A realism that looked beyond the gilded elegance of the rich to the plight of slum dwellers. This is the milieu of Sergeant Madden and Sternberg offers a an effective social portrait of the great unwashed. Stories of those on the margins of society make up Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters, Underworld, The Docks of New York and An American Tragedy; the latter a Dreiser adaptation.

The dark joke of Sergeant Madden is that Beery's titular cop must stop a pathological member of his own force who is also his son. The criminals of this film are portrayed as gauche gargoyles, much as in The Shanghai Gesture. What makes Sergeant Madden  so startling is that psychopathology is shown to exist not only in America's evil institutions, but also its supposedly good ones. Sternberg grasps the ambiguities of America and manages to smuggle this vision into mainstream entertainment. A nice trick for a master of artifice and illusion.

Gaylyn Studlar has written perceptively on the theme of masochism that is recurrent in Sternberg's work. It certainly is evident in Sergeant Madden. Madden toils all his life for the police force, but his job is a treadmill. a routine without hope of progression or advancement. Tom Brown's "Al" must repress his love for Laraine Day's "Eileen" because she is married to his psycho brother. Most of all, Eileen represses her wariness about her husband's manic delusion in order to be a supportive mate. She mistakes his psychopathology for ambition and suffers accordingly.

Sergeant Madden is one of Sternberg's least showy films, but when he moves his camera, particularly when he dollies in, it is to heighten an emotional response. A chase through alleys and warehouses is handled with beautiful economy. I have no doubt that Laraine Day was a limited performer, but here Sternberg brings out her winsome charm in a way no other director except Hitchcock did. Day's idealized colleen borders on absurdity, but in Sternberg's hands she becomes a symbol of grateful fidelity. Beery is even better, portraying his simple hero without burlesque or telegraphed charm.